Our tour in Alaska ended more than a year early when I was selected for the Initial Entry Rotary Wing Aviator Course (IERW) at Fort Rucker, Alabama. I received orders to report 21 April 1987 and with travel time and leave in route, we left Alaska the last week of March. We had been given horror stories about how difficult it was to clear post housing and stories of up to six FINAL inspections before soldiers were allowed to leave. Sometimes these delays took a week or more. These people didn’t know my wife, Anna. When it comes to cleaning, she is the queen of clean. At our appointed time, the housing inspector came and when through our quarters with a precision I had never seen before. In the end, he found three items that needed attention:
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Carbon buildup on one of the electric stove coils
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Dust in the drawer tracks for the stove drawer
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Black scuff marks on the risers on the basement steps
We spent a whole five minutes addressing these (deficiencies) and then were allowed to clear quarters much to the amazement of all our neighbors. (As an additional note, we NEVER failed any final inspection clearing any quarters or apartment we rented, ever.)
Clearing quarters was the last of all the tasks we’d had to complete to clear post and move on to our next assignment. Here are a few of the clearance items we had to finish to leave Alaska:
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The NCO Club (prove you don’t owe anything)
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The cable company (show where bill was paid and equipment returned)
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Central Issue Facility (You turned in all equipment and or paid for missing equipment)
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Housing (Obviously)
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The Bank/Credit union
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The Post Exchange (prove you don’t owe anything)
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The POST Library
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The Hospital/Medical clinics (Hand carry your medical records)
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Transportation (Ship you household goods)
With housing completed, I could sign out on leave and the next morning we loading up the truck and we were southbound toward the lower forty-eight states.
The trip to Alaska had taken just over two weeks and we made stops along the way. We had similar plans for the return trip although have the route was different on our return. Roughly, then route was the same from Anchorage through Dawson Creek via the ALCAN highway. (Anchorage, Delta Junction, Beaver Creek, Whitehorse, Muncho Lake, Fort Nelson to Dawson Creek) From Dawson, we wound head east to Edmonton and then on to the Dakotas and eventually back to Louisville, KY to visit family before arriving at Fort Rucker, Alabama.
The first part of the trip was uneventful with stop in Whitehorse for a late lunch and dinner at a little place caller the Lower Laird River Lodge near the border of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia. We had debated staying at the lodge or trying to make it to Summit Lake and chose to keep going after dinner. At this point, things didn’t go so well. The road was plowed and so was the ditch at roughly a thirty-degree angle, but the road was still snow covered and the edge of the road was hard to define in the darkness. About twelve miles down the road, I drifted just a tad too close to the edge of the road and then next thing I know that thirty-degree graded bank is pulling the truck off the road and we plowed into a snowbank. The truck was undamaged, and for the most part we were only lightly banged up, but we were in a pickle as we couldn’t run the engine with the front end of the truck buried in 5 feet of snow. With no traffic on the road and no one answering the CB radio, and the temperature a balmy negative 20 Fahrenheit, I made the decision to run back to the lodge and get some help. I bundled up the best I could and headed out to the lodge at a 6 mile a minute pace.
While I was using my Alaska Physical Training experience to practical use, my wife Anna, sons David and Kevin and a tuxedo cat named Sigmund Freud stayed in the cab of the truck and tried to stay warm. Good fortune was with us as about 20 minutes after I left, a semi-tractor trailer carrying Canadian mail stopped to check on them. The driver was by himself and didn’t have any equipment to pull the truck out, but he did ask if there was anything he could so and Anna asked him to give me a lift to the lodge. He caught up to me six miles later and saved me another hour or so running in the midnight air in northern British Columbia. He dropped me at the lodge we’d left about an hour earlier and I went inside and asked for assistance. I have to admit, I was overcome with the instantaneous response. We went outside and disconnected the damage travel trailer that was currently hitched to the wrecker and the owner of the lodge, his friend and I all piled in and down the road we flew at 70+ miles an hour. The wrecker had straight headers and I could barely here myself think but then I was too terrified to do much thinking at the speeds this guy was driving on ice at night. I just held on for dear life.
While I had been getting my lift, and getting the wrecker, God was smiling upon us again. Another semi-tractor trailer, this time US Mail, had stopped and checked out our truck to see if Anna needed help. They were team drivers and they had chains and pulled out 1977 F150 super-cab out of the snowbank with ease. One of the drivers was a former Army para-medic and offered medical assistance which my wife declined (She hurt her knee when we climbed out of the truck to access the damage.) The US Mail truck apparently passed us while I was in the lodge getting help or I missed it passing up while in the wrecker (All I remember was hoping I lived through the rescue.) and when we arrived at the crash site we were quite dumbfounded to find the truck up on the road, and the engine idling to keep them all warm. Anna quickly brought us up to date on this miraculous happenstance and we collectively decided it would be a smart idea just to go back to the lodge and call it a night. I carefully turned the truck around in the road and even more carefully drove the twelve miles back to the lodge.
The Lower Laird River Lodge was a very “Rustic” place. Rustic for northern British Columbia. All wood paneling and bench seating in the dining area and no central heat. We paid $40 Canadian ($33 USD) for a room barely large enough for a full-size bed and a couple pieces of furniture. There were about 20 quilts stacked upon the dresser and just enough room at the end of the bed for the cat carrier and the boys to roll out their sleeping bags. There was a community bathroom down the hall that was heated and had running water. So we all cycled through the bathroom and snuggled in for the night in a room that was barely above freezing.
