Day 5 / Día 5
Yukon
“Miles of complete desolation”, is what we were told we would face as we drove the Alaskan Highway from Anchorage to Vancouver. Most of the road, built during World War II to defend “The Last Frontier” is indeed a silent part of the world, where the sun never appears to set completely this time of the year. Every few hours we would glance at the map and realize how little ground we had covered. Alaska is larger than Texas, California, and most of New England put together, and the Canadian Yukon territory is twice larger than Great Britain and the Netherlands. The first non-native visitors to the Yukon were fur traders from England who bought the Hudson Bay Company from Canada in the 1800s. Gold-seekers followed, around the 1860s. Overall, however, the landscape remains untouched by humankind, too daunting to be broken into, looking the same as it must have been a thousand years ago.
We drove fifteen hours of sun and rain through a vast open, and mostly deserted landscape — mountain ranges, glaciers, and forests— mostly populated with occasional small towns that serve camping and fishing tourism. We passed Destruction Bay, a small community of 59 people. Its name is derived from the wind blowing down structures erected by the military during the highway construction in 1942.
As we were in search of food, gas, rest stops, and perhaps a bit of conversation, we landed in a store in the middle of nowhere, on the top of the mountain. Its sign read: “rock collecting shop” The outside had a satellite dish with an Impressionist landscape painted on it, and there was a Mexican flag at the entrance.
Inside was a jolly old man sitting next to a XIXth century stove in the middle of the room. He was warming up a soup directly on the can. There were some boxes of pink and turquoise stones on the floor, old magazines, canned soups, a broken phone. More than a store, the place looked like an assortment of random objects. It felt as if this man had been sitting in this room for thirty years in a row without ever leaving. He didn’t seem to be that interested in selling us anything, but more in knowing who we were and where we were going. I wanted to ask the old man what was the point of selling collector rocks in this deserted part of the world, where there were barely any people —let alone rock collectors— but I felt it inappropriate. When I inquired about the Mexican flag, he said in his thick Yukon accent something about Mexicans coming to fish out there, and then he made a follow-up joke that we didn’t understand, but smiled courteously.
When we were leaving the man asked, winking one eye: ”aren’t you going to buy some rocks?”
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Yukon
“Millas de total desolación” es lo que nos advirtieron que veríamos en el Alaskan Highway de Anchorage a Vancouver. La mayor parte de esta carretera, construída durante la segunda guerra mundial, es efectivamente una parte perdida del mundo, donde el sol rara vez aparece por estas épocas del año. Manejamos por quince horas de lluvia cruzando el paisaje desierto. Pasamos por Destruction Bay, un poblado de 59 personas. Buscando un teléfono, en la cima de un monte encontramos una enigmatica tienda para coleccionistas de rocas con una bandera mexicana fuera y una antena parabólica con un cuadro impresionista pintado. Dentro habia un viejo sentado junto a una chimenea del siglo XIX, calentando una sopa directamente de la lata. Habia unas cajas de piedras turquesa y rosa, viejas revistas. Se sentía como si ese hombre hubiese estado sentado en el mismo lugar por treinta años. Hablamos por un rato. Cuando le pregunté acerca de la bandera mexicana respondió con una broma en su acento de Yukon que no entendí. Cuando nos despedimos, nos dijo, guiñando un ojo: “¿no piensan comprar rocas?”
