It’s now July 9th, 2024, and I find myself at the North Pole, near Fairbanks, Alaska. It really does exist! The Clausy street names and candy cane light poles were corny (even the McDonald’s sign pole bore the kitschy red and white stripes). Imagine going a call to St. Nicholas Dr. and Santa Claus Lane (note: it’s to the NE of North Pole High School). I felt a bit nauseated at all this tripe, so I drove on.
I met with State Trooper Zack CHICOINE (formerly with the New Hampshire Police Department) for an afternoon shift ride-along. Unfortunately, their police academy was not in session, so patrolling we did and use-of-force we talked. Riding with patrol officers allows me to pick up tidbits of information that help me shape my understanding of how force is used in various parts of the world. It stirs up a million memories of my own extensive street time. I am actively seeking knowledge outside of our backyard to see if what is being taught back home is effective and worthwhile. I also want to establish some control tactics training rules akin to firearms training rules that all police know.
The following morning, I met the affable Lieutenant Jess CARSON, who lined me up with a couple of eager, hardworking young Troopers who made up their Crime Suppression Unit. Trevor NORRIS and Scott McAFEE (both martial artists) graciously let me tag along as they hunt and peck, looking for thieves and miscreants of all ilk. We chat a fair amount about various control tactics and techniques (BJJ seems popular, ousting former Trooper Steve JIMMERFIELD’s program).
After two days of car camping in the State Police parking lot, I hit the road towards Anchorage, where Jess’s twin brother Jack, despite being out of the country on annual leave, made arrangements for taking a look at their training facilities and getting me a ride-along in this municipality. I meet Sgt. Ty WITTE and get a tour of their downtown station, where I am introduced to the Chief of Police, Sean CASE. They have decent classroom and gym space here, as well as at their police academy, where classes of 12-20 are trained for a police force of around 400 officers. At home, we are relatively blessed with great mats, thanks to my ex-partner’s Ret. Sgt. HINTON’s drive to install sprung floors in our Police Judo, Justice Institute (Police Academy), and VPD Tactical Training facilities. I note that they are using the LEPAT machine in their physical testing (an obvious variation of Doug FARENHOLTZ’s original POPAT set-up for which I was a test subject in the mid-80s). Like many other agencies, they are understaffed (by about 50 members) and are draining the recruiting puddle dry.
On Sat., July 13, 2024, I attended the Anchorage afternoon shift parade (24 members), where I met up with a junior Patrol Officer, James CAMPIONE (and his “partner” in a separate car, Cole SMITH). There is a buzz going around about TRUMP nearly being assassinated and BIDEN being shown the door. There’s a fair amount of gunplay in these parts, along with the seemingly ever-present domestic violence, drugs, and mental illness cases also seen in Australia and New Zealand. We wrap up the shift with the nabbing of a bank robber using unspecified high-tech equipment (see, I did read the waiver 😉 ).
Rain continues to dog me while BC and Alberta burn (they say I dragged this lousy weather with me). Meanwhile, back in Tok, my old pal Joe and his fire crew are bored to death with nothing for his crew to do. The next day, I briefly met with Sgt. Derek COTTLE at his HQ; the following day, I went to see Andrew HOUSER at the Alaska Department of Corrections in nearby Palmer. We had a great chat and exchanged a few handcuffing techniques in their training gym using a probation officer, Molly, as a training dummy (yes, they, too, get trained in use-of-force matters!). They are also slowly abandoning JIMMERFIELD’s training methodologies. I found Andrew very quick to grasp the nuances of meaningful control and arrest tactics and strategies and greatly enjoyed the friendship he extended to me.
It is now July 17, and there appears to be a small break in the rainy weather, so I hit the road (Highway 1) back towards Tok. The road is absolutely gorgeous! The view of Matamuska Glacier is quite a sight. It does rain a bit, but at dusk, this sets up one of the most thick and brilliant (double) rainbows I have ever seen! I sleep soundly at the entrance of an old service road—my pot-of-gold spot. The mosquitoes are out in full force, making me dive quickly into the back of my SUV, lest I drag the bloodthirsty swarm in with me. I pull into Tok, Alaska, at 2000 hours with lots of daylight to spare and await Joe to get off work so we can drink a bit, swap techniques and share tales of the martial arts we did together in Vancouver and on tour in China (1994). I retire at 0040 hrs into the dusky confines of my car (I refused to camp on their floor because I didn’t want them tiptoeing around me when they got up to work in the morning).
