Tom turned the Jeep around at the Nabesna sign and drove us back to the airstrip. While we were there taking photos, Juan drove up in his white van with the canoe on top. “I saw your note,” he told me. “Let’s go to Eagle together! I’m going to explore the mines then I’ll pick you up from the campsite this evening.” I snapped a picture of him as he drove away and we continued back down the road.

Gary and Tom offered to drive me back to their RV near the highway and let me sleep the night in their spare bed but I wanted to go to Eagle with Juan so I politely declined. They dropped me at the campsite and I waved them off. Then I packed up my tent, made myself some dinner and lazed around as I waited for Juan to turn up. And waited. And waited some more. Eventually, it was 10:30pm and I gave up waiting for him and put my tent back up.

“I wonder if he’s OK?” I mentioned idly to some of the other campers I’d been hanging out with and then I went to sleep.

In the morning I packed up my tent again and was sitting drinking a cup of tea when Juan pulled into the campground entrance, a couple of hundred yards from where I was sitting. Oh good! I thought. He must have been delayed by something last night but at least he’s here now. Unfortunately, my positive mood didn’t last long.

Rather than driving around the campground’s loop road to look at all the sites, he gave a cursory look to the left and the right, evidently decided that I must have already left, and put his van into reverse. Realising what was happening, I jumped to my feet and sprinted as fast as I could towards him, yelling out his name, but it was too late. By the time I reached the campground entrance he was already on the road and the last I saw of him was his van disappearing around the corner in a literal cloud of dust as I stood a hundred yards behind him waving my arms in the air and shouting.

I remained motionless there for a minute as the dust settled, letting what had just happened sink in, and then I began to swear loudly. I stomped back to the campsite to tell the other campers my tale of woe. “That idiot!” one of them said, “Why didn’t he drive round the loop?”

“I don’t know!” I said with considerable feeling. I’d been looking forward to going to Eagle for a long time, and now I was reduced to thumbing a ride out on a road with almost no traffic, after turning down Tom and Gary’s offer of a ride and a bed in their RV the night before. I waved the other campers goodbye, grabbed my pack and stomped out to the road again, where I sat down in the dirt, made myself a sandwich and continued to loudly curse the Juan that got away.

Once I’d begun to calm down, and realised I wasn’t going to have any luck flagging down the non-existent passing traffic, I wandered over to the bar to ask if anyone there was driving out. As it happened, I was in luck. A guy called Kenny (from Alaska this time, not Kentucky) was heading out within half an hour and was happy to take me with him in his RV. He was heading towards Anchorage, the opposite direction to Eagle, but it’s good to be flexible in life so I took a ride with him as far as the Richardson Highway. I’d been intending to head to the far north of Alaska at some point and it seemed like the wind was blowing me there now.

Kenny was a nice guy and we chatted away quite happily for the couple of hours we spent together. Before he left, he rummaged around in the back of his RV and came out with a big bag of smoked salmon and some cheese and crackers, which he gave to me. Once he’d driven off to the south, I sat in the dirt by the side of the road and savoured this feast before I stood up again to hitch.

I stood there for an hour or so without much luck until a large pick-up truck pulled over and the guy in the passenger seat got out. “Where are you headed?” he asked me.

“North,” I said.

“We’re going to Fairbanks,” he said. “Get in.”

He introduced himself as Chris and the driver as Marcus. They’d been down in Chitina for the weekend fishing but it hadn’t been a successful trip: dipnetting from the bank of the Chitina River, they’d only caught four salmon while people with boats in the middle of the river were hauling in dozens. It seemed like they’d had a fun time, nevertheless.

A few minutes after they picked me up, Chris turned around to look at me. “I’m just warning you so you don’t freak out,” he said. “We’ve got a gun we need to test so we’re going to pull over into a gravel pit and try it out. Don’t worry!”

“OK,” I said, but stayed a little warily in the truck once they pulled over until it became clear that they weren’t going to shoot me.

They picked a pile of gravel as a target and were firing at it from about twenty feet. I got out the truck and Marcus beckoned me over. “Have you ever fired a gun?” he asked. I shook my head. “Well this is your lucky day!” he said, and handed it to me. It was a .44 Magnum, which is apparently a big powerful handgun (“like learning to drive in a Formula 1 car,” Marcus said later) and they gave me careful instructions to hold it tightly with both hands to stop the recoil hitting me in the forehead.

I hate the idea of handguns, the purpose of which is almost invariably to kill other humans, and I’m so glad they’re illegal back home, but gun culture is hugely embedded in the Alaskan psyche, and I felt like I should experience firing one at least once. So I did. It went off with a bang and a huge ringing in my ears: they’d forgotten to give me a set of their ear plugs. “I’m so sorry!” said Chris, as I squeezed the sides of my face in discomfort. “The ringing will die down eventually.”

We got back in the truck and Marcus handed me my camera. He’d suggested taking a photo of me to mark my first time, so here it is:

The ringing in my ears died down within twenty minutes or so. We drove for several hours, first through some pretty scenery and then through the mother of all rainstorms. It was really hammering it down. I hadn’t told them where I was going, other than north, but they seemed content to keep driving me. They were fun guys and we had a good time laughing and joking before they entered into a long conversation about guns and military equipment (Chris was quite high-ranking in the US army, it turned out) and I fell asleep.

I woke up when we stopped for gas in Delta Junction and then again nearer Fairbanks. The horrible storm had persisted and Marcus said he felt bad for me because I was planning on sleeping in my tent. “You can stay at my house if you like,” he said, after calling his wife to make sure it was OK. Of course, I said yes. He lived with his wife and three kids a few miles down the road to Chena Hot Springs, just outside Fairbanks. We arrived late at night and they let me sleep on an airbed in their lounge.

“We’re going to church tomorrow morning,” Marcus said, just before he went to bed. “You’d be welcome to join us.”

“I’d be happy to come along,” I said, “but I’m not actually a Christian. I’m an atheist.”

“That’s fine!” he said, brightly. “It’s an Evangelical church. You’ll be very welcome. They’ll want to convert you!”

“Well in that case, sure!” I said, and that was that. He went to bed and I stayed up late doing a load of very-necessary laundry.

In the morning I went to my first ever Sunday church service. It wasn’t nearly as intense as I was expecting from an Evangelical church in the US. We sung hymms, the pastor talked for a while, some very earnest children spoke about their experience at a Christian summer camp… and then kept on speaking about it, for what seemed like an inordinately long time. Fortunately I wasn’t along in thinking this. Marcus and his family eventually got fed up and led me quietly out of the room. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t normally last that long. It should have been done half an hour ago,” he said.

They took me out for a very-tasty brunch and then asked me where I wanted to go. Overnight I’d decided that now was the time to head to the Arctic. They took me to the visitor centre to get maps and information about the dirt roads to the north, then dropped me at a viewing area for the oil pipeline (of which much more later) just off the highway a few miles north of Fairbanks. I got a ride quickly and didn’t end up at all where I was expecting that night, but that’s a story for another post.

 

Total distance hitchhiked: 4,330 km.
Total number of rides: 37.