A Crack in the Edge of the World (48 page)

I passed Contact Creek at 10:00
P.M.
—it was still brilliantly light outside, the sun setting so late this far north—and found myself eventually foodless and uncomfortable in one of the world's nastiest towns, Watson Lake, BC.
The Milepost
guide tries to be kind: “an important service stop,” “a staging post.” But the truth is that the place is a complete dump, and even the presence of a “forest” of left-behind place-name boards and license plates (51,842 of them, from every imaginable place in creation) at the north end of town cannot mitigate its awfulness. Watson Lake is a place to avoid. What do the locals do? I asked the grim-faced innkeeper where I eventually found a room. “They drink and fight,” she said. “Nothing else to do.” Quite so.

I crossed the Continental Divide eighty miles on into my third highway day. From this point onward all waters drain into the Yukon River and thence into the Bering Sea and the Pacific; the rivers now behind me drained into the Mackenzie and thence into the Arctic Ocean. Pacific salmon migrate up the Yukon and its tributaries. A subtle set of differences, cultural, geographic, and anthropological, was thus settled on the land that lay to the west and north of this barely marked demarcation line on the road. Walker's Continental Divide Roadhouse made the point a little less eloquently but memorably: The young woman who made the rhubarb pie I had for breakfast was so beautiful, and her cooking so intoxicatingly good, that I threatened to marry her on the spot.

By now I was firmly in the Yukon, a vast tract of Canadian real estate that English speakers are told is Canada's Real North, while Francophones have to suffer its description as
Le Nord avec un grand
“
N
.” Compared with the British Columbia now far behind, this was harsher, chillier, and more beautiful by the mile. (Except for Whitehorse, which, with 22,000 inhabitants, must be one of the smaller capital cities around, probably rivaling Pierre, South Dakota. Even though Whitehorse tries hard, with its railroad to Skagway and its wonderful paddle wheel ferry on the Yukon River, it does also have a Wal-Mart, and that, for me, is the kiss of death. The notion that the ghost of Sam Walton and the Brutes of Bentonville have come to linger anywhere at all in the Yukon sets me fretting about the state of the world even more than usual. There is worse, however: Someone suggested taking the road farther north still to Dawson City and being initiated into a drinking club that has as its signature libation a whiskey in which is marinated some unfortunate's frostbitten toe. It seemed almost as repellent an attraction as Wal-Mart.)

But then all depression lifted once I reached Haines Junction. If ever there was a pretty subarctic town, it is the small group of houses and businesses that cluster beside Milepost 985, near the great range of ice-covered peaks at the edge of Kluane National Park, one of the Canadian park system's least-visited and most beautiful possessions. I took a small plane up from here to look down on the ice field and the great glaciers that pour down from the Kluane into the not-too-distant Pacific; and on the way down I saw bull moose drinking from the streams in the low, late-evening sun, and thought I had perhaps never seen anything quite so majestic in my life. The Kluane Fault shakes every so often here; I was researching earthquakes in San Francisco and Anchorage, and the locals knew full well why I had come along their valley. This was a link, they all said. They read about it in their weekly newspapers. The same fault line, essentially.

There are Swiss and German migrants here, and one couple has for the last five years run a hotel—the Raven—which has food in its restaurant that can match that of any European café in New York or Toronto. There is a bakery, too, run by a Scots family, and there can be few more agreeable moments in northern Canada than having a latte on the terrace of the Village Bakery, a scone fresh from the oven, the Kluane peaks glistening in the morning sunshine, the air crisp and cool and full of promise.

It was after this that I got a speeding ticket, from a Mountie. “Yukon Highway Safety Week!” he informed me with a bright smile, after he had zoomed from out of nowhere with his lights flashing. The road deteriorated rapidly in the miles thereafter, as frost heaves and construction plans and long sections of gravel forced me to slow way, way down and crawl along the lake shores up close to the Alaskan frontier. There was a small plaque at Soldier's Summit, where the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Alaska Highway was staged in 1942, and its half-century anniversary in 1992.

