Iqaluit
The night highway felt like threading an endless tunnel.
Headlights licked across asphalt and guardrail — the only things that still belonged to the present. Everything else was a past, and a future, drowned in dark.
The engine's monotonous bass, the steady roll of tires on pavement: an environment that pulled a man down into his thoughts. All the more so for a man with a past worth chewing over.
Memories seeped in from the fingertips wrapped around the cold steering wheel. The helplessness of the day I took a draft notice in my hands. The alien air of Nonsan Training Center.
Back then I believed winter field training was the hardest thing on earth to endure. Carving frozen ground in the knife-wind off the East Sea, sitting up through the night inside combat boots that had stolen every sensation from my toes — every night I swore that once I mustered out, I wouldn't even take a piss anywhere this godforsakenly cold.
And then that same bastard walked himself, of his own free will, to Canada — to Yellowknife, sitting at sixty-two degrees north. Life was a string of breathtaking ironies.
The recollection slid onward to the years I traded one uniform for another. An unordinary stretch of service had made peaceful days feel cheap. I needed something that would make my heart beat.
A vague romance, and the childish swagger of wanting to be the protagonist of my own life. Those things had me knocking on the weathered door of a French Foreign Legion recruiting office.
At first it was hell, pure and simple. The biggest wall wasn't the training — it was learning French.
"Parle français, merde!"
Speak French, damn it. The instructor's roar hammered my eardrums every single day. Accent, culture, even the way of thinking — everything was different among those men of a dozen nations, and I learned whatever I had to, however I had to, just to survive.
I crawled along the bottom until, before I knew it, I was a member of the Legion's elite GCP — the Commando Parachute Group.
From then on, a different world unfolded. The Sahel of Africa. Afghanistan. Things ordinary people only saw in movies became daily life. The concussion of explosions, the smell of gunpowder, the fear of death always at my side. For a while I suffered a mild case of PTSD, hearing gunfire in nightmares, but I endured.
And those experiences hardened me. The pride of having done things most people would never touch in a lifetime. That was the medal of my youth.
When the five-year obligatory term ended, the unit offered me an extraordinary deal to stay on. I refused. A vicious homesickness had found me, and the guilt of making my parents worry about their son from the other side of the planet held me by the ankle.
And so I came back to Korea. The money I'd saved as the price of my life over five years was a decent sum, and I gifted my parents an overseas trip. The first real thing I'd ever done for the two people who had spent years with their hearts in their throats over their only son. The last I saw of them was the two of them waving, smiling brightly, at the airport.
A few days later, an anchor's voice on the evening news brought my world down.
After that day, Korea was no longer home. Everything I looked at reminded me of my parents. The teacup my mother had treasured. The shoes my father liked to wear. The programs we had watched together. Every piece of daily life became a sharp blade digging into my heart.
The ghost of PTSD that had been sleeping woke again, feeding on depression and grief.
"Mr. Lee, try changing your environment completely."
The psychiatrist advised me to leave for new land — somewhere unfamiliar, with no memories at all. At first I thought of Jeju Island, but for a man who had rolled through battlefields, that degree of change would never be enough to restore a wrecked mind.
So I chose Canada. A land vast enough to bury the past, cold enough to freeze my grief. I came here as if running away.
When I woke from the distant recollection, I was still holding the cold steering wheel. But I was no longer running.
When I came out of that long tunnel of memory, the time had already well passed midnight. Night driving by headlights demanded extreme concentration.
Five hours and thirty minutes since leaving Yellowknife. I had been running through the dark without rest, but this Mackenzie Highway had no end in sight. Fatigue piled up from staying on edge, dodging the occasional deer or pack of foxes that leapt onto the road.
At last a faint light began to show in the distance. A truck stop near Enterprise. I drove toward that glow, as welcome as an oasis in a desert. I took a place in a corner of the vast lot and killed the engine, and a terrible silence arrived.
