I kept thinking to myself, “Where am I right now?”
The road led us through a scene, shrouded in fog, that was so thick it obscured everything around us. It is a landscape I would expect to find in a dream or Hayao Miyazaki film, but I was awake and this was reality. A CD is quietly playing breezeblock by Alt-J, and the car is packed with 6 twenty-somethings drifting in and out of sleep. It seems odd that a half-hour earlier we woke up to rock music blasting throughout the whole volunteer house to make sure we were up and ready for this excursion.
Our caravan of two cars slowly moves towards the end of the Kougarok road. By Salmon Lake, the fog has dispersed, and it is possible to view the serene mountain vistas that lay outside of Nome. We made frequent stops to photograph, fill our water bottles from springs, trade CDs with the other car, and climb bridges. The only thing taken seriously on this trip was the fact that it was the weekend.
Driving away from the Kuzatrine Bridge, we entered a large expanse of tundra, lichen of many kinds stretched out like a green carpet to the distant mountains. Grey clouds filled the sky and the road that carried us, curved lazily through this image that belonged on a postcard. In the distance there was a curtain that connected the land and sky; it swayed in the wind like fabric. It took a moment to realize to notice that this curtain was actually smoke blocking our view of the horizon. A slow-moving tundra fire was creating the wall of smoke that I thought resembled fabric. The fire seemed to be close to the road, but it became clear that the fire was about a mile away. To witness the tundra be overtaken by the smoke and fire inspires a mixture of fear and awe.
Cautiously we continued on the Kougarok, keeping a weary eye on the smoke and making sure the fire wasn’t going to block our path back to Nome. We finally pulled up to a bridge that lay over a small river and led to a dirt trail. This was the end of the Kougarok road. The simple scene seemed to be a balance to the fire that burned a mile away. In the distance, the smoke was still visible over the crest of the hill. At the bridge we unpacked our lunch and ate in the middle of the bridge. I sat there eating a chicken sandwich smothered in mustard, watching smoke waft in the wind over the horizon, wondering, “where am I?”.
