VIOLATOR

Late one night I was scrolling Pinterest, making a brisket shirtless in the dark, listening to Personal Jesus. Saw photos of fall Denali. FaceTimed my buddy on the spot.

"Dude. You have to see this. We have to go."

He agreed immediately.

The next morning he called in sick to his job. Told them he had COVID.

REI, Bozeman. The salesman asked where we were camping.

"Oh, uh. Denali."

"Oh."

We bought everything we needed. We intended to bring all of it back afterward and tell them something was wrong with it. This was fraud. We called it the REI method.

We walked out with five grand of gear, smiling like we'd pulled a scene out of Ocean's Eleven.

Cashed in the SkyMiles. Bozeman to Seattle, Seattle to Fairbanks. We were too young to rent a car, or be trusted with one, so we rented a U-Haul van. The heater didn't work. Neither did the four-wheel drive.

Backpacking gear. A case of Miller Lite. Monster. Nicotine pouches. Enough Old Trapper beef sticks and Clif Bars for five days. Thirty-five hundred calories a day. That was the meal plan.

I Can't Tell You Why by the Eagles, the whole drive down from Fairbanks. I hung my head out the window like my Australian shepherd, and I may or may not have had my tongue out. Gold and red and amber, going on forever. Two kids in a U-Haul went quiet for a long stretch.

Mandatory orientation before the backcountry. The ranger had been doing this a long time and had very little patience left for the public. A couple sat in the room. Every time the ranger said Denali, the husband raised his hand.

"Um, actually, it's Mount McKinley."

Every single time.

By the fourth correction something in the ranger broke. He called the man some things I hadn't heard before from a federal employee.

We did not correct the ranger.

First night, Riley Creek, in the back of the U-Haul. Cold enough to lose your downstairs manhood and not notice until morning. No light pollution at all. I'd been to Alaska once, at ten, on a family fishing trip. That didn't count. This counted.

We cried looking at the sky.

We were already planning the party we'd throw when we got back.

Unit 6, the next morning. Shoulder season. The whole campus was closed except one ranger station. Six million acres, and as far as we could tell, nobody in it but us.

Which meant nobody was watching.

Those Pinterest photos, it turned out, had been taken from the road.

We were not on the road.

Alaska wasn't being cruel to us. We were badly prepared. No camp stove. Beef sticks and Clif Bars, five days of them. The Monsters ran out around day two. Caffeine withdrawal in the rain, in the backcountry, is its own kind of misery. We waded rivers and hiked miles in the pouring rain. Somewhere in there I got trench foot. I still have the boots, blood stained, and the empty Keflex bottles. Mud in the tent at 2 a.m. We laughed until we cried anyway.

Glacier runoff, filtered straight from the river, was the best thing either of us had ever tasted. We filtered it. Giardia water tastes different going down than it does coming back up. One of the few lessons I'd learned as a kid.

We hadn't seen another person in days. No trails. No signs. Tundra going amber and red in every direction, and a silence you could feel against your chest. Miles from anything. Miles from anyone who could stop us or help us or audit our adventure.

One morning there were fresh grizzly tracks just outside the wash where we'd camped.

We followed them down to the Teklanika River.

She was just sitting there. A large sow in the middle of the river, looking at us. Then she lowered her head, stopped halfway in the water, and kept her eyes on us.

It wasn't hard to read.

She looked at us. We looked at her. Then we kept existing in her space like we'd paid for a permit.

Which we had. She wasn't in the mood to ask for it.

That's what humans do. We monetize violations and call it a portfolio.

I got the picture.

Back at the ranger station the U-Haul was covered in mud. It had rained the whole time, and the dirt lot outside the Unit 6 entrance was a swamp. We tried to drive out. No four-wheel drive. The tires spun. We put rocks under them for traction, and the rocks fired out from under the tires into the trees like cannonballs. We looked at each other and started giggling. Then we grabbed bigger rocks.

By the time we got out of that lot we'd weaponized geology.

The rangers looked at the U-Haul, then at us, and giggled like schoolgirls. They invited us back to ranger housing that night. Said they were having people over.

It was already loud when we got there. Someone had brought a keg. Someone else had brought a blown-out JBL speaker. Shoulder season. No cruise crowd. Nobody they had to act professional for.

Out there, the sow. The river. The dark.

In here, a log cabin, a keg, a room full of federal employees, and two idiots who'd somehow been invited.

Nobody parties harder than gay guys in Vancouver and Alaskan park rangers.

Best rooms I've ever been let into.

They both love Depeche Mode.