I opened the map app and checked my position. Four hundred and forty-five kilometers. I had driven every meter of it, and yet in latitude I had only come south by a little over two hundred. The winding road felt spiteful, and I felt anew just how long and hard the road ahead was going to be.
I dragged my tired body through into the sleeper and lay down on the bed. The faint residual heat of the engine was the only shield against the cold.
The next morning my eyes opened without an alarm. A bluish pre-dawn, before the sun had risen. I repeated yesterday's routine. I crossed through the bellows corridor into the trailer, brewed coffee, turned on the TV, and started loosening up on the mat.
This morning, temperatures across northwestern Canada are recording between minus thirty-five and minus thirty-seven degrees Celsius, while the Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan continue to see extreme cold of minus twenty-nine to minus thirty-four.
Due to the volcanic ash cloud, atmospheric humidity has risen, and visibility is expected to remain poor throughout the day, as if a thin fog were hanging over everything. Drivers are urged to exercise extreme caution…
The screen shifted to landscapes of Canada gone milky and indistinct. Sweat ran down my forehead as I did pull-ups and listened to the news, but the gloomy reports sent a chill down my spine.
After the workout I grabbed my toiletries and headed for the shower inside the truck stop, to save even a drop of the water stockpiled in the trailer. When I opened the door and stepped outside, a flesh-cutting cold stabbed my whole body. Fortunately there was no wind. If wind had been blowing at this temperature, exposed skin would have frozen in minutes.
Standing under the hot water, I thought of yesterday's conversation with Dave. Knowing that bastard was probably hurrying his own preparations to head south, I felt a small comfort — that even apart, I was not alone.
After the shower I headed to the restaurant inside the truck stop. A typical trucker's diner: a few plastic tables and worn chairs, and that was the whole of it. I ordered a simple breakfast of bacon, fried eggs, and toast.
Around me, three or four truckers like myself were clustered at a table, chatting loudly as they took care of an early meal. Their conversation lodged itself in my ears of its own accord.
"Damn, last night near High Level I thought my diesel was gonna freeze solid."
A big white trucker was grumbling. The skinny man across from him burst out laughing.
"Cold's cold, but thanks to it our rates are going through the roof. Yesterday they were offering three times the usual freight for an emergency materials run from Edmonton into Fort McMurray! This volcano's about to make us a killing."
"Three times? Whoa, that's no joke. Maybe I should look into that."
They were more worried about the spiked freight rates than the disaster sitting in front of them. Like gamers who loved the fat rewards of a dangerous raid. To them, the end of the world was still a distant story — or just a new opportunity to make money.
After the meal, as I was catching my breath over coffee, the skinny trucker who had been talking about making a killing spoke to me.
"Hey, pal. That shiny Kenworth out there — that yours? Killer looking rig."
"Yeah."
"A 990, right? Looks like you just rolled it off the lot. Buying a new truck at a time like this — you've got some balls. How far you headed?"
I answered his easy, familiar question shortly.
"South."
He shrugged and went back to his seat. I did not want a deeper conversation.
I left the restaurant and stopped at the little shop attached to the truck stop. Canned coffee and energy drinks for the drive, cup ramen, and at the register I added two cartons of Marlboro Reds.
Back in the W990's driver's seat, I opened the map app for the next leg. Today's destination was High Level. About three hundred kilometers away, but the last big town on the road south. Past that, the real endless empty country would begin. I zoomed the map, checked road conditions and weather once more, and moved the heavy gear lever.
The massive engine gave a low growl and started the long journey south once more.
I pulled out of the truck stop and climbed back onto the gray asphalt. In the milky air and the monotonous landscape I switched on the radio out of habit. Right on the hour, the news signal played, and the anchor's calm but heavy voice came through.
Even without a picture, a terrible landscape painted itself in front of my eyes.
The anchor's voice turned now to Canada.
An unseen giant of ice was coming down out of the north. I had to keep running south.