"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I.

The phone rings while I'm dividing up the CD collection, deliberating on whether or not I should give my ex-girlfriend the scratched-up copy of Dark Side of the Moon. She moved out right before Christmas. Happy Holidays, she said. I put the CD in her pile and pick up the phone.

"It's Ned. I'm calling from Ketchikan." His voice sounds underwater.

"I bought a used schoolbus," he says, "found it on the web."

"A school bus?"

"For the tourists. They come in on cruise ships, we take them right out to the lake. Half-day paddle and a salmon snack. Could be big dough."

"Where is the bus now?"

"Colorado Springs. I'll fly down tomorrow to get it, and I'd sure like some company driving it back up to Alaska."

I look down at the pile of CDs. "Why not," I say, "I'll pick you up at the airport."

Ned was my roommate at University of Colorado, and when he started his Sea-Kayak Company, Alaska Kayak Supply, in Haines, Alaska, he offered me a job as a guide. I was an awful guide. Really terrible. No sense of direction. One girl even cried when she saw how lost I was. Through it all Ned would just smile, and we ended up having a fine summer that year.

Rolling out of Boulder it feels like being aboard a long yellow boat and the stress just leaks away. The Front Range of Colorado rises like a frozen wave of rock to our left. Wet snow coagulates on the windshield. I lay back on the squeaky green vinyl and watch a lone cumulus mushroom, framed in the square bus window, imagine countless children clutching their brown bag lunches of soggy Wonder Bread, their lives so in front of them.

Smokestacks billow white on the flat horizon. Ned and I talk about the Yangtze River, which China plans to dam next year, flooding thousands of miles in the process. We're getting only 6 miles per gallon, but the 60 gallon tank gives us a good range. I buy some Teriyaki beef jerky at the Conoco and chew thoughtfully while Ned drives with no hands.

Sagebrush melt up out of the snow, mottled against the measured length of the phone-lines that skirt I-80. At forty-five miles-per-hour, trucks power past us in the left lane. One trucker honks, and a young girl's smiling face appears in the passenger window, waving.

Ned catches me up on the news from Haines. Jennifer is pregnant, again. Andy lost a finger to a fishing line. Marsha's bookstore is for sale.

The roads are white and glassy. Oncoming headlights could be airplanes in the distance. We pass ramshackle trailer-towns huddled up like outposts, begging for a fresh coat of paint.

Antelope bounce away from the bus like small, graceful apparitions in the snow. "They are the last living spirit of the plains," says Ned, "the only animal that can actually digest sagebrush."

As darkness grows near the Utah-Wyoming border the snow starts falling like marshmallows. Ned drifts onto a frontage road. Soon the freeway is out of sight. We twist though a series of S-turns along a narrow canyon, tires spinning on the slick road. Suddenly there's a blinding glare. Ned flashes his brights. But it's not a car, it's a train, and it's heading directly at us. Locomotive floodlights. Adrenaline. We're up against the rock wall when the train blows by, so close I could reach out and touch it.

The frontage road leads back to I-84, and we pull over in Evanston, Wyoming for fries and coffee. Ned actually eats this translucent pink gravy that has hardened, Jello-like, around the all-you-can-eat ribs.

The lights of Ogden, Utah glitter in the row of schoolbus windows. About 200 miles out of Boise I catch some sleep.

Wake up in motion with the Snake River rolling past, gleaming in the first light of the day. Two coyotes run alongside the bus, unbending lines with moving legs. Old pickups rust under the clear sky while the pavement hums underneath us. Track homes pulled by Diesels down I-84, WIDE-LOAD signs taped to the bumpers, houses in motion. An eagle disappears for a moment as we drive under the overpass. The sign reads, HAY FOR SALE -CALL 278-3367. Another, WELCOME TO OREGON. Long clouds hang over the landscape like gigantic white vegetables.

The Columbia River Valley is the largest fresh-water drainage in North America. It churns off to our right as we empty down toward Portland. The reflection of a Heron stands motionless on one skinny leg.

II.

It's after midnight by the time we pull up to our old friend Todd's house, so we just sleep in the bus. I step outside to piss, marveling at the star-smattered sky, then notice one of Todd's neighbors peeking behind her curtain with an expression like, "who is that strange man pissing on my lawn?" The next morning Todd takes us to his job where he works as a production manager at a local vineyard. It's a 10 million dollar facility, and I can't help but be amazed at the big stainless steel vats and rows of wooden casks where Todd toils like a happy troll, finally putting some wine back into the world after all he's taken out of it. That night we meet Todd's fiancée Caroline and her mother. Mom is a

devout Catholic woman and insists they do the wedding by the book. Six sessions with the Priest. They've just returned from buying a wedding dress when our conversation turns to religion.

"So if I was going to expose my children to anything," says Caroline, "why not Catholicism?"

"Why not Anthrax?" says Ned, "it's killed fewer people over time."

Caroline's Mom's face goes gray. It occurs to me that this is going to be a short visit. And it looks as if Caroline backs this decision.

