Photo Pest: FLASHBACK: Alaska with Ken (1980)

Ken and I drove to Alaska. He was retired and I had earned nearly a month of vacation from the library. It was our first trip together as adults and I had a hidden agenda: to come out at the right moment. I brought along Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as Plan B.

Dinosaur, CO

In retrospect, Ken may have been suffering from what we today call FOMO. He'd just turned 63 and I had borrowed his car to make road trips of my own in 1977 and 1979. He and Mary had planned to spend their retirement traveling but Lois, who became a grandmother the day before we left, had different ideas.

Flaming Gorge, UT

Is it weird that he occasionally remarked "OK Mary" when I did something that reminded him of my mother? I asked him to stop.

Ken outfitted his Type III Volkswagen station wagon for the long drive on the Alaska Highway, also known as the "ALCAN" because much it crosses Canada. He was eager to document the trip photographically because he thought VW could use our journey for promotional purposes. I inherited his wishful thinking gene minus the automotive obsession.

Ken never had been camping before. When making his way to see me in New York or going to the Daytona 500, he slept in the car and washed up in the morning at a truck stop or McDonald's. For once, I was the expert. Even four decades ago, it wasn't always easy to find a campsite, and we didn't always have the time (or light) to pitch my tent, the one I bought before going to Maine six years earlier. I can still hear Ken saying "We're roughing it tonight!"

In terms of "amber waves of grain" Canada had the US beat in Alberta. Enormous grain silos along railroad tracks were as numerous as farmhouses.

The ALCAN officially begins in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Built when Alaska was still an American territory, it connected the 50th state to the mainland United States.

More trucks than passenger vehicles barreled down the 1,700 mile road, most of which was unpaved in 1980.

I thought these might be wild horses until closer inspection revealed that they had been shoed.

"Four Tails, Five Asses and 16 Legs"

We generally set up full camp for stays of more than a day. Ken was obsessed with chopping wood and I found that using just an ice chest and a propane stove, it wasn't hard to replicate the simple meals I made for Dave at 47 Pianos.

The tent protected us from rain but not moisture condensation which dripped down on our faces if we had to close the flaps.

Clouds obscured our first view of the Canadian Rockies.

Muncho Lake, British Columbia

Ken cringed every time a truck passed us going in the opposite direction. Flying gravel had cracked the windshield in several places.

Mountain goats used the ALCAN, too.

Both Ken and I wished we could add El Paso and New York City to Watson Lake's Signpost Forest, first planted by a homesick construction worker.

Imagine how many signs there must be today!

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police brought back not-so-distant childhood memories of Dudley Do-Right ("Rocky and Bullwinkle" and Mad magazine were primarily responsible for developing my sense of humor). My journal doesn't record any encounters with Mounties, but we did get into a tense altercation with a Canadian customs agent who insisted we must be bringing guns across the border and thoroughly searched the car!

It's probably Tatchun Lake that makes me remember Yukon (then known as the Yukon Territory) with more fondness than any other place on our trip. We had made camp in the rain but the fog had lifted completely by 9:30 a.m.

Ken insisted I take his bare-ass picture before he went down to the lake. "My peter shrunk up so bad I can't even wash it!" he yelled from the chilly waters. TMI.

I climbed a hill to get this shot of the perfect campsite.

These survival huts probably get more use in the winter.

Compared to this bicyclist, Ken and I might as well have been glamping. She and her friend, another student at the University of Montana, had left Missoula, Montana (2,000 miles south) eight weeks earlier with the goal of dipping their toes in the Arctic Ocean. Before departing, they had dried food in bulk and shipped it ahead. "I never even owned a bike before and we've been averaging 50 miles a day," she reported. Their provisions and camping gear weighed close to 100 pounds.

The fish weren't biting with the cheap rods and reels we purchased at Woolworth's. Maybe they were all asleep by 10 p.m. when this shot was taken.

A ground squirrel couldn't get enough of my Saltines stash. Crack for critters.

These photos illustrate the differences between the ways father and son stage their Kodak moments. Dad celebrated "sitting on top of the world" with an empty can of Coors

. . . and I took off my shirt while blasting Lene Lovich. "I'm going to write her a fan letter to let her know that her music has reached the Arctic Circle." Temperature: 64 degrees. Weight: 135 pounds. Need I add that Ken greatly preferred the Sweeney Todd double cassette? I had taken Dave to see it for his 25th birthday the previous March.

