OUT OF EDEN WALK

It wasn’t the kilometers. It was the light that got you.

High summer in Alaska at the latitude of Anchorage: 19 hours of continuous solar radiation. Soft and diffuse sunlight, maybe, but also implacable. Inescapable. Light that penetrated everywhere, making everything painfully visible. It suffused the deepest spruce forests, diluting tree shadows to a watery shade of blue. It bounced off glacial rivers to burn out the eyes. It bored through pinholes in the blackout curtains of cheap motels. Even at 2 a.m. the sky was never truly dark. Reeling with catatonia alongside the highway on those white nights, I felt this illumination seeping even beneath my boot-soles. I floated in light. It didn’t help that my tent was white. Cocooned inside pale nylon, I tossed and sighed for hours, like a snow-blinded patient anesthetized, barely, upon a table. I might nod off in exhaustion. It didn’t matter. Radiance steeped into my dreams.

“What’ll it be, honey?” the distracted waitresses along the Glenn Highway would ask, thumbs twitching above iPad menus.

I wanted to beseech them: A slice of pure night, please. Hold the moon.

The Glenn Highway is 525 kilometers long. Last summer I walked out most of it.

I was joined on this odd hegira by a garrulous seafarer named Phil Norris. Norris once had collected 9,000 films into a computer hard drive for off-duty entertainment aboard polar-expedition cruise ships. Tron. Avatar. Stargate. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I’d spent decades of life abroad. Since 2013, I’d been walking continuously—and Hollywood-free—from Ethiopia to Japan. This obliged Norris to explain, with awful fervor, each of his movie references. “Hail Gimli! Son of Glóin!” he once greeted a motorist who braked to invite us to lunch. I got that one. The driver wore a beard that was indeed Tolkienesque, braided into a fork. He blinked back at us in alarm.

The Glenn Highway unspools up the Matanuska Valley near Anchorage and skirts the toes of melting glaciers to Glenallen. From there, it rolls on across open taiga to Tok, nearly at Canada’s threshold. It’s a narrow two-laner. The width of its asphalt might accommodate a schoolyard game of hopscotch. The road tethers the Last Frontier state to the rest of North America. We walked its verges, walloped by the Doppler roar of tourists’ recreational vehicles.

The boreal landscape scratched by the highway was first surveyed by outsiders in the 1890s. Seeking alternate routes to the Klondike gold strikes, a certain Capt. Edwin Forbes Glenn of the U.S. Army oversaw two mapping expeditions into the region. The idea of Alaska was so unprocessed in the American mind that the federal government imported 50 reindeer from Lapland to serve as pack animals. (Most died in transit.) After Arctic exploration duty, Glenn was deployed to the Philippine-American conflict where he became the first American officer to be convicted of waterboarding civilian prisoners. For this war crime, he was fined $50. Later promoted to major general, Glenn would write The Rules for Land Warfare, which became the army’s main legal manual until World War II. So it goes.

The Glenn Highway was built partly atop an old railbed.

In 1916, locomotives began yanking trainloads of Alaska-mined coal to the wharves at Seward: fuel for steamships. Twenty years later, Depression-era farmers escaping foreclosure used the roadway to colonize the Matanuska Valley, where rich glacial soils and white nights still germinate one-ton pumpkins and carrots the size of a human leg. By 1945, the last kilometers of modern highway were bulldozed to completion. All this was yesterday.

“Our people have been using that route forever,” said Aaron Leggett, a Dena’ina leader and Special Exhibitions Curator at the Anchorage Museum. “Old trading trail.”

Two Athabaskan groups, the Dena’ina and the Ahtna, sledded and canoed their excess dried salmon, animal pelts, and copper tools through river valleys now threaded by the Glenn Highway. The 1,500-year-old transport corridor was a grand supermarket if you knew how to shop. Leggett cited an early 20th-century account by a Dena’ina hunter and memory-keeper named K’etech’ayuilen who bagged 14 bears in a single day.

"[L]ots of tents,” K’etech’ayuilen, which means "One Who is Bringing It (the Gun) Among Game" in the Dena'ina language, and who was dubbed Shem Pete by whites, recalled of the founding of Anchorage. “And they burn and cut the trees. It's full of smoke, fire, nighttime. They like to work the nighttime too . . . and they play cards. Lots of gambling in the tent."

The only bears Norris and I spotted on our 11-day traverse of the Glenn Highway were stuffed.

Grizzlies with glass eyes reared on shaggy legs above the doorways of cafes and roadhouses. What archeologists will make of these doleful totems, occurring as they always do in association with espresso machines, is anyone’s guess. We walked past one traffic-squashed moose. As if another memento mori were needed. Whether driving a 21-ton Winnebago Grand Tour motor home or walking, we’re all making for the same destination. Enjoy the trip.

We slogged more than 70 kilometers from Anchorage to Palmer.

Trudge along any highway you’ll get tugged into the passing traffic by concentrations of high-velocity wind: the gritty suction of speeding cars. You’ll start to hate the cars. Until you meet some of the fine people in them.

An Uber driver in Palmer named Dallas sold copies of a memoir from the seatback pockets of his car. It was a book about his nights spent patrolling Baghdad during the surge of 2007. “I don’t believe I succeeded in my young quest to create world peace through the majesty of small-arms combat,” he noted drolly in the introduction, “but I do believe I learned a thing or two about living.” Dallas carried himself with that air of modesty. He moved about with the gingerly step of a survivor. We’d overlapped in Baghdad. But there was little illusion about sharing our wars. You could pull a trigger or watch someone pull a trigger. And those were different Iraqs.