"You Alaska types are a little rough around the edges," she says. Todd just sniffles, loaded on Sudafed and zinc. It's time to get back on the bus.

In a few hours we're in Seattle, where we stay with Ned's Grandfather, Jack Wagner, a retired surgeon. At eighty-one, Jack is in remarkable shape. The first thing he wants to do is go to Denny's for the Senior Grand Slam, where he tells us about going to medical school in Omaha. His father was a sharecropper in Nebraska and they didn't have much money. The head MD at the school took notice of him, and gave him a suit.

"Cost me six dollars to get it hemmed," said Jack.

Five children and twenty-two grand-children smile up from his refrigerator door. He sits in the favorite chair, his handsome, bald head crowned with an ancient green visor, Reader's Digest curled in his hand. On the first night there at Jack's house we watch reruns of Hawaii Five-O and Barney Miller. The second night we watch Hawaii Five-O and Barney Miller. Jack loves Barney Miller. By day four I'm right back into Barney Miller myself, and Hawaii Five-O has its moments.

Driving back from Costco my belly groans, full of free beef-jerky samples. I tilt my head back and close my eyes. Sunlight blasts through Spruce Trees as we drive, and it's like a strobe, a staccato effect behind my closed eyelids.

Costco is pure America. They can sell you anything you can think of. Batteries, bread-sticks, basketballs, Butterfingers. I stroll nonchalantly past the free beef jerky samples, grab a few more. Hey, jerky is expensive.

But downtown Seattle is a different story; Pike's Market is a sensory bonanza. Smells come from everywhere, caramel popcorn, Chinese spices, pastries. A bronze pig. Smiling hipsters in wool hats. A woman on one knee takes a photograph outside a flower shop.

While Ned rummages through an antique store I walk over to the docks where the rank, briny smell of the ocean rises up to greet me. Seagulls change course in mid-air. Children eat peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. A slow ferry-boat plods through the cloudy afternoon.

I climb up to the top of the rail and look down into the murky water, dig into my jeans, find a penny, flick it up into the air with my thumb. The shiny coin spins up then down, making a little thwack when it hits the surface of the Pacific. Underwater it slides back and fourth, sending up glints of metal-orange light before it sinks out of view.

III.

Our connections go smoothly: weld a hitch on the bus, paint it, buy a trailer, pick up nine new sea-kayaks. The hard steel of the trailer is wrapped with foam and strips of truck-tire inner-tubes, fastened with electrical tape. Then it's back on the road. At the Canadian Border the girl behind the counter says she's trained to spot a lie by a person's body language. It snows, then stops. Route 29 is a recommended shortcut on 97 along the Peace River Valley. Hereford cows stand in a grove of birch, plumes of steam bellowing from their nostrils. A pair of Moose run with long legs across a frozen lake. White-tailed deer bounce away into the snow. Bare birch branches stand out against the salmon colored sunset, the powder blue sky.

The Yukon. Three thousand miles in three days. A trucker decides to pass us on the gravel and our windshield makes a dull thud when it shatters. Ned is salty about his cracked windshield and broods.

Then the moon rising in the clear night, cool shadows on the mountains like creases in a clean white blanket. Roadside reflectors give the illusion of driving down a runway. We don't see another car all the way down from the junction.

The Three Apostles, a cluster of mountains near the Pass, tower above us as we downshift on the icy road. Memories of Alaska Summers: mountain lakes, the tumble of fireweed, a fish-wheel turning slowly in the Chilkat. Salmon, dill, butter, stout beer. Jumping off the old dock with Sean, weightless as the water approaches, dropping through space, a subject of gravity, a student of falling things.

At the Alaska Border, the guard steps out into the night with a puff of steam. It's midnight in Haines by the time we arrive, all quiet except for a few hearty souls still drinking at the Fogcutter. Haines looks the same, surrounded by magnificent, white-capped mountains. My first shower in a week is like a gift from the gods.

Wake up with Howie the Dog's foot in my mouth, look out over the Lynn Canal, waves curling up on the rocky shore. An eagle turns slowly in the sky as the first light catches the tops of mountains. I watch the Golden-eyes bob and dive in the dark green surf.

A walk into town to find my old buddy Jameson still baking at the Mt. Market, even Melina is there, back from massage school in Utah. Dante, Jameson's aging St. Bernard, sleeps in the same patch of ground he always has out front.

I walk into Marsha's Bookstore and talk to her about why she's selling it, and how much she wants.

Today is my father's 67th birthday and I place a call to NYC. Dad is happy I remembered his birthday, and I can tell by his jovial tone that he's had a drink with dinner.

"Well......I might not be coming to New York this summer," I tell them, my Mom on the second line in the bedroom, "there's a business opportunity that I may explore here in Haines."

"In Haines?"

"Yes, I might be buying a bookstore."

"Better have a lawyer look at it first. And get a written lease."

The next day I offer Marsha "earnest money" to close the deal. The timing is perfect for me. I walk back along the coast-line to Ned's house, my resolve growing, ideas spinning, stop for a while to watch a battered fishing-boat make slow progress up the Canal, plodding into the windblown spray.