A small boat ferried us across the Yukon River, which was the primary means of transportation during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail end of the 19th century.

Once in Alaska, we saw more modern evidence of gold extraction, including an abandoned mine.

Ken's retired Army status got us a room--and a hot shower--at the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) in Fairbanks, 4,000 miles from 47 Pianos. There wasn't much to see in town so we re-stocked our provisions at the post exchange and commissary.

Military prices were a lot cheaper than those in the boondocks.

Next stop: Denali National Park and Preserve, home to the indigenously named "high one," then called Mount McKinley, which at more than 20,000 feet is North America's tallest peak.

A guided tour must have been our only sightseeing option; otherwise I can't imagine Ken or I boarding a National Park Service bus near the entrance. Cloud cover obscured a glimpse of the summit. "Denali creates its own weather," said the ranger. 650 people had made the ascent in 1980 by the time we arrived on August 9.

This is as close as we got to any bears. It's difficult to tell that they were blond, a detail that sticks out in my memory as vividly as picking raspberries late in the evening alongside grazing moose in Yukon.

Speaking of moose, moms don't have antlers.

Once we arrived in Anchorage, Ken was hellbent on looking up Colleen, whose parents were friends of his and Lois's. She had followed a man to Alaska and now was tending bar. We spent much of an afternoon tracking her down. Colleen took us to the Birdhouse Bar, deformed by an earthquake and decorated inside with business cards left behind by tourists from all over the world. It eventually burned down.

We also toured the Portage Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula with her.

Colleen, who reminded me of JoAnn, let us crash at her place. She proudly showed us a collection of gold flakes she had received in tips. Single again, she had decided to continue her wanderlust in Maui before the winter darkness and cold descended. Colleen also presented us with "I Drove the Alaska Highway" t-shirts the morning we said goodbye. Ken may have been attempting to play matchmaker. Our body language speaks volumes. For some reason, he couldn't hear it.

To avoid doubling back on the ALCAN, we drove to Haines to see if we could travel space available on a ferry to Prince Rupert, BC. It was touch-and-go for a couple of cool, wet days in Chilkoot Lake State Park before we were finally able to squeeze on to the M/V Taku.

Sockeye salmon spawn in the stream that empties into the lake, which makes it as popular among bears as campers. The ranger, who monitored their progress, explained that only one percent reach maturity, and live from three to seven years.

I never forgot how tired the salmon looked. Years later, it made me LOL at my favorite New Yorker cartoon of all time, here re-printed on a t-shirt I proudly wore to tea in the Pines. No one noticed. Too subtle.

The M/V Taku took us through the Inside Passage of southeastern Alaska with a late-night stop at Juneau. In the morning we could see another glacier in the Tongass National Forest as well as dozens of humpback whales, some spouting. I didn't get any pictures of the latter. Like Colleen, they were on their way to Hawaii.

After disembarking at Prince Rupert, we detoured to Kispiox, an indigenous village, for a look-see at an incredible assembly of totem poles.

My telephoto lens came in handy.

Southern British Columbia proved to be even more scenic than Yukon. That's a railroad bridge in the distance.

I fell in love with Vancouver's natural beauty, from the first sunset, north of the city. Move over, San Francisco!

Ken agreed to stay another day although he worried that we couldn't say we had been on a camping trip if our number of motel nights increased. No kidding.

Girl in a Wet Suit Statue

Queen Elizabeth Park

I bought a print at a local gallery. More souvenir than art but it still hangs in my apartment.

"Hummingbird" by Claude Davidson (138/300, 1978)

Seattle was just a hop, skip and jump south. We ascended the Space Needle to get a 360 degree view of the city.

When we couldn't get within 30 miles of Mount St. Helens, which had erupted just three months earlier, we settled for Mount Rainier, but not before I filled two of my Kodak plastic film canisters with volcanic dust as souvenirs for me and Dave.

Way behind schedule, we pitched a tent somewhere on the Oregon coast before proceeding to the Avenue of the Giants, where Dave and I had conducted our marathon photo session two years earlier.

The day before Ken dropped me off at the airport in San Francisco, I insisted that he recognize a young man's prerogative to enjoy the night life on his own. But as I approached the Castro, the engine light flashed red and I remembered his parting words: "Don't forget, I have to make it back to El Paso in that car." Nope, I never did find the right moment to come out but I did finish Crime and Punishment. And by the time Ken got home, we had spent 28 days on the road and put nearly 10,000 miles on his very, very dirty VW.