Another survivor, named Liudmyla, also piloted a taxi to pay bills. She came from Ukraine and was dizzily grateful to be in Alaska. (About a thousand Ukrainian refugees had been resettled in the Anchorage area.) Yet her homeland’s agony still marked her. Of course it did. She spoke haltingly of the future. Of working two jobs besides the taxi. Of how rapidly her two children were Americanizing—becoming strangers. A family struggle over the ownership of the past was degenerating into domestic warfare. Even as she stood in front of us, talking anxiously but without self-pity in the spectral Arctic sunlight, Liudmyla was not really there.

Worse disassociations, of course, can occur in reverse.

The United States bombed Yemen as I walked the Glenn Highway. Why bomb Yemen? Who decided to bomb? Who would live? Who would die? Some citizens spoke of the violence being waged in their names as if it were an abstract force of nature—some faraway and uncontrollable storm front, perhaps. This was the alienation of empire.

We got buzzed in the village of Sutton.

It seemed that everyone did. The Christmas tree in the roadside bar was still up in July. Empty liquor bottles were stuck on its plastic branches. Exhausted from crushing asphalt, Norris and I nodded over our beers.

Out in the gloaming of the gravel parking lot, an elderly gentleman dressed in a fresh, pearl-snap buttoned shirt walked in circles. His silver hair was coiffed. He reminded me of a weatherbeaten David Niven, the 50s movie star. He was taking stock.

“I’m the village midwife as well as a welder,” he said, waving a hand over the scattered mobile homes, a general store, and kilometers of spruce forest. “I delivered my own two sons. I get $2,400 a month from social security. I’m good for credit at the store. I call this a 10-foot village. We’re all living 10 feet from each other.” He paused to ask if I’d spotted a green car trolling around—his dealer. “I do like my drugs,” he sighed happily, glancing about. “Methamphetamines and alcohol. Those cost a chunk.”

The motorist Norris had called a Middle Earth dwarf directed us off the highway and down a forest road.

The dirt track opened up to a wide grass airstrip and a big, log-sided building with airy, pane-glass windows. It looked like a luxury lodge. Screened from the Glenn Highway by a picket of trees, Kingdom Air Corps trained evangelical bush pilots. Small, brightly colored planes were tied down on the tarmac, and hymnals were stacked on the log building’s windowsills. The organization prepped aviators for missionary duty everywhere from Papua New Guinea to the North Slope. They called people living in those places “lost.”

Norris and I lined up with the friendly staff for cheeseburgers and fries. Afterward, we helped wash dishes to earn our lunch. Before we left, a young mechanic came to pray over us. He asked us what specifics we wanted him to pray for. When I suggested world peace, he seemed disappointed. I empathized. The gods of walking were evasive. Lostness was part of their deal.

We hammered out 25 or 35 kilometers a day. We tottered eastward toward 4 a.m. sunrises.

Glaciers and the messy, treetop nests of bald eagles slid by. We waded through stands of magenta fireweed. Icy creeks appeared. We washed in them. We pitched our tents atop mattresses of moss—all of this occurring within earshot of the Glenn Highway’s dull boom. Summer traffic came and went in pulses. Camper vans. Semis. Tank-sized SUVs pulling trailered ATVs. Pods of motorcycles.

Americans are generous.

Motorists stopped to ask if we needed lifts. The woman caretaker of a campground that rented plywood shelters resembling oversized Snoopy doghouses gave us apples and bananas. A young couple relaxing at a picnic table brought us cold beer. At a shuttered store that flew faded Trump flags, the absent owner (his phone number was taped to a window) directed us to his cache of drinking water. An immigrant fry-cook from Mexico added side dishes gratis to a meal ordered at a pullout called Glacier View. (Glacier View was where Alaskans celebrate Independence Day by rolling junk cars off a 100-meter cliff.)

When a few of these Samaritans discovered my trail’s end was Tierra del Fuego, the reactions tracked predictably: first disbelief, then hilarity, then curiosity, and finally, often, a grudging sort of longing.

“No, no,” a middle-aged tourist at a roadhouse demanded, unsatisfied. She had motored past Norris and me out on the blacktop. She poked a finger into my grubby t-shirt. “But why?”

Because, among other things:

The smiles of Laotian migrants. They foraged the highway margins in limpet hats. They shyly opened their wicker baskets to us: in one, a bounty of sulfur-yellow Laetiporus conifericola, a wild edible mushroom Alaskans called “chicken of the woods.” (“Cilantro. Onions. Fried. It’s good.”)

There was the graveyard of junked Volvos (dozens, maybe scores, with fireweed growing up through the floorboards), each car going to rust near the Alaskan rococo of a small greenhouse occupied by a stuffed albino moose. The dead moose under glass stood over a Paris café table. On the table was a cut-glass bottle with flowers.

There were the hundreds of No Trespassing and Vandals Will Be Shot signs announcing the triumph of pioneer libertarianism along a government-funded highway.

There was the owner of an isolated guesthouse near Copper Center who confided sotto voce that her lodgers had included Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. “They’re looking to mine lithium out here,” she explained, which given the state of the country seemed a good idea.

And there was that day the walk turned into a race. After the hard right turn at the Glennallen crossroads, we veered down a muddy forest road to Kenny Lake. A historian friend named Gerrit Verbeek had joined Norris and me, and together we jogged with our packs—"an elf, a dwarf, and a man," according to Norris's film-looped mind—through the last golden hours of the evening: 42 huffing kilometers, a marathon. The mosquitoes' wings shone in the air like glitter. At the lakeside, an old-fashioned mercantile, the only one for a hundred square kilometers around, was almost closing.

“You walked the Glenn Highway?” the beefy shop owner said, shaking his head in bemusement as he rang up our instant noodles. “Sounds pretty boring.”