It's just about a week to go and I'm alreay feeling nervous. After a year of planning and thinking, it's just about time now to get down to the serious stuff.
It's habit of mine to always pack in increments. I start thinking about what I want to do and what I will need to do it, and then slowly a pile of stuff starts growing in my mind, and, then, on the floor in some spot. Right now that pile has a small tent, two 25L jerry cans, a sleeping bag, a mat, and a few odds and ends. Of course the camera bag, extra sim cards and this computer are going. The maps are bought or printed or loaded. And every time I now look at the Pathfinder, with those knobbly off-road tyres that'll get me up the Dempster, every time I hear the deep thrum of their sound on the road, I get that pleasurable tingle of anticipation that for so many years, for so many trips, were part of daily existence in the international workplace.
This time around, all sorts of things were different. I used to say (with some kind of mock horror always snaking in my tome) that the idea of actually paying for a vaction when for so many years I had been compensated (and quite handsomely) for going to places others could on ly dream about, was akin to heresy. And, in those days, I travelled halfway across the world and on a plane, got driven or trucked to my destination, and there I would hole up for four to six weeks before reversing the process (or drifting wherever the fancy took me - one year I ended up in Arizona, for example). This time around it was all me. Me going, me planning, me paying and me driving.
Crap. I hate paying for my own vacations when my company should be doing it for me. Okay, I jest, but the thought refuses to entirely go away...
Anyway, last year, when enduring a fit of unreasonable loneliness caused by being alone in our house while my family was off sunning themselves in Kyrgyzstan, I went, on a whim, on a long drive.
I kinda enjoyed that. Having my tank of a camera along was a bonus. Being able to go and turn corners and stop and start as and when I pleased also had a certain charm.
And so I started to make quite a thing of this. And even when my wife and kids returned, every now and then the wanderlust started to take me and I figured that I should just go somewhere, in some direction where I had not been for a while (if ever). The wife and I and Mark ended up in Montana on just such a trip, more by accident than by design. For immigrants to whome getting into North America was a long run exercise attended by much bureaucracy, much cash, miles of red tape and a shudderingly huge raft of paperwork, to just show a passport and drift over the border into the US was quite a thrill.
Somewhere along the line it ocurred to me that I would really like to do a trans-Canada trip. My adopted country has roads up to yin yang. It's huge. It's different. It's got photo-ops beyind compare no matter what the season. I know people up and down the length of the place. This could be a six week exercise in pure *fun*.
So I bought some maps, went on Google, checked distances and times and things, and realized, after a month of working things out, that perhaps, just perhaps, given that I had a finite time-span, a family, limited resources and that I had no idea exactly what driving for ten days for a thousand klicks a day entailed, that just perhaps I was being just a smidgen over-ambitious. Not that the trip was impossible: oh no. I'm quite insane enough to do it just to show that it could be done (a similar burst of optimistic insanity caused me, when I was fifteen, to walk from GT to Timehri at night, alone, and some time later to take the overland cattle trail (long since overgrown by jungle) down to the Rupununi). So no. I knew I could do it. But just because I could, didn't mean I should, for the simple reason that blazing across the continent wouldn't really count for much if I never stopped anywhere, and was hampered by a three-week leave deadline. So reluctantly I gave up that idea. St John's and the overland from Goose Bay to Quebec would have to wait.
On the other hand, I thought, casting an eye up North, the whole business of the Yukon and NWT held definite promise for a three week trip. There was the drive itself, the different environment, the remoteness of it all, Watson Lake, Whitehorse, Dawson City, Innuvik. The names of the roads themselves were like a roll call of honour for the great road journeys of eras past: the YellowHead Highway; Top of the World Highway; The Dempster: never Dempster Highway or Route what-have-you. Always The Dempster. One of the last great road trips still left in the world (and I've done a few in Africa, in Guyana and Brazil, in Central Asia) -- and since I'm unlikely to ever go to check out the Great Trunk Road, or the Pan American -- at least not until I retire -- then this, in my own backyard, seemed to hold out great potential.
And the more I looked at the literature, the more I read about the history and sights of this place, the more I realized it fitted in perfectly with a facet of my character that I only admitted with some reluctance: that, in spite of the nerdish Sheldon-esque mannerisms I so deliberately cultivated; in spite of the bean counting nature of my profession and the books I've read, the conversations I have the knowledge I've amassed over the four decades of my life: in spite of all these concessions to being a faux intellectual (not really, but it sounds better), the truth is that I've always felt this is not what I can really be good at: I'm Aries, a Mars child if there ever was one; I lust for adventure and long sojourns in strange places where none but the odd ducks go. Sure the North has attracted its share of the tourist trade, but its not the run of the mill tourist trade: you've really got to work to go there, and like the outdoors, enjoy nature to some extent. I may like my comforts, and I may have forgotten about what used to pass for survival training...but the urge to go to these places off the beaten track is still there.
And so the decision was made. Innuvik it was.
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