I slept well; then I spent the following few days setting up visits down the road and re-jigging my “home on wheels.” Joe and Tess quietly listen to my rather lengthy story entitled “My Uncle Frank”, which lays bare a bit of my family history. Joe was shocked about my father’s abusive nature. He said he didn’t know about it…and I certainly never felt like bragging about it, or crying in my soup. In fact, my original reason for getting into martial arts in the first place was to defend myself and members of my family against this often raging, dry alcoholic. I fantasized about beating the crap out of my old man. After sweating buckets and getting into deeper touch with my own anger issues, I fell in love with Karate during the Kung Fu craze of the early 70s. I soon realized that I could just as well hit my father over the head with a baseball bat with far less personal physical sacrifice.
I learned that forgiveness lies on the road to happiness, so I had a very difficult tete-a-tete with my father, and we both hugged it out and started anew. Forgiving someone does not mean one should forget about family violence (or whatever wrong has been dished out to you), nor does it absolve the person of blame. Forgiveness lightens your own personal emotional burden. We can all learn from negative experiences and just move on from them.
On July 20, I rolled into Joe’s workplace to say goodbye, and we both teared up a bit; he told me that he loved me and that he was a better man for having known me. Wow! He felt gifted that I had entrusted him to say something nice at my memorial service if I blast off into the Great Forever After before him. It was like we would never meet again. I told him that I loved him too and that he made himself the man he is today—I just cheered him along. He is, and will always be, my dearest martial arts brother.
I steered my wheels north up the poorly maintained Highway 5 (Taylor Highway – “Top of the World Highway”). I got through OK and chatted pleasantly with the CBSA officer manning the gate from Alaska into Canada about my trip. I showed her my embarrassingly small canister of Sabre dog spray, and off I went into the Yukon. I liked how the first few kilometres of the road are in a perfect state of repair, only to have it turn to crap shortly thereafter. This dirt road is almost entirely without traffic, but I do see a grizzly bear and two foxes (one with a mouse in its mouth).
Highway 9 abruptly ends at the swollen and swift-moving Liard River, and I take the very short, free ferry to Dawson City on the other side. It’s late in the day, and there is a slight drizzle, but I am rewarded with yet another complete and dazzling double rainbow. I stay put to saviour the moment while parking my car along an old unused logging road. This must be my resting place for the night. I ate some leftover yogurt and granola with sliced banana, and I was asleep by 0130 hours, just 50 km short of Stewart Crossing.
The adventurous part of me rued that I had not ventured up the Dempster Highway yesterday, but I was really unprepared (with regards to water, extra fuel, and a proper spare tire) for a thousand kilometres of a dusty, bumpy road. I did not want to get stone damage to my vehicle’s exterior or lose a windshield. I was unsure if my lease agreement would handle such a tortuous trip, so I steered clear of it, promising myself to return when I was better prepared. I still wistfully remember looking at that first little inviting stretch of perfectly paved road heading north, but that was not the way it would be all the way up to Tuktoyuktuk. I guess I am maturing mentally, after all. Another trip it will be!
I drive through many minor smoulderings of recent fires in the sparse forest that seemed to make the multitudes of mosquitoes even more voracious. Ah, good, smoked meat! I stay in the parking lot at the Canadian Superstore in Whitehorse and fall asleep to the sound of a light drizzle pitter-pattering on my now-inappropriately named “sunroof”.
