The Grand Summary Begins

American culture has revolved around roads, from the National Road to the Mother Road. We love the idea of the road trip, the concept of the highway journey and all that comes with it. Roads weave through our literature and movies and television shows and dreams.

Some roads mean more to us than others, calling out to us with grand images of specific kinds of journeys. Route 66 offers dusty trips in Depression-era Ford trucks with destitute Oakies ... or trips with cool beat guys in '63 Corvettes. The 101 suggests California girls with scarves waving in convertible breeze. A1A holds the promise of margaritas at road's end.

The Alaska Highway is one of these roads, a road I've said I'd drive since early childhood. The road was built across Canada as an American tool of war, connecting the U.S. mainland with the far-flung northern territory many feared would fall easily to Japanese invaders. It covered 1,500 miles of wilderness across mountains and swamps and permafrost-scored land that was thick mud when it wasn't ice. No road had existed there before because nobody thought you could build one. The Army Corps of Engineers did it in eight months, planning the route as they went along.

Of course, that early road was little more than a long series of mud ruts and potholes in tundra. Today's Alaska Highway is paved the whole way (at least in theory) from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska. But the road still holds its mystery. It still calls travelers to that frozen north, those willing to cover 2,000 miles across Canada just to get to the place where the road begins.

We set out from downtown Chicago at 7 p.m., Friday, June 30 and aimed north on Interstate 94 toward Milwaukee. We watched the skyline fade in rearview mirrors and dreamed of that skyline's opposite waiting in woods where the sun never sets. We noted the 200,133 miles on the odometer of our 1995 Honda Civic overloaded with camping gear and tried not to think of oil pumps and flat tires.

Some might ask why now, when the price of gasolene brushes new highs around three bucks a gallon daily? My answer is that gas will hit four bucks next year, five bucks the year after that, and 600 bucks after that. If we were to make this trip and see this place at all, we had to do it now. So this is it, the centerpiece of our big End of Civilization Oil Collapse Road Trip Blowout, and what better place to wind things up than a state simultaneously built and destroyed by oil?