About thisTrip (July 5th)

Today, after mulling over the idea for a couple of months, not to mention postponing it for several years, I decided to take another road trip to Alaska this year with my dogs, camping all along the way. (No, the recent debunking of John Steinbeck’s credibility about his supposed road trip with his dog Charlie in the 1960 had nothing to do with my decision.) It was only after I made the decision that I realized that today was Sonntag’s and Kessie’s (his sister) birthday, 24 years ago.  For those who do not know, Sonntag (which means Sunday in German, the day he was born) was my second dog, whom I adopted after my first, Montag (which means Monday in German, the day he was born), was put down at 14.  I inherited Kessie four years later after three of the four members of her family were killed in a small plane crash. The significance of its being Sonntag’s birthday is that it was he who inspired me to take my first road trip with my dogs to Alaska in 2000, after having taken back-country backpacking trips without my dogs there in 1992 (starting on the ferry from Seattle),  1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996.

Why in God’s name in the summer of 2000 did I travel 12,500 over 45 days with my paralyzed, 13-year old German shepherd? (Kessie had been put down in 1999, but she was with us the whole trip anyway.) Here’s why. In December 1999, I was offered a senior post with the Russian government in Moscow to serve as the secretary to the committee on banking reform, and resigned from the Federal Reserve to take the job, a job for which the seed was planted when I was about 11 years old.  (By then I was almost fluent in Russian after seven years of studying it in my spare time.) After months of struggling with the decision about what to do about Sonntag, whom I had managed as a paralyzed dog since February 1998, I decided that it would be unfair to him to take him to Moscow only to live out the last year of his life essentially alone in an apartment.  But I also decided that it would be unfair for me to give up this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in Moscow. So I decided to take Sonntag on one last road trip, which was his favorite treat. At first I thought that a two-week trip to Mt. Tremblant in Canada, where we had spent our winter vacations together since 1989, would do it. Then I asked myself, “Why two weeks? Why not two months?”  And then I asked, “Why Canada? Why not Alaska?” At the end of the trip, I thought, if Sonntag survived the grueling 45-day camp out, I would put him down and get on with my life. After all, I reasoned, he would have had far more fun packed into these 45-days then he would have had over the next year of his life, assuming he lived to be 14.  So I told my Russian employers that I would see them in October as I had other plans for the summer. (The Russians did not object as they were in no hurry to carry out banking reform.  Eleven years later, they still have not.)

The trip to Alaska was well recorded in The National Geographic, The Washingtonian, The Washington Post, the major German daily Die Welt, and numerous other places, so I will not repeat those stories here except to say two things.  (Click here to see the YouTube piece the National Geographic photographer put up in May 2010 about our trip.)

First, during the trip, on the way up to (and then coming back from) Prudhoe Bay along the 500-mile dirt and gravel Dalton Highway, Sonntag and I camped out at the site of a cutoff from the road.  On the night of the trip up, August 21st, I sat with Sonntag near midnight on a prominence that jutted out onto the tundra, spreading like a carpet over the North Slope as far as the eye could see, the scene was remarkably beautiful.  In the distance, to the northwest, were several increasingly fading rows of mountain ranges, bathed in explosive bands of purples, reds, oranges and yellows too numerous to count. To the south, the already-darkened sky was interrupted only by the snow-covered, jagged peaks of the Brooks Range.  To the east, the silvery streak of the Alaskan pipeline snaked its way along the last 100 miles of its 800 mile journey from Valdez.  The scene was so beautiful that without giving it any thought I spontaneously said to Sonntag that “someday I will return here to spread your and Kessie’s ashes.” 

Second, at the end of the trip, when it came time to carry out my plan to let Sonntag go and get on with my life, I had bonded with him so much over those 45 days of constantly being by his side that I could not put him down.  So, at the end of October, I sent a message to the Russians that “they will have to go on with banking reform without me as I have other projects and priorities I need to pay attention to.”  After the trip, Sonntag lived for another seven months and I put him down (on April 10, 2001) only after he rapidly deteriorated over a five-day period and the quality of his life started to suffer for the first time. 

Seven weeks after Sonntag was put down, after struggling with what my first post-Sonntag decision would be, I adopted Leben (which means life in German) and Erde (which means Earth), another brother and sister team.  Two months later, the three of us were on the road in my Defender heading north to Alaska. I had made a promise to Sonntag and Kessie that I intended to keep it. And so, exactly one year from that night on the tundra in 2000, in the very same spot, I scattered Sonntag’s and Kessie’s ashes over the tundra in a scene that rivaled any dramatic moment in any opera I ever saw.  As the spine-tingling melodies of the last 12 minutes of Wagner’s epic Gotterdammerung wafted over my headphones (in this case it was the twilight of the Dogs, not Gods), I cast Sonntag’s and Kessie’s intermingled ashes to the wind over the tundra from my “I Love My German Shepherd” mug. I also threw onto the tundra two red, heart-shaped dog tags, one reading “Sonntag, My Buddy,” and the other, “Kessie, My Sweetheart.” That trip lasted 60 days and 14,000 miles, all just to keep a promise to my dogs.  That trip was written up and published with numerous photos in a popular Land Rover newspaper sent around the world. 

