Yesterday we rode into Ushuaia, the city at the end of the world, that shining beacon on the southern horizon for the last 21 months, and thus concluded our journey. We have Pedaled as South as they will let you and we cannot Pedal any Souther. This morning I guess we woke up to the first day of the rest of our lives, though one can only pray that waking up hungover in a bunk bed isn’t a sign of things to come. I feel compelled to try to put some words to what I’m feeling. I don’t know that any of us really know how we feel yet; everything always ends up being so much more complicated than you think it is or was or will be.
When we woke up yesterday morning it was snowing. It was the first snow any of us had seen in more than two years. I stood there in the woods after breakfast as it came down thick and white and windy and caught snowflakes on my tongue and tried to call up the first time I could remember standing in the woods catching snowflakes on my tongue. The winds were blowing hard against us as we climbed the mountain pass separating us from Ushuaia, and descending the other side the snow stung our faces and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. At the bottom of the hill the sun came out and I told Riley, “your bike doesn’t sound like she’s gonna make it dude,” and Riley said, “nah man, she’s just talkin to me,” and then his rim cracked and a big sliver dislodged but somehow the tube didn’t pop. With twenty kilometers left to town, fresh out of viable alternatives and bright ideas, Riley took off his rear brake and fender, duct taped the rim back together, and we pushed on. The tube had popped by the time we got to town but it didn’t matter. As usual we came skidding in sideways, wet and cold and giddy, just enough time before sundown to dunk our bikes in the cold Antarctic waters in the harbour and call it a wrap.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to make sense of the last 21 months, trying to figure out what it all meant. No matter how many notes I pen in the dim light of a dying headlamp, broken tent flapping violently overhead in the fierce pampa winds, I just can’t seem to conjure up any nuggets of profundity. I have a sense that something important just happened to us but it almost feels like it happened to someone else, some guys that look like us only younger. Time will grant us the clarity of hindsight or maybe it won’t. As for now, I have some nice pictures and many scribbled moments of beauty or strangeness or the times we seemed to tap into something far greater than the four of us. The pages of late are glaringly void of any concise theses and Answers but they do paint a nice picture of the four of us, road weary and wild eyed and ever in the thick of it as we traversed the pristine and raw and breathtaking landscapes of southern Patagonia:
“Speaking softly with the guys as the embers from the fire tornado on the wind after dinner and the skinny trees cast moonshadow ghosts on the dirt. Dirt is soft and cold on bare toes… bear toes… burritos….” “Whitecaps on green waves seem to churn in slow motion in the Straits of Magellan, spitting rainbows into the mist above the surf.” “Flipped off a trucker today and really meant it“ ”After 130 kilometers or so you will start to feel your knees and the potholes will look like Africa and entropy and you will wonder who knocked down all the trees” “Hobo in a jumpsuit, one lonely tooth, came at us fast but only to offer invite for camping with him in that abandoned building by the tree line” “The fog over O’Higgins at dawn” “Such little time left.”
There’s this Rainer Rilke quote that somehow always makes me well up in inappropriate places where he says:
“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
It is true that I left home those many months ago looking for answers. Mainly what I’ve found instead are only better questions. The pertinent question of late is where to go from here. I too am fresh out of viable alternatives and bright ideas so I suppose I’ll go north. It’d sure be a nice change of pace. A fellow traveller told us recently that we weren’t nearing the end at all, that we were in fact pedalling to a start, to new beginnings. Ushuaia is a lovely city but it’s clear now that it was never really the destination. The destination was the journey. It was to see if we could do it, to step back for a moment and take a look around, to take a look at ourselves, to live the questions deeply and to try to earn the lives we always wanted. Are we there yet? I don’t know. Probably not. Do I think we went the right direction? Indubitably. It seems ever more an undeniable fact of life that if you’re stoked on who you are and what you’re doing, and if people tell you that you’re crazy, you’re probably headed in the right direction.
With so much love and gratitude and happiness from the bottom of the world,
Tomás
Our Time With the Tahltan Nation
We reached a crossroads at the top of British Colombia. To the East, the Alaska-Canada Highway proceeded towards the Rockies. To the South lay the Stewart Cassiar Highway, a single meandering belt of asphalt which traverses the vast remoteness of Northwest B.C., an area roughly the size of Oregon.