The next day, July 22, I called my friend Bill CASHER. He wanted to meet up with me later in the day, so I took four hours of time to install six newly purchased, plastic, stackable Sterilite bins in the back side of my vehicle for storage, making things far easier to find. The right 1/3 side of my vehicle’s rear area was now solely a storage zone, with the remaining 2/3 of the car width reserved for sleeping. Delux! Bill led me to the Information Centre to pick up a few of his house guests from Australia, so I followed them back to his beautiful and spacious rural house, about 40 km from Whitehorse, to have a great dinner courtesy of his wife, Fiona. I had a hard time falling asleep, but Nature felt I needed a wake-up call at 0500 hrs in the form of an extremely loud clap of thunder that actually rocked my vehicle! How close was that lightning strike? Bill checked his property and found no fried trees, so it must have burst above my impromptu Faraday cage?!
So, I dodged recent fires and a lightning strike; what’s next? A mudslide? Yup. That very same day, I left Whitehorse and decided to cut over to the West Coast to see the deep port at Skagway, Alaska. With all the continuing, albeit light, rainfall, I noted a chest-sized rock on the curved highway skirting around a cliff of dirt and stone. It was likely glacial debris left there during the last glacial event, some 12,000 years ago, when the valley was under a mile-thick sheet of ice. The rock was trying to reduce its potential energy by seeking out sea level (and then some) using gravity’s silent, gentle and invisible hand, lubed up with rainwater. I managed to wrestle this heavy piece of rock to the ditch by rocking it back and forth and pivoting it on its pointy bits, thereby duckwalking off the road. I mentioned the slope instability to nearby Highway workers who had witnessed my rock wrestling. Perhaps they were monitoring the slope?
After a quick look at the massive cruise ships in dock (three of a possible 4 berths were occupied) and noting the large number of jewellery shops and tourists milling about, I drove back out of the Skagway Valley. I found an even larger boulder at the same spot and noted the improper placement of cones just around the bend, so I scooped them up to reset them. I noted rocks the sizes of baseballs and footballs sliding off the slope every 10 seconds. This was no game. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck—this slope was going to cut loose, so I wisely beat it, not even hanging around a bit to video the event on my phone. I had no idea how long that would take, so I drove a short distance to Carcross, where those same Highway workers told me that there was a massive mudslide, 20 meters deep, that just cut loose, exactly where I had been rock wrestling (and cone setting). I saw the aerial photo of the slide and realized that the slide fan was wide enough to have wiped me out and buried me under tons of debris. I caught news of the slide and subsequent road closure for days (I was on the right side of that near hit!) and about Jasper’s burning inferno. No Jasper-Banff trip for me. I go to the Liard River Hot Springs to bask in the hot pools to reflect on my good luck. What the heck? What’s next? Dengue Fever like my friend Blair has in Thailand?
Highway 97 through Muncha Lake Provincial Park was a real treat for my eyes as the nearby mountains wore fluvial fans like long dresses, small creeks sprang off steep cliffs and flew off as wispy waterfalls, tiny glaciers bedecked the jutting peaks with its downward flowing finger-like extensions clinging to cold barren rock, and clumps of snow adorned many sun-shadowed crevasses. Magnificent! It must be to get me to write like I am.
On the following day, I passed through the massive Peace River Valley and whizzed by my old workplaces in Beaverlodge and Grande Prairie. In early ’72, I hitchhiked from North Bay, Ontario, to Edmonton in the middle of February yet, to find a job in these places, serving as a groundman for the linesmen who either strung interprovincial lines for high-voItage lines on wooden “wishbone” structures, or who ran power lines to the pumpjacks (“donkey heads”) that sucked oil out of the ground using petroleum fuel products until we brought the electrical lines in. Sometimes, I did both forms of work, but I mostly did the work of a groundman. Passing through this area brought a flood of memories from the 19-year-old part of my brain. I bought my first motorcycle, a 1969 650cc Triumph Bonnyville, which I almost drove off the road when speeding from Grande Prairie to Beaverlodge to pick up a part before the motorcycle shop closed. I knew nothing about motorcycle riding in those early days.
Anyhow, I overnighted at the rural and isolated Grande Cache Cemetery on July 26. Sleeping at its front gates felt like flipping the bird at the Grim Reaper. I must say that it was deadly quiet, so I slept deeply despite the fact that Death was seemingly stalking me. On the brighter side, my visitation requests were starting to line up in Alberta!