OXYMORON

Canada wrote down peace, order and good government. America put the pursuit of happiness next to life and liberty. Two countries trying to answer roughly the same question: what's a person supposed to do with being alive?

Our friend from Jasper threw his bag in the van and climbed in. First time he'd come north with us. He didn't know yet what he'd signed up for. Neither did we, honestly, but we had more practice not minding.

Two Americans. One Canadian. One van. North, after a muskox.

There was nothing obviously wrong with the arrangement.

Deadhorse, up on Alaska's North Slope, exists because there was oil under it. Inuvik, its Canadian cousin, exists because somebody decided the western Arctic ought to have a town. Different reasons. Same result.

The Roost. Pizza. Grimy, fluorescent, and a guy behind the counter who looked up at the three of us and said, "what can I get ya bossman."

My friend from Bozeman and I hustle pool for fun. We walked into Trapper's Hall with two hours of unearned confidence and a plan to ruin somebody's night. Across the table, an old man, easily eighty, and his grandson. Both Gwich'in. Both carpenters. Both looking at us like they'd seen this exact kind of idiot come through the door before.

They had.

The old man broke.

Balls went where he told them.

His hand on the cue. The cue on the felt. The ball, the pocket. The same motion over and over, decades of it, until his hands stopped needing his brain's permission. He never made a show of it. Nobody suggested money. Nobody had to.

We got our turns. It didn't matter.

We laughed the whole walk back. What else do you do.

The Mackenzie Delta is flat enough to make you suspicious. A straight road laid across it, nothing on either side, ending at the Arctic Ocean because somebody decided that's where it should end. We'd come mostly to say we had.

I don't want to be disrespectful saying it, but god, it's an ugly ocean. People in La Jolla drink margaritas in the sun at the beach. People in Tuktoyaktuk drink straight bourbon in the rain at the beach, scowling. Murky. Cold. Hazy. Wind that doesn't let up and doesn't care that you drove two days to get there. Waves that knocked you sideways once you waded past your knees. Mosquitoes thick enough to have a local reputation. People up there will tell you they can pull your socks down. Caribou wade into the same freezing water to get away from them, which tells you how the math works when you're an animal built for the country and you still pick hypothermia. Gray water, gray sky, gray everything, and getting bitten the whole time.

My friend from Bozeman looked at it for a while.

"We came all this damn way."

It wasn't a good argument.

Our friend from Jasper looked at the water, then at us. Said it looked cold. Hard to argue with him.

We got in anyway.

He stayed on the shore, fully clothed, slapping at his neck, watching two grown men get knocked around by the Arctic Ocean.

Came out smelling like the inside of a boot. That smell did not go away.

Past Tuk the road quit.

The first day we still talked. Ponds, slope tundra, gravel bars, mud, a pingo now and then rising out of the flat like the earth had blistered. No mountains. No trees. Nothing to measure distance against except the water underfoot and the next low ridge. We glassed the ridges and argued over whether a shape was an animal or a rock. It was always a rock.

Second day. Fewer jokes. Almost no food. Not much sleep.

Rock. Ridge. Rock.

Third morning, cowboy coffee. Grounds straight into the pot, strained through a sock because nobody had packed a filter. Our friend from Jasper watched me pour it through yesterday's sock. He looked at the pot. Then the sock. Then me.

By then he'd stopped asking questions altogether.

Wet boots. Wind. Hunger.

Walk. Glass. Nothing.

Walk. Glass. Nothing.

Somewhere in there I couldn't have told you why. Nobody was making us.

Walk.

Mid-sentence, mid-thought, our friend from Jasper turned his head.

"Oh, uh. Found one."

Three days and that was the announcement.

He stood alone on a gravel bar between two ponds, broad and filthy, facing into a wind that had been working on all four of us since morning.

Hair in long matted sheets. Horns curving down and out. Small eyes set back in an absurd quantity of animal.

His coat moved. Most of him didn't.

We stopped.

He looked at us.

It was the look a man gives you when you've stopped in front of him and haven't said what you want.

And?

We'd finally found him.

He hadn't been lost.

There was something almost embarrassing about the imbalance. We'd built the better part of a week around this meeting. For him, no meeting had occurred.

I raised the camera anyway.

Wind. Then the shutter.

He went back to whatever he'd been doing, which as far as I could tell was standing there.

Back in the van. Three of us, three days of no food and less sleep arriving all at once. Our friend from Jasper looked at the two of us for a long time, like a man working a sum that refused to balance.

"I don't understand how you guys are alive."

Somebody graded the road.

Somebody trucked fuel north.

Somebody kept the runway clear.

Somebody stocked The Roost.

Somebody sat in a booth at the border.

None of them was thinking about us or a muskox. They were doing their jobs, correctly, on schedule, the whole time. We came in afterward and called it an adventure.

Peace, order and good government. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We wrote both of them down.

A stretch of land has to be for something. A town needs a reason. Colored balls on felt become fifty years of a man's life. The end of a road becomes somewhere worth reaching. An ugly ocean becomes somewhere worth swimming. Three days of mud becomes a search.

We have a hard time leaving anything alone.

Nothing can just happen.

Maybe that's not a defect. It gave us roads, and games, and old men who don't miss, and a swim nobody needed.

It gave me the photograph.

I printed him on black. No ponds. No road. No van. No friends. No Canada. No government. No adventure.

Muskox. Black.

I gave the picture a title, which he didn't ask for either.

He's out there somewhere, writing nothing down.

I'm still at it.