We decided to travel the Cassiar for its famed isolation, hoping to experience untamed Canadian wilderness and the people for whom it is home. We cycled over mountain passes and through sweeping valleys. On either side of the gravel shoulder, a sea of spruce and fir trees stretched to the horizon. We rode over grated metal bridges where a gridwork of welded steel separated car and man and bike from huge quantities of air and water and rock. Somewhere along the way we began hearing about the Tahltan First Nation, a group that has inhabited the Stikine Plateau, located between the Coastal and Cassiar Mountain ranges, for more than 500 years.
We heard stories of a place called “The Sacred Headwaters,” an area that a group of Tahltans have spent the last decade defending from industrial development. The Headwaters is a mountainous meadowland which gives birth to three major salmon-bearing rivers. It hosts an impressive spectrum of wildlife: Grizzly Bears, Caribou, Wolves, and the largest gathering of Stone Sheep on the planet. According to Tahltan legend, the Sacred Headwaters is the birthplace of humanity. They take their youth there in the summertime to teach them the traditional culture. It is at once their kitchen, their classroom, their sanctuary.
When we arrived in Dease Lake we asked around in hopes of meeting some of the elders who had participated in the efforts to protect the Sacred Headwaters and were given the address of Lillian “Tiger Lil” Moyer. Ricardo and I biked out to meet her. When we arrived, Tiger Lil told us that she’d be happy to let us interview her, but that she was leaving the next day for the annual “Tahltan Country Music Jam,” 100 kilometers away near Telegraph Creek. She introduced us to a young man she had been visiting with when we arrived, Chad Day, the recently elected President of the Tahltan Nation. “I’m heading down there in about an hour,” he said, “If you can be ready by then I’ve got room for two more.” As easy as that, we hitched a ride to a country music festival in the remote hometown of an indigenous people with their President. Such is the nature of Pedal South.
We got to the festival Friday afternoon, and soon the rest of the team arrived having hitched rides with various festivalgoers. People had begun to congregate around the small stage and dancefloor which had been built into a clearing not far from the banks of the Stikine.
The Tahltan people love country music. Their favorite by far is Waylon Jennings, whom they refer to simply as “Way-lahn.” By nightfall, two huge speakers trumpeted a declaration of outlaw country — Hank, Merle, Johnny and friends — into the silent landscape for miles in every direction. The onstage lights painted a sea of gyrating Tahltans in red and green as the percussive onslaught of so many shimmies, twirls, and stomps threatened to destroy the makeshift dance floor. If the crowd had noticed this, they were unphased. Men, children, elderly women, everyone danced the same exuberant shuffle-step in time with the band’s breakneck pace, song after song, hour after hour. Their revelry was unbridled and contagious; we quickly found ourselves stomping and hollering along to songs we knew so well. At one point, the band cleared the dancefloor with a slow number, and Tahltan women young and old swooned in admiration of Jack’s well-polished two-step.
As we danced late into the night, it felt as if we had somehow escaped the jurisdiction of time and space. We danced well into the early morning, until our ribs and feet hurt. At one point we found ourselves gathered around a nearby bonfire, embers swirling up in eddies into the starry cloudless night. The scene, the whole evening, was as surreal a thing as we had experienced thus far. We had transitioned from riding the Cassiar day after day to this wholly foreign environment too quickly to comprehend. One by one, exhausted, we drifted off to the comfort of our ground pads in the tents nearby, and slept.
The next morning we walked down to the banks of the Stikine where Ricardo and I stripped down to our underwear and swam out. Floating fast downstream, I saw the land from the Stikine’s perspective: a rolling tableau of mountains, forests, cliffs, people. To be a part of that vast, silent march to the sea for only a few minutes was enough to garner a sincere respect for it. I understood why the Tahltans have long feared a dam on the Stikine. To curtail its power would be to bridle an ancient god, one of the few that remain. We caught up with Tiger Lil for her interview; I was interested to hear about the work being done to protect the Sacred Headwaters. She told us that beneath the Headwaters is a vast amount of highly sought after mineral and energy resources. Since 2005, a group called the “Klabona Keepers” has worked to preserve the area from development at all costs. They blockade access roads so that trucks cannot pass and occupy exploratory drills. Many have been arrested, some multiple times. Tiger Lil has been arrested twice; the charge, “criminal intent.” After almost a decade of struggling, several of the major energy companies have announced in recent years they will not proceed with development in the area. But, nevertheless, new companies try every year.
