The trip north on the Alaska Highway (never say “Alcan” – that was a promo name) offered a different camp-of-convenience every evening. One of these took the form of a now-abandoned road loop, as if an original turn had later been streamlined. This was understandable because much of this terrain was the legendary ‘muskeg’—a kind of deep accumulation of waterlogged natural compost. It looked as smooth and inviting as a farmer’s field, but was quite unable to bear weight for long. Building the highway surely required vast tonnages of fill.

We heard about an older couple who went north in their Navion private airplane. Exploring, they decided to set down on one such ‘field,’ into which their airplane squished and sank up to its wing. They survived.

As dinner was being prepared on our Coleman stove, each of us in turn went off on nature’s errand and came back reporting there was a road loop behind this one—an “old road.”

Some days later we stopped in a similar situation and discovered four such loops, each extending further: the old road, the old-old road, and so on into the bush.

As we drew closer to Fairbanks, but not yet on the paved last hundred miles, we stopped at what seemed to be a seasonal campsite of indigenous folk. I found a practice arrow that a child had improvised from an empty cartridge case and a straighter-than-average stick, grooved for the bowstring. Children have no trouble amusing themselves.

That night the sky became strange with the grandest display of aurora I have ever seen. This was the eerily-undulating curtains of green and purple, extending a hundred or more miles up toward the vacuum. How can the sky become inhabited by something so huge?

Later I would learn that the sun continuously streams ionized atoms and the electrons they have lost into the void. They acquire the energy to escape solar gravity from the high temperature of the sun’s outer atmosphere. This is “the solar wind.” Being charged, some came under the influence of the earth’s shifting magnetic field lines, sweeping out into space from one magnetic pole, curving inward again to arrive at the other pole. Collisions of the incoming electrons with the nitrogen and oxygen atoms of our atmosphere elevate the bound electrons of those atoms to higher energy states. In returning to their original energy, the excited electrons emit photons of characteristic frequencies – the dreamscape colors of the aurora.

All that spooky action on so vast a scale is completely silent. So were we, staring.

Ten years later I would work a summer job assembling and testing a vacuum system that a physics professor needed for aurora research, paid for by the US Air Force. Why? All those electrons high in the sky were interfering with reliable detection of incoming ICBMs.

In my hours in the machine shop I had some conversation with a machinist about to retire. He had been Bridgman’s mechanic in his Nobel-winning ultra-high pressure research. I asked him how the crankpins of an AJS twin I was working on could still have factory-original diameter – zero wear.

“Very simple,” he said. “They were nitrogen hardened.”

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