The American immigration and customs checkpoint at Port Alcan might once have been perfunctory; these days, given the state of the world, it was fierce, unsmiling, severe. But there were no lines: My car was all but alone, and, apart from the occasional truck swishing south into Canada, and the mewing of the whirling eagles high above, this was the quietest of all frontier crossings, a lonely outpost of American severity. It hadn't always been American, of course: The frontier itself, spearing its way due north and south along a line kept cleared and marked by stone pillars in the muskeg, had first been negotiated between the British and the Russians, the treaties signed in 1825 in London and St. Petersburg.

I had a picnic by a lake, then sped on to Tok—short for Tokyo, as the army camp was once called—and spent a night with a family of ultra-Christian bikers whose visitors' book read like a testimonial for the evangelizing energies of Pat Robertson's 700 Club. I decided not to tell them about Azusa Street down in Los Angeles, and about how their particular faith had its roots in a disaster that had been caused by the same geological phenomenon that had created the valley in which they live, and in which Tok is sited.

It was here, at Milepost 1,314, that I was to turn left for Anchorage, and so formally left the Alaska Highway. (The roadway goes straight on north, bound for Delta Junction and the antimissile base, and eventually reaches Fairbanks. It terminates at Milepost 1,422.)

And it was at a village called Glenallen that I finally reached my intended goal, the pipeline. Ordinarily you don't see it from the road—this is one of the few places where it passes underground—but on the map it seemed possible to take a short diversion and get a little closer. And so I found a dirt track, thick with low brush and rutted with icy mud, that seemed to go in the right direction. I bumped down it for two miles or so, tipped over a low berm—and suddenly there, wholly unprotected and without a warning sign or a fragment of barbed wire, and standing high off the ground to allow migrating caribou to pass beneath it, was the gray immensity of the line itself.

I got out of the car, amazed. So this was it—the 800-mile-long pipeline of four-foot-diameter-steel Mitsubishi-made tube, the source of so much controversy when it was built, the source of so much concern now that terrorism had erupted, the fount of so much of America's economic prosperity and current need for energy. It carries a million barrels of oil each day down from the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay to the oil port at Valdez—and here I was, standing entirely alone underneath it. I had brief thoughts about plastic explosives, of how easy it would all be.

The line is supported for almost all of its journey aboveground on a series of twelve-foot-high piers, each one shock-absorbed, thus enabling the line to move up and down if the earth chooses to misbehave. A few miles north of here is the very section where the pipeline crosses the Denali Fault, and where the earth does misbehave often, and spectacularly. The shock-absorbing piers on this half-mile section are ingeniously protected by being set down on enormous horizontal steel beams, with Teflon-coated sliders that allow the line to move from side to side should the fault slip, as it is wont to do. The line has a series of built-in bends here as well, so that it is too flexible to snap.

During the November 2002 earthquake all worked perfectly. The earth moved eighteen feet to the right, the Teflon sliders permitted it to slip beneath the line, the built-in curves absorbed the energy. The line at daybreak had an enormous kink in it—but nothing broke, not a drop of oil was spilled, and not even a flicker appeared on the dials watched by the pipeline engineers, even though one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded was tearing apart the earth directly beneath their precious and vulnerable charge.

Now I had seen it—now that I had seen what is arguably the single most important item of humankind's making that is potentially threatened by the conjunction of the two tectonic plates—I could at last turn back. It remained only to get to Anchorage itself, to rest, and refuel the car with decent gas. And so, after humming for another half day down a road known unglamorously as the Tok Cutoff, I reached the city itself—a prosperous, contented-seeming place of low skyscrapers and unexceptional suburban houses with barely anything—aside from a few parks and museums—to show for having been so desperately ruined forty years before.

That the owners protect their pipeline from earthquakes is understandable; that the city of Anchorage seems more blithely unconcerned, and at this time of year merely basks in the near-endless Arctic sunlight, is a little less easy to comprehend. Like San Francisco, it will be struck again one day; unlike San Francisco, Anchorage—at least in the brief pleasantness of its summertime—seems more content to forget the fate that lies in store.

