July 4, 1976
America’s 250th birthday got me thinking about the birthday party I missed — the big one, the Bicentennial.
The largest parade in Highland in years. A town fireworks display dwarfing prior events. Special activities months in the making. All of it set against a background of a perfect July day in Indiana.
Fifteen years old and loving life.
I missed it all.
Stopped Dead on the Alcan
Our 1957 Flxible Visicoach sat quiet on the dusty Alcan Highway in northern British Columbia for the entire day. If you’ve never driven it, imagine a gravel road through a forest that doesn’t end. No towns. No billboards. Just spruce and birch and sky, hour after hour, the dust from the road settling on everything.
Investigators were flying in by helicopter from Whitehorse to determine who was at fault when a south-bound logging truck ran into a north-bound tractor trailer. No one would clear the road until they got that sorted.
The next stop for our high school choir was a church in Anchorage — we had a concert in two days. With nothing else to do, we got out our footballs and frisbees, set up the grill, and had a picnic in the middle of the wilderness.
Twenty Yards into the Forest
I stepped off the gravel and walked twenty yards into the forest. I was alone in the world.
It hit me — not gradually, but all at once — that I could walk another hundred yards into those woods and be completely, irreversibly lost. Not inconvenienced. Not turned around. Lost. In millions of acres of wilderness that didn’t know my name and wouldn’t care if I never came back.
I’d spent plenty of time in the north woods of Wisconsin. I thought I knew what wild meant. But this was different. Wisconsin wild had roads on the other side. This didn’t. This was the kind of wild where the forest just kept going until it disappeared into the mountains.
I stood there for a long time. I imagined walking off just to see what I could find.
The memory resurfaces occasionally. When it does, it takes me back to that moment. It was the first time I knew, really knew, that the wilderness isn’t waiting for me to visit — it’s something that exists whether I show up or not. And that the distance between safe and lost is a lot shorter than I thought.
It was also the Fourth of July, and I was in Canada. So there’s that.
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