These are the Chronicles of Famous Surf Writer Ben Marcus and his trip into the Wilds of the Alaskan Frontier.
Latest Update: October 14, 2000

22:56 YUKON TIME ROOM 5, COZY CORNER MOTEL, HAINES JUNCTION, YUKON, KA-NA-DA

There's an East German hitchhiker in my room. Who is this guy? We've been through a lot today, and I don't even know what his name is. We made it out of Tok, we got the Third Degree at the Canadian border and we drove 202 miles of icey, slidey, treacherous AlCan Highway, all the way to Haines Junction, listening to Buffalo Springfield and Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell. It was nice to have a witness to all the terrain and climate changes. He was good company, even with all the tobacco.

So now we're in Room Five of the Cozy Corners Hotel, a clean, Christmas-lighted room with satellite TV, and more TV channels than I ever knew were possible. They've got BBC News!

I'd better ask his name. I asked. It's Frank Hoppe. He's East German. Ten years ago, he wasn't allowed to leave his country. Now he, like me, is flat-hatting all over the Big North. He's been all around Alaska and Canada most of the summer. Yesterday he was in Tok, for some reason. I saw him on the side of the road this morning in Tok when I was going to the Chevron station. He was going my way, so I gave him a ride.

I woke up late this morning because I spent most of last night online, playing gin with my women. I had so many last night, I can scarcely remember them all. My Palestinian Princess couldn't get into the game for some reason, so I had to play with others. There was a woman who turned out to be from Alaska, an airline pilot who flew 747s for TWA. A Captain, no less. She flies from Anchorage to New York, then Paris. Does that ring a bell? TWA? New York to Paris? 747? I asked her if she had ever seen anything unexplainable, and she got all mysterious. Said she had photos.

I played gin with another woman, a securities broker from Las Vegas, a redhead who had been married five times. Va va voom. (Hi Mistie)

There was another woman, IBeSpunOne, who turned out to be a music producer who did soundtracks for XXX movies.

There were others, so many others. I played gin with about 8 different women. Some of them were talkative, some of them weren't.

I'm an online gin slut. I am ashamed. But playing gin online is a way to have some human contact after a long day of driving in the middle of nowhere.

Although yesterday I didn't even do that. I just sat in my hotel room, watched movies and worked on the Jeff Clark interview. Hawk says that swell.com is going to launch this weekend. I said, "Yeah yeah, sure sure."

Around 3:00 in the morning, Steve Ogles came on. He's also a pilot who flies for American Airlines, and keeps weird hours. As we were talking about A10 Warthogs and this and that, he told me to go outside and look for the Space Shuttle, which was flying my way, attached to the Space Station.

I didn't see it, but it was nice out, that weird kind of warmth you get when it's snowing.

So after that big night I slept in, and I got a late start. As I was leaving Tok, looking for a Chevron station, there was this hitch-hiker dude on the side of the road. I wasn't at all surprised to hear a German accent, and I warned him that I had bad tires and we might not make it to Canada alive. He was game, and we managed to fit his backpack into the van, which is now more chaotic than Brazil.

And we pushed on. We got to talking about this and that. I introduced him to Mr. Walther (after pulling out the clip) and he didn't flinch.

"That's some fine German munitions engineering you have in your hand there," I said.

"This is the first time I have held a handgun," he said.

That got us talking about East Germany. And his military service. And the Fall of the Wall. The first thing Frank did when the wall fell was spend his West German Marks on a Neil Young concert. That inspired the CD player, but all I had was Buffalo Springfield.

Before the Canadian Border we stopped at a gas station. I wanted to organize the van, and started to do that in front of the CafŽ, because I've gotten used to doing anything in Alaska with noone bugging you. Well, this bugged the owners, and they told me to pack it up and git. Although the reception was cold, it was incredibly warm in front of that gas station. There was snow all around, but it felt like summer. Weird.

I did manage to get Mr. Walther all packaged up and hidden away, and 20 miles later we were at Canadian Customs. Frank had an East German passport and no plane ticket out of Canada, I was my usual suspicious, no-eye-contact, "I have a shotgun but a handgun? No, sir," self.

For some reason, we got pulled over.

I got to stress a little again, because I hadn't hidden Mr. Walther all that well, and I also couldn't remember where I had hidden my little baggie of Homer Hysteria.

So I got to stress a little bit, but in the end, we didn't get searched and pushed on.

(I'm, watching The Living Daylights right now. Bond just pulled out Mr. Walther's cousin, with a silencer)

So we rolled on, passing landmarks I remembered from the drive up: The coffee shop where I had watched Who Wants to be Millionaire? The bridge over the Duke River that said "Vehicles with Lugs Prohibited." I went back through a lot of rugged, lonely, vast, spectacular terrain that looked familiar, chatting with Frank about everything, and listening to good music on the CD.

The driving was sketchy at first because the road was icy and slippery and horrible, but as we got around Kluane Lake, where it was windy and freezing again, the snow disappeared. At Kluane Lake I learned why chum salmon are alos called "dog" salmon. The pioneers and the Natives would dry them and feed them to their dogs.

And we pushed on, listening to the CBC when it came through, and music the rest of the time. Frank was good company. He gave me some insight into life Behind the Iron Curtain, and suggested I read The Gulag Archipelago to get the scoop on the Soviet Union.

Around 10:00 we pulled into Haines Junction, where I had seen all the German tourists a couple of weeks ago, and the Swiss guy who ran the gas station. We checked into the Cozy Corner hotel for $60 Canadian, and then went looking for grub. We found a restaurant that was closing, but the lady let us get some sandwiches. She was German, of course, and I listened to her and Frank rattle off some lovely syllables.

Then we checked into Room Five, which had a TV with more channels than I ever thought possible. They had the BBC News, with a feature on an ill-advised soccer match in Yugoslavia between both sides of the Milosevic thing. Can you believe it turned into a riot? Duh.

Not much online action last night, although I had a pleasant game with Miss Las Vegas Redhead.

And that's it. Now it's 10:22 AM on Sunday. We're going to drive to White Horse and Frank is probably going to bail out. He's heading way up north to meet up with a fur trapper who lives on the Dempster Highway.

I don't think I'm going to make it to Sequim tomorrow to protest that Expired License ticket, unless I learn to drive on water, very fast. I don't think I have the right tires for that, either.