Running Commentary: Bag Cars and Birch Trees (Into The Wild)

by: bamf 1 year, 2 weeks, 4 days, 11 hours, 34 minutes ago 0

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Bamf here rematerializing from the void..

There is a scene at the start of Into the Wild that shows graffiti written in an Alaska Railroad bag car.  Now for movie magic, I let this pass.  It illustrates some beautiful vistas and the quite romantic nature of riding a train through the snow.  The reality of the situation is Chris McCandless would never have taken a hobos ride on an ARR train car (and he never did such a thing as the book reports, not in Alaska). 
I worked Alaskan tourism for many years. My positions afforded me unique opportunities to see my state in ways few would have the chance to ever do.  On my second summer working for the ARR as a baggage handler/forklift operator I was bumped by a senior staff member from the Fairbanks depot I worked at.  The choice was to either quit, or work the summer in Denali National Park.  I chose the latter, it was one of the most fulfilling decisions I ever made.  I was 18 years old.

The first day of my job in Denali I was alone, making my way to the train depot to open it up for the new tourism season of 1999.  I crossed the tracks towards the small cabin like structure and was stopped cold.  A Lynx, a cat the size of a Labrador was going the opposite direction and was staring right at me from about twenty feet away.  It had huge bat like ears with a twist of hair at the top; the mass of the body had long matted hair that looked like dreadlocks with a smattering of twigs tangled in the mess.  I froze, I was not sure what to do—scream or stay still?  I stared in that cat’s eyes for what seemed like an eternity, then it put its nose down towards the ground and dismissed me as quickly as it had found me.  My adrenalin was pumping. 

Denali is like summer camp for adults, at least for the adults that work there.  The park then is a much different place even than what it looks like now. In 99 we were at the precipice of seeing a whole new corporate landscape in the National Reserve.  The local properties were being bought out, and new land was being acquired to handle the projected loads of new businesses that were slated to come in. The running joke among the bag crew was,

Q: “What does National Park mean?”

A: “Sell parts of.” /sarcasm

The Denali depot manager had been fired just before the start of the season (a side effect of a valued employee who chose not to work with her again, and how I ended up in Denali by the way) so the Railroad was looking for a new manager.  I interviewed, and received the position.  As I said, the Park was growing, and the ever increasing loads of the trains demanded ever more bus’s to accommodate the masses.  Bus parking was coveted, and once word got around that I was going to be the new Depot manager, executives from all of the major tour companies began courting me with dinner comps and free drinks in the hopes that I would look favorably on them when it came to assigning bus spots for pickup.  Bribery is something I would hesitate to call it, but the real scandal lay in the fact that I had just turned 19 at the end of May, and booze was something I never found to be denied.  This all ended though when the CEO of the ARR found out they were going to let a 19 year old kid run the second largest depot in the state.  He promptly but a snuff to that proposal, and in turn killed my free source of food and drink, but I still got my booze.

With that little celebrity behind me, I was back with the proles, humping endless heaps of luggage from plastic crates.  Being back at the bottom afforded another unique opportunity though.  I would ride the train some days to what we called “the switch”.  This is where the north bound and south bound passengers would meet in the middle of their Alaskan traverse.  Sometimes I would hang out in the passenger cars answering questions about the state, providing color commentary and personal stories about growing up in Alaska to the eager tourists who wanted to hear it from someone who lived there.  But then there was the bag car.  A sixteen car passenger train would consist of two engines in the front, a bag car, and then a dining car with the following segments consisting of various private passenger cars.  The baggage area was a freight car, painted in dark blues with a gold banner along the mid section.  The conductor had a small work area to radio requests for track warrants (permissions to move ahead) and do general upkeep on the manifest records and any maintenance issues.  Because of this, there is no way any stowaway would ever make it 5 minutes in this area, but I was fortunate to not have this as a concern.

The doors of the car would be open wide.  A crate of bags would be positioned in front of the open gap and made a perfect seat for scenery gazing.  It was an area full of the noise of the twin engines pulling the massive load behind in tow; the rhythmic clanks of steel wheels against the sections of rail had a song of their own.  Sometimes I would tip a cook a five spot, and eat my prime rib sandwich sitting on those bags watching Alaska pass before me.  Then there were moments when I would grip my hands tightly above my head on the overhanging rail, and lean my body out far past the doors into the wind.  Below me the ground moved fast, the air was heavy with scents of the Spruce and Birch trees.  Moose would be spooked away from the roar of the engines and disappear into the high growth.  The air currents would move dandelion seeds in and out of the car and would make the space around me swim with puffs of white cotton looking seeds at the mercy of the drift.  I would lean out into the open air and smile, taking in every minute I could as we sped closer to the depot.  I loved those moments.  Tourists would pay thousands of dollars to ride atop glass domed train cars, wanting to catch a look at an animal, or see Denali in which 90% of them would never get the chance.  But here I was, on another trip to the switch, watching mountains pass slowly across the horizon with no glass between me, and no limits to my view.

Later in my life I would bartend for Princess Tours, way at the end of the 16 car train.  I now was with the masses, penned up in a cage of domed glass, constantly fighting fogged windows and attempting to explain the reason why the old lady had not seen any wildlife was because the train had scared them away long before we would be able to see them.  In all that time mixing drinks and now telling stories via a microphone I never dared to tell them what they were missing.  Sure they could step down to the observation deck between the cars, but it would never be the same.  They could never understand the simple peace found in eating an expensive sandwich for cheap, listening to the train whistle whine in warning while watching the Alaska panorama pass the eyes with comely serenity.

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