The town itself was rather underwhelming, but we were there, like most, to see Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America. Only once we got to Denali, we found out that it’s hard to see any of the mountain’s 20,320 feet from within the park, or at least from as far within the park as we were willing to go. Traffic in Denali is strictly regulated and buses (unfortunately not ours) are the only way to get around. (Yeah, bicycles are allowed, but don’t we know each other well enough by now to understand that was not in the cards?) So Tim and I made the mistake of taking a tour in an aging Park Service school bus.
It wasn’t (just) that I was spoiled after spending the year in our luxury Prevost. Packed with forty-nine other people traversing narrow, winding, Park Service maintained roads over which large animals routinely cross, I was horrified, but that had nothing to do with the bus. The rule on the tour was that anyone could yell STOP for anything at any time: animal sightings, picture opportunities, bloody noses (this really happened. They sent the kid off the bus – to be eaten by a bear, I suppose. Or is that sharks?) Our overly helpful guide/driver even got walkie-talkies for us slobs in back, so that we could more easily communicate our wishes to him on this hell ride. Unfortunately, "Stop the bus. I’ll catch a cab" was not one of the possibilities.
The problem started with the very first animal sighting, a caribou. An older woman across the aisle from us let out a bloodcurdling scream. I thought perhaps the poor animal was being eaten by a bear. Since I had only seen the one Alaskan bear and there was little I could do to help poor Rudolph anyway, I craned my neck in the caribou’s direction. But, no. He of the mega-antler bling (someone should tell those poor, misguided creatures there is such a thing as over-accessorizing) was placidly grazing in a wide-open meadow, oblivious to the commotion it was causing in our claustrophobic space. It didn’t even flinch when the woman let loose with what appears to be the Tourist Rallying Cry: "WALTER! GET THE CAMERA!" Tim and I hadn’t been on organized tours in quite some time and as we shot each other pained looks, we remembered why.
"This is going to be a very long trip," we said in unison. What does Walter’s wife do when she needs to get his attention for something really important? Like, say she’s being strangled by a stranger, which I can assure you, nearly occurred several times during the nearly eight-hour ordeal. Then there were the Dall sheep. Someone would shout, "STOP THE BUS!" and we would . . . for dots of white on a hill, which we were told were frigging sheep. OK. Our guide didn’t really say "frigging" sheep. Being a naturalist named (what else?) River, he called them Dall sheep. Was there really anyone on that entire bus who had never been to a farm?
"But they’re mountain sheep," Tim protested the first time I made this quite excellent observation. By the sixth, he delighted in spotting the frigging sheep himself, only to withhold the information from the rest of our wool-crazed herd. At one point, River even stopped the bus on his own, struck a pose, and in a misguided effort at channeling Marlin Perkins, announced he was going to scan the mountain ridge with his binoculars for the, thus far, elusive bear. I rolled my eyes at my husband.
"If they’re that far away, who gives a shit?" I asked. To which Tim replied, already half out of his seat, "Let me get the walkie-talkie for you."
The eight hours crawled by slower than I’ve often prayed Tim would take highway exit ramps. The boxed lunch didn’t help. In fact, as we were exiting the bus, I left a soda can on my seat. Tim went back for it, chastising me with, "This isn’t an airplane." To which I responded, "Really? Couldn’t tell from the lunch." But Denali had one more indignity in store. As we disembused, River (whose name while working in the Lower 48 during the off-season is probably Bernie, Tim observed), apologized for the paucity of animal sightings.
"I think what’s important to take away from today," he asserted, "even more than what we did see, is what we didn’t: strip malls and coffee shops and restaurants and . . ." the rest of his words were drowned out by rousing applause from the entire load – except us. Like Walter and Edna could survive more than a day without any of that stuff.