On the way home from Alaska that second road trip, I stopped off in Colorado to visit the graves of Al and Judy Phillips, and their daughter Monday, Kessie’s first family. Back in 1987, when I met the Phillips at the place where we got our dogs, the Phillips had their hearts set on either Sonntag or Kessie since the two of them had played so well together.  Over their graves I scattered a small urn of Sonntag’s and Kessie’s ashes I had saved from Alaska.  On the thin-layer of dust that had collected over their family gravestone I wrote, “. . . and their beloved dogs, Kessie and Sonntag.”  The next day, September 11^th, as I drove east from Kansas City, just two days from home, I started seeing signs like “God Bless America” popping up all along the highway around 10:00 a.m. or so.  I called my friend Amy to find out what was going on and she told me.

On the first trip with Sonntag in 2000, we drove from DC to Montana, turned right and then headed north to Alaska.  On the way back, we took the ferry from Juneau to Prince Rupert in Canada, drove along the  Trans-Canadian Highway to Montreal, and then headed home.  On the 2002 trip, we drove from DC to Toronto, across the Trans-Canadian to the Rockies, and then north along the Alaskan Highway, up to the nearby Arctic Ocean along the Dempster Highway in Canada, and then over to Fairbanks for my second trip and down the Dalton Highway.

(Note: The Dempster and Dalton highways are the only two roads --- both 500 miles of dirt and gravel --- that cross the Arctic Circle in North America. It is doubtful that anyone ever drove both those highways in one month, let alone ever, as I did, alone with my dogs.)

In the cover story of the January 2002 National Geographic; “From Wolf to Woof,” the story of the bond between humans and dogs, Sonntag’s story was the centerpiece.  One of the photos in the two-page write-up on Sonntag’s journey was of me and Sonntag heading into our tent at night in the middle of a snowstorm.  The site of that photo was the very one where I had made my promise to Sonntag the night before, and to which I returned precisely one year later to keep that promise.  Just imagine what I see when I look at the photo.

In the summer of 2002, anxious to get back on the road again with my dogs, I decided to drive to the end of the road this time to Labrador.  During that trip, I was hoping to be one of the first to drive over the new dirt and gravel road being constructed along the coast and into the wild of Labrador, but discovered when I reached the end of the construction that it was not yet completed.  To get to my destination at the end of the road on the east coast in North America, I had to backtrack 600 miles over six days. But I hoped someday to return to complete that drive, and perhaps finish it by driving across Canada once again to the end of the roared on the other side of the continent, a feat few, if any, have accomplished I am sure.

In June 2003, I started to carry out my plans for that dream-trip across the northern edge of the continent. One of the first items on my list was to take the dogs in for all their vaccinations.  Twelve days after her visit to the vet’s, Erde’s immune system collapsed, due to an overdose of drugs in her system, which had been previously weakened by a hormone deficiency she developed after being spayed before her first heat.  Over a period of a few weeks, Erde lost 12 percent of her body weight.  Over the next few months, after several close calls with almost losing her, her health started to recover. (It has only been hat in the last few months, eight years later, that her weight is back to where it as before her troubles began in 2003.

In 2004, with Erde’s health vastly improved, I started once again to make plans for that long trip.  Unfortunately, I took some diversions in my life that kept me off the road for the next five years.  But I learned some lessons in the process, lessons I had no opportunity to learn earlier, and so things balanced out.   Fortunately, those diversions ended in 2010.  But just as I was sketching out plans for making the trip in 2010, Leben was bitten by a large exotic poisonous spider that mysteriously appeared on my 9^th floor patio balcony in mid-April,  and in the process of walking on his painfully swollen left front leg for six days, he destroyed the ligaments in his wrist.  May to December were spent geting him back on his feet again, and so travaling that summer was out of the question. (His left wrist is permanently injured, and he must wear a brace on it, but he has adjusted quite well, as have I.)

A year later, with Leben’s situation stabilized, and with my slate now cleared of all the diversions that crept into my life in recent years, the lure of the road pulled me back. Once the thought lodged into my brain, it was not a difficult decision where to go, as that decision was made years before.  So, as of today, my decision is made: In late July, the dogs and I are heading not north to Alaska, but northeast to Alaska, since to get to the end of the road in Labrador we have to first head east 800 miles.  I am planning for this trip to be at least 50 days and to cover at least 14,000 miles. 

For the next three weeks before the trip, I will use this site for my planning and to write down some thoughts about the trip, my prior trips, my dogs, and other various and sundry topics. In the meantime, feel free to join in the planning by posting a comment.  During the trip, assuming I get access to the internet, I will use the site as a blog of my trip.

I have to lot a planning to do and little time to do it. Check back soon for the next posting, probably about the mundane chores of planning and preparing for a trip like this.

Purpose of this trip

I am not exactly sure what the purpose of this trip really is.  In an earlier version of this posting I listed a dozen possible reasons, all true to one extent or another.    Perhaps the one that rings loudest, though,  is that I decided at one time to make this trip, and perhaps it's time to do it while I still can.  It was that same persistence that took me down so many other interesting paths in the past.