I daren’t look at my wife, Charlene.
I knew I was in trouble.
BIG trouble.
I just rode it out and pretended that this was all part of the plan.
This unfortunate event occurred due to a phenomenon known as frost heave. And because of this incident, I learned a powerful lesson when driving in the north.
A few years ago, the wife and I embarked on a trip of a lifetime. She has always wanted to go to Alaska, and we had the opportunity to do so. I laboured for months on this trip. I came up with two itineraries before finally settling on the third. It was five and a half weeks of trekking through Canada and the USA to see the great state of Alaska. Needless to say, it was a long drive.
Sometimes on those long drives, my foot gets tired and I find it harder and harder to maintain a proper speed limit. I get going faster and faster. I am okay with that.
Yes, we slow right down in areas where there are animals, like bison on the road. I learned that if they are busy eating, they are less likely to walk across the highway. Elk were less predictable, so naturally, the need to slow down was important. Then there would be the scenery, that amazing scenery, which is why we’re on this trip in the first place. Sometimes we would slow down so much trying to take it all in that we would start to get behind schedule.
I heard of this thing called frost heave way back in my school days. I never experienced it because permafrost is nowhere near where I live. I knew that it could make the roads rough. But how rough, I did not know.
Once we got “North of 60”, we started to see the effects of the heave caused by the permafrost. For the most part, it put a dip in the road. These dips would be small, requiring no speed adjustment at all, or bigger, which required me to slow down.
We had been driving a long time, on this particular day, on our journey to the northernmost state, when we encountered these dips in the road. We were coming across them quite frequently. I was able to start predicting their size and adjusting my speed correctly. Not always easy to see, they did add to the experience of driving way up north.
Because we were so far away and camping most of the time each night, we were heavily packed. I even had extra fuel in the back just in case we found ourselves needing gas. I was not about to get stranded. With all this water, food, tents and other equipment, it was a noisy ride. Everything shook and rattled.
Then it didn’t.
I daren’t look at my wife.
I felt her eyes boring a searing hot stare at me.
I gripped the steering wheel and hoped for the best.
I was so confident, maybe even a little over-confident, that I was getting faster and faster. Speed was our friend on this largely deserted road, and we had a considerable distance to travel. I failed to notice the road had heaved, and when we hit it at speed, the noisy vehicle I was driving became silent.
All those things rattling and banging against each other stopped rattling and banging against each other. The sound of the gravel under the tires disappeared. I knew I had hit this heave too fast, and we were actually airborne!
My wife knew we were airborne.
I knew that if I looked at her, I was going to have to explain why we were airborne.
Eyes stared intensely forward, hands intensely gripping the steering wheel, I prepared for the landing. Honestly, I did not know what would be worse: striking the ground hard in a SUV that was overpacked, or having to explain what just happened, and why?
Once we landed, I did my best to pretend that nothing had happened. I tried to deny it all, but it was hard to deny that everything had shifted in our RAV4, and it was much noisier on the inside now, thanks to my unplanned stunt performance.
Thankfully, I recovered from the glaring from my wife’s eyes, from her tongue-lashing and from the harder-than-desired landing on the dirt road in Alaska. We continued on our way, enjoying the sights and places, although at a much slower speed.