We arose for breakfast and prepared to check out. There was a bit of disagreement as the owner staunchly rejected any payment for the midnight run in the wrecker saying it is just what people do up there. They couldn’t argue when we gave them a 100% tip on breakfast for four (The owner was also the cook and his wife was the waitress.) I also bought a bumper sticker from their little shop that said: “I drove the Alaska Highway. Yes, Damn it, Both ways!” We went outside and check the damage to the truck (Just a broken piece of plastic in the grille) and we headed south toward Fort Nelson and “Civilization”. From the lodge to the next trapping of civilization was a gas station at Muncho Lake where I had planned to get gas anyway. I was concerned because after the incident, the fuel mileage had become tremendously worse and I wasn’t sure we were going to make it. My one misgiving about that truck was a relatively small 20-gallon fuel tank. We arrived at the gas station with maybe a gallon to spare and while I was topping off the tank I investigated what was going on with the fuel.
It turned out that when I drove into the snow bank, I had crammed the air intake scoop to the air cleaner full of ice and snow. It took me about 15 minutes with a screwdriver I was using as an ice pick to get the scoop cleaned out and the fuel mileage returned to normal. We stopped for lunch in Fort Nelson and continued on our way to Dawson Creek. The majority of the drive, there was no broadcast radio to receive and about seventy miles out of Dawson Creek Anna tuned in a radio station as we had pretty much exhausted out tape collection in the cab. It was fun listening to it as the Disc Jockeys were doing a remote broadcast from a dance club (doing a remote in a remote area???) and it was breaking up the monotony of the drive. There was a Holiday Inn listed in our travel book from AAA and we’d decided that we would reward ourselves with a nice warm room with running water and heat after our experience the night before. Much to our chagrin, when I turned into the parking lot, the place was packed, I had to scrounge for a parking place down the side of the hotel. Anna stayed with the kids while I went inside to investigate.
As it turned out, the night club that the remote was transmitting from was in the hotel and it was a popular night spot. I went to the desk and asked if they had a room available and the clerk very apologetically said yes, but only the Executive Suite and it was $50 Canadian a night. I explained that I’d just paid $40 Canadian for an unheated room the night before and a 2-room suite with a Jacuzzi was just fine with us. The bathroom was a sybaritic delight and I felt fully warm for the first time in 3 days. We filled and drained the Jacuzzi at least three times that evening. To say the least, it was a wonderful evening of just relaxation and rest after having covered 2500 kilometers in the 48-hours.
The next planned stop on the trek was a stopover in Edmonton Alberta where we had planned to spend an entire day roaming around the West Edmonton Mall. We arrived early in the day as it was a mere 585 Kilometer drive and we found a nice motor court to stay in that evening. With plans to be up and out to the mall when it opened, we snuggled down for another relaxing evening. I awoke at six AM answering the call of nature and as I relieved myself I noticed that everything was strangely quiet. Our room was at the back of the motor court but we could still hear traffic when we had gone to bed and I couldn’t hear any from the bathroom. I finished my business and then I peeked out the window to see what was going on and was astounded to see that there was over six inches of snow on the ground and it was still coming down so heavily I could even see the road in front of the motor court. I quickly turned on the television and woke Anna in the process. It was soon evident that a blizzard was sweeping toward the southwest and that we would be in a race to get home ahead of it. Snow accumulations were predicted in feet and we didn’t want to be there to see if the predictions were correct.
We set a world record packing up a cat, two kids, all our luggage we’d brought in and we were checked out and on the road in about fifteen minutes. It was slow going for about forty miles or so as I was making about 40 miles an hour when we suddenly drove out of the snow and hit dry pavement. I routed us to the south east to try and stay as far ahead of the front as possible, we passed Moose Jaw and Regina Saskatchewan and crossed the border into North Dakota where we woke some poor innkeeper at 2 AM in Minot after an 800-mile trek. We were up and out again early in the morning fearing that the front would again catch up with us and the only real stop I can remember along the way is a McDonalds that was located on an elevated platform over the Interstate 294, Hinsdale Tollway Oasis in Chicago.
Once we left Chicago is was the home stretch down Interstate 65 through Gary, Lafayette, Indianapolis, Columbus to Louisville, Kentucky where we finally arrived at my wife’s childhood home in Valley Station. Not to be outdone by all the events of this trip our tuxedo cat, Sigmund Freud, decided that after 4400 miles of riding lose in the cab of the truck he felt the need to climb through the steering wheel of the truck while I was in the middle of a ninety degree turn a quarter mile from our destination. We managed an emergency cat extraction before I veered off the road and Anna held the now extremely distressed cat the last quarter mile to her parents’ home. We were greeted by Anna’s mother who had been quite distraught as there had been reports of families trapped and perished in the blizzard we’d managed to avoid. We hadn’t called because long distance calling was still extremely expensive and international calls were even worse. We were mission complete for this phase and it was time to rest with family and friends for the next few days before we continued our adventure to Fort Rucker, Alabama.
