Latest Update: August 12, 2001 by Ben Marcus

7:11 ALASKA TIME SUNDAY AUGUST 12, 2001 OUTSIDE OF KINKOS, FAIRBANKS.

ODOMETER 62440
TRIP METER 6363

MONEY
Gas at Texaco with card
Check to Sebastian $25.00

Oh frick I am beat. I just drove 500 miles on the Dalton Highway, from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks, from 15:00 in the afternoon on Saturday to 6:00 in the morning on Sunday, driving in one day (16 hours) back what took two days to get there. Mud, fog, trucks, potholes.

Saw another grizzly, a white wolf, several caribou and lots of fog and mud. But we made it, and now I'm waiting in front of Kinkos to get my fix.

Civilization. You come back to a place like Fairbanks after driving out to the oil fields and all you see is waste. Most of what goes on in a city is unnecessary and is just giving people something to do. Social comment, that.

If I write the ANWR story, I'm going to pull in some thoughts from Ecotopia. In that book, people who used resources like wood and water were expected to go out and confront those resources, to learn about them and respect them. The same should be true for oil. Everyone should make that drive out to Prudhoe Bay and see what went in to the pipeline and all the heavy industry out there and how the production end is a lot more efficient and even elegant than the consumption end. Social comment, that.

They should do a road race on the Dalton Highway (The Haul Road), one of those Baja 500 deals from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay and back again, non-stop, through rain and sleet and hail and mud and snow. They should run it without clearing the track first, and make the road racers deal with huge trucks coming at them in the wrong lane. They should make them wait for road workers with stop signs while the other racers catch up. They should make it exhilarating and frustrating, like the real thing.

They could call it the Road Warrior, Fairbanks to Prudhoe, to The Source 500. It's symbolic, you know. Wasteful gas guzzlers racing for 500 miles to the source of all the Juice. Social comment, that.

A good idea, with one problem: What if a racer crashed and took out a section of Pipeline. That would be killing the goose that laid the Golden Egg, wouldn't it?

Anyway, we made it, barely. If it had been just Gus and I we would still be stuck and out of gas somewhere along the way. My credit card and bank account are tapped out, and Gus is selling his mottos for $1a piece..

Luckily we had Sebastian Westermann the German bicyclist, who scraped together just enough money to get us here in one piece. I just dropped him off at a Safeway with his bike and all his bags. He's going to get something to eat and then ride up to the University. Then he's going to ride to Valdez, and then he's going home.

Picked up Sebastian earlier today as we were preparing to leave Prudhoe Bay. I saw him with his bike talking to someone about heading back, and I offered him a ride. There was no need for him to repeat the four or five day ride out of Prudhoe Bay, so I told him I'd be back in 15 minutes. I had to get some gas.

I had about $20 and Gus had about $8 so we filled up on $2.55 a gallon gas at the Tesoro Station. Actually we had to wait about an hour and a half for the attendant to show up, and then we got the gas, It was nice to see the requirement that everyone pumping gas do it over a screen that would catch any overspill. I don't think that was meant for tourists or nosy semi-journalists. I'd just like to think the people in Prudhoe Bay care about the environment and not mucking it up. For being as Industrial as Prudhoe Bay is, the surrounding area is very clean. There are lots of marshes and wetlands in between all the welding sheds and drilling places and pipe shops, but they all seemed to be flourishing and clean. I just don't think people are allowed to spill a drop out there, and that is hard to do with all the substances they are using.

Prudhoe Bay in August reminds me of the San Francisco bay near Alviso, sort of.

Anyway, now it's 10:06 on Sunday morning. I fell asleep for a couple of hours and now I am in Kinkos. A young woman is using the laptop station so I am hacking away in the corner, looking disreputable and tired, but oh well, it's Alaska.

Ike is missing again, and I'll probably hear something about him when I get online. I'm still tired.

So, out of money again, but hoping for some tomorrow. What to do now? It looks like the Russia trip won't leave until August 26, if it leaves at all, so I have some time to kill. I'll probably stay in Fairbanks a day or two and then head toward Anchorage. Amazon is sending a DVD of The Beast to General Delivery at the Fairbanks PO. The Russian/English translation program has been delayed a week.

What I am going to do is put together a proposal for another hair-brained scheme. Apparently there was at one time a newspaper called The Prudhoe Bay Journal. I don't know exactly what it was, but I think it was a newspaper covering the construction of the Alyeska Pipeline and the exploration for oil in Prudhoe Bay.