Tiger Lil introduced us to another elder named August Brown later that day. August’s name in Tahltan, Nosziktauk, means “War Chief.” In his youth, August attained his dream of busting Broncs despite being born with a handicap, and has become in recent years a respected voice in the First Nations conservation movement, despite not being able to read or write. He is every inch a true mountain man. He and I sat in the shade of a salmon smokehouse overlooking the Stikine and he told me about his relationship with the natural world:
Like I say, I can’t read and write, but I understand the land. Mother Nature give me power, make me think. The good lord put this land here to survive on it, not to sell it. I want the whole world to hear my feelings and my happiness about being here. I want my kids, their kids, my nephews and nieces, their babies, to have a home to come back to and be proud of who they are, Tahltan.
As I gleaned the history of the Tahltans more and more, a long and intricate narrative began to take shape. I learned of the smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis epidemics which violently decimated their population in the mid-1800s. I learned about Residential Schools, institutions that systematically eradicated aboriginal language and culture, forcefully replacing them with Catholicism amidst rampant physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, which continued until as recently as the 1980s. The effects of this spiritual and physical destruction: widespread poverty, lack of education, poor health, substance abuse. Two distinct, ongoing conflicts began to emerge in my mind. This was a people fighting a daunting battle to save their land, while at the same time fighting to preserve their very way of life.
Later that afternoon I wandered down the shore of the Stikine once more. Country music drifted lazily through the trees at my back and reflected off the canyon wall on the opposite bank, enveloping me in Tahltan renditions of country jams: “Move it on Over,” “Hello Stranger,” and the self-ascribed anthem of their people,“Tahltan Boogie.” In the distance, a group of teenagers huddled together, the boys calling taunts to one of their own who had gone rogue and was talking to a pretty girl nearby. Closer to me, three younger girls labored diligently on mud pies, excavating sandy mud from the river in turns and plopping it in a wet pile on the beach. The youngest of the three saw me and said, “Hi, I’m Honeygirl. Hold this,” and handed me her pink cowboy hat.
I sat in the sand and inspected the pink straw latticework of Honeygirl’s now needless accessory. I watched as she squeezed mud between her toes, giggling with her entire body, and thought about the children sent off to Residential Schools at her age. When would she notice the lingering shadow on her people, the poverty and alcoholism and abuse around her? Did she know about the people out there who would gladly carve holes in this place? The idea that August and Tiger Lil could espouse such optimism for their people, when their history has been so consistently punctuated with sorrow, was unbelievable to me. I felt anger, towards whom I did not know. August’s slow, soft voice lingered in my head from our talk, “We’ve struggled enough in our country just to survive. We don’t need enemies. We don’t need hate.”
On Sunday, Doug — the man whose R.V. we’d camped behind all weekend, grey mullet pulled back in a ponytail and extensive arm tattoos, who had fed us relentlessly since we first made his acquaintance — drove us up to the cemetery overlooking Telegraph Creek and the Stikine. From here we would hitch a ride back to Dease Lake, back to our bikes stashed in the woods and our journey south. One of the newer headstones belonged to a girl born only a year before me. Another nearby belonged to a woman who had passed away in 1908. A tumultuous century between them, both had likely stood here at some point and looked out over the forested, mountainous canyon scene below. Aside from some power lines and now derelict buildings, the relentless onslaught of modernity has largely passed over this place, leaving the view from where I now stood more or less unchanged for centuries. A hundred years from now, will this view look the same as it did then? What will the Tahltans look like?
We decided to travel the Cassiar for it’s famed isolation, hoping to experience untamed Canadian wilderness and the people for whom it is home. We could not have stumbled more directly into Telegraph Creek and the lives of the Tahltans if we tried. Day by day, mile by mile, we accustom ourselves to plunging headlong into situations wholly foreign to us, armed with only a camera and a smile, hoping to capture in a few hours or days an honest glimpse into the lives of others. Occasionally, the stars align, revealing strange and wonderful worlds to us that few others will ever get the chance to see.