But I was now eight days out from San Francisco, the car had come 3,850 miles, and I was weary. So I found a good hotel, got my hands on a cold bottle of champagne (this is a prosperous town—with oil, for one thing, helping to make it so), took a long bath, and had dinner while watching the sun set over the waters of Turnagain Arm at a quarter to midnight. The oysters were from Halibut Bay, the salmon was freshly caught that morning, the wine was crisp and cold, and someone was smoking Gitanes at the bar. It seemed like heaven.

Now that I had seen the Denali Fault and the pipeline there was, however, one final thing to see—and that required my driving yet another 4,000 miles back down south. So the following morning, and for the better part of the following week, I was on the road again: more caribou, more moose, and even a pair of bald eagles in the Rockies near Calgary. I crossed the American border in the windswept plains of northern Montana, zipped past the Minutemen nuclear-weapons silos that I thought had long ago been dismantled and grassed over; and, after a day spent meandering in the rain shadow of the mountains, came to the pretty university town of Bozeman and finally to my goal, by way of the imposing stone gateway into the first of America's great national parks, Yellowstone.

THE PARK IS A PLACE
of almost indescribable spectacle, rightly popular and in consequence frequently, especially in the high summer, more crowded than is good for it. The wildlife, the mountains, the lakes, and the geysers are all the very obvious lures for the hundreds of thousands who each season drive in through the park's main gates. And these days there is a new reason: The widely publicized knowledge that Yellowstone Park sits on top of a potential supervolcano, whose eruption—at some unpredictable moment in the geological near term—will devastate nearly all of western America.

Most of Yellowstone is, in fact, the relic of a family of great volcanoes. There have been three periods of eruption, the first about 2 million years ago, the latest finishing around 600,000 years ago, with each spitting out, very violently, immeasurable quantities of lava and dust and ash. The last eruption left behind today's caldera with its jagged-mountain edge; this is filled at its southeastern corner with the large body of water that is Lake Yellowstone, drained northward by the spectacular river of the same name. The last eruption, in other words, left behind the very reason for the existence of the national park.

In recent years seismologists and geochemists have been poring over the park's geology and its character deep underground, and have found something that they long suspected but have not been able fully to prove until now—and it is that specific something that is drawing in the crowds. For it turns out that only a few thousand feet below the ground level of the park, the enormous body of molten magma that fed all the volcanoes of the past is not only still there—but, to use a metaphor of which the ancients would have approved, it is alive. Moreover, it is moving. It appears to be doing something that the imaginative would say is akin to
breathing
.

For recent measurements have shown that the bed of Lake Yellowstone, as well as the bottom of the river close to the point where it flows out of the lake, is rising and falling, slowly and rhythmically, year in, year out. It is as though a giant is slumbering beneath the lake, readying itself—for what? To awaken? To turn in its sleep? To snore? To stand suddenly and tear loose all that lies on top?

Such images are potent, and they have captured the American imagination in recent years—not least because even the sober scientists of the survey, who come in ever more frequently from their regional offices in Colorado and California and beyond, shake their heads in wonder at the scale of the eruption-in-waiting.

The greatest of the unknowns and the indeterminables, though, is when something might happen. Those who study the sleeping beast in the caldera offer as their safest answer only that it will happen sometime
soon
, using that word in its strictly geological sense. And that could be a quarter of a million years. After all, the first eruption began 2.1 million years ago, the second 1.3 million years ago, and the third 1.1 million years ago—and this last eruption lasted, if it is possible to imagine such a thing, for 600,000 years. It completed its work 600,000 years ago, confusingly—meaning that there has been no activity for that length of time, a period that is fully (to remind ourselves of the insignificance of mankind) five times as long as recognizable
Homo sapiens
has been bipedally extant on the face of the planet.

Yellowstone is thus, on purely statistical grounds, ready for an eruption almost any day. And when it happens, it will almost certainly be vast. Yellowstone is already one of the biggest explosive volcanic complexes on the surface of the planet, and when it goes, huge tracts of the western states will be covered with immense thicknesses of volcanic products. But as to what will trigger it—what cosmic whim might begin the ruin of the West—no one can say, or really even imagine.