I am going to propose to start it up again. I think it would be interesting to start up some kind of newspaper for Prudhoe Bay-operated from Prudhoe Bay-which covers all the oil operations there and the work that is starting on the natural gas pipeline and ANWR.

I have the writing skills to do it, and I could learn about oil soon enough.

So, I'm going to figure out who to pitch this all to and then make a pitch in which I would start up the Prudhoe Bay Journal. I'll put together an estimated budget for what kind of equipment and such that I would need, and outline the Journal.

I have enough good writing that I've done to show them that I can handle the writing part. What I am going to propose is that I start something that could be continued by all the budding journalists that Alaska is going to produce. Maybe the Editorship of the Prudhoe Bay Journal could be an internship handed out by a promising journalist at the University of Fairbanks, or some other Alaska school that specializes in journalism, and especially oil-field journalism.

Sounds like an idea. Maybe someone will salute it, maybe not. I wouldn't mind spending a half a year or a year in Prudhoe Bay working, earning money, paying off creditors and starting something worthwhile.

Sound like a plan? Well maybe it is.

That girl using the laptop station just ran off, so I'm going to go online, check e-mail and start researching all this. I want to look up articles on Sam Clemens running a newspaper in Virginia City and also get some history on what the Prudhoe Bay Journal was, and what it could be again.

Gus is sleeping in my bed. Ike is running around. I'm pooped and need to sleep for days.

More on the drive last night. Sebastian was in the passenger's seat, and Gus was in the back, either sleeping or shouting out orders.

At one point we saw a grizzly run across the road and stopped to check it out. Ike leapt out and Gus went across a bridge and upwind with that can of stinky salmon from Unintelligible Indian The bear perked up when he smelled it, but went back to eating berries. It's amazing how graceful grizzlies are.

Some army guys from Fairbanks stopped to check out the grizzly. Along the way we'd seen a number of caribou, and at least one hunter skulking by the side of the road with a bow and arrow.

Ike jumped out there and poked around and didn't go try to play with Mr. Brown, which was nice. Gus has gotten good at catching Ike, so we pushed on.

It was a good thing we picked up Sebastian, otherwise Gus and I would be sleeping at the side of the road somewhere, waiting for Gus to sell his $1 mottos to truckers. We didn't have enough gas money and barely got enough together at Coldfoot to push on. But we did.

I logged on and checked e-mail and Gus watched TV and talked to truckers and Sebastian made some hot noodles.

Then we pushed on some more. It finally got dark around midnight and I had to drive carefully, skidding in mud and at one point going head to head with another truck in my lane and heading the opposite direction. It made me wonder why they spent billions on the Pipeline but didn't bother to pave the entire road. It really sucks in places and I can only imagine what it is like in winter and spring.

Truckers are bringing in a lot of equipment, although I guess the delicate stuff comes in by plane.

What else happened on the drive out? I can barely remember. Three days ago seems like a month ago, and yesterday is all confused.

We saw Dolores the nice Athabascan woman on the way out. Ike said goodbye and we pushed on.

I rigged up the CD player so it was on a down comforter and it worked great. No jumping around. Listened to Led Zeppelin, Beethoven, Moody Blues, Kurt Weill, David Bowie, Elvis Movies.

A lot of music and a lot of traveling. At some point I decided I'd start my Trip to ANWR story by drawing a parallel between Cristo's umbrella project and the pipeline. Cristo's project was aesthetic, but it was the industrial scale of it that was so awesome.

The Pipeline is the other way around. It is all function, but the form of it running through such spectacular scenery leaves you in awe of the aesthetic. You know, shit like that.

I figured out a way to write in Ike, and also include lines from Paul Simon's Graceland. ñMy traveling companion is 57 years old, he's the hitcher I picked up in Dawson City. He has reason to believe, we both will be received in Prudhoe Bay.î

Anyway, time to log off and send this. I also need to download some photos. My leg is asleep, and the rest of me is envious.

It's Sunday. I'm out of dough again. It's raining and gloomy in Fairbanks and my future is uncertain. What else is new.

Just found some articles on Samuel Clemens walking into Virginia City in the Nevada Territory and writing for the Territorial Enterprise. That's similar to what I might do in Prudhoe Bay. We shall see.