If you’re interested in helping protect the Sacred Headwaters, click here to see how you can get involved. To stay up to date on the Klabona Keepers’ work in the Sacred Headwaters, you can follow them on facebook.
Yukon Jeremy
From the porch of the two-story cabin he had built years before with his father, Jeremy steadied himself through what must have been a thick alcohol haze, leveled the enormous bear rifle at one of the dozens of empty gasoline cans littered about the yard, and fired. "You can kill an elephant with this shit," he said cheerily. He had offered to show us the real Alaska, what life was like beyond the gravel safety of the Haul Road, and we had eagerly accepted his invitation. But by the time we arrived at his cabin hours later, our hopes of an interview were vanishing precisely as fast as the fifth of whiskey in his back pocket and we were a long way from home.
We met Jeremy in the small store he runs with his mother in the parking lot of the Yukon River Camp. The store, accurately named "Mainly Birch," was a small shack of souvenirs and knick-knacks carved from the wood of the Birch trees that populate the area. Each item was uniquely crafted and delicately painted: keychains of woven wood, bracelets decorated with individually hole-punched bark bits. The gift shop supplied their income, she told me, in addition to the wildlife boat tours that her son offered shuttling tourists up or down the Yukon River for donations. When we first met Jeremy, he told us about his miles of trap lines and the cabin he had built upriver with his father where he and his mother lived. The waitress in the camp cafe told us his father had passed away four years earlier. He said he'd love to show us around and we eagerly agreed.
As we zoomed up the river in his tiny fishing boat, barely afloat under the weight of all six of us, he told us about himself as he drank from a plastic handle of vodka. Tales of life in the wild and wild living, his time in prison, women he'd loved and lost. He told us about his father - the original "bad-boy" he said - whose misdeeds had forced them to move around frequently. Despite the trouble he sometimes created, he had loved his wife and son a great deal. He had been a pillar of strength for their family, Jeremy told us. The two of them had built the cabin out in the woods decades earlier by themselves, before the cancer, the first fire, the second.
People who decide to make the Alaskan wilderness their home have a palpable sense of pride about them. Jeremy wears the claw of a bear he shot around his neck, equal parts badge of honor and backwoods amulet. He swore like a fit of turrets amplified through a loudspeaker and swilled liquor like his tongue was on fire. We watched in disbelief as he raced his snowmobile in circles around the house, assassinated empty gas cans with an arsenal of rifles and shotguns, felled Birch trees with his body weight; what I imagine a Yukon Olympics might look like if all the athletes were half pickled. Exhausted, Riley finally asked him if we could just talk to him instead, if we could be real with him.
"You wanna see some real shit?" Jeremy yelled, and started off into the scorched landscape behind the cabin where a fire had raged months earlier, new growth sprouting up amidst charred trees. We followed him a few dozen yards to a small hill, the only thing in sight that the fire hadn't burned. At the crest, we found ourselves circled around a coffin-shaped piece of sunken earth with two birch branches twined together in the shape of a cross stuck in the ground at the grave's head. Jeremy broke the silence, "Can't burn my dad," he said.
I didn't take a picture of Jeremy's fathers grave, I don't think the thought even crossed my mind. There's a chance that that hill will join the other beautiful, undocumented moments filed away in my memory as missed opportunities, though I doubt a photo could do justice to the power and surreality of that moment. My mind grasped at rational explanations as it is prone to, chalking the whole thing up to beautiful coincidence or scientific anomaly. My heavy-laden heart conjured up images of Jeremy shouldering the weight of his father's body up the hill just as he'd soon have to shoulder the man's responsibilities if he and his mother were to survive out here. I couldn't help but imagine myself standing in that very spot as the fire raged all around me, sunken grave at my feet and birch trees ablaze for miles in every direction. I don't need a picture of that hill, to have seen it is enough.
It's still not clear to me whether a life lived on the fringe of society made Jeremy wild, or if perhaps like he said, this was the only place for a man like him. "Can you see me in the city? No way, brother." I don't think that any of us are sure what we learned from Yukon Jeremy, really. The interview we got certainly wasn't the interview we were looking for. What I am sure of, and what I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by, standing on that hill looking out on the Alaskan wilderness, is that this is why we are here. We pedal south to see for ourselves and bear witness.