We’re two hours outside of Calgary, hurtling through near-midnight blackness and farm roads, when the shape of certain doom looms up in the headlights of my truck. Everything shifts to a crawl. Time blurs into a viscous syrup of possibilities, branching out in front of me, past and present shedding their skin to reveal the future. There is a way out of this, if I can only find it.
My dad and I have been on the road for three days straight, driving the Alaska-Canada highway on a suicide run through the August heat to law school. The cab of my truck is grimy with the stink of hundreds of miles of rough road and the ketchupy tang of Ruffles All-Dressed chips. You can’t get them in the states.
Long ago, before I was begotten, my parents did this trip in reverse, driving an ‘82 Toyota Celica hatchback with two dogs whining in tandem, towing an overloaded U-Haul trailer. They listened to coverage of the OJ chase on the radio, and yelled at the dogs to stop barking whenever they’d catch the scent of a grizzly or a bighorn sheep, munching grass on the side of the highway.
Now, almost thirty years later, we’ve stopped in Whitehorse to watch a red fox cross the street behind a Tim Horton’s, dodged caribou and bison driving through the Yukon, and nearly burnt out my brakes in the Canadian Rockies. Coasting into Fort Nelson on fumes at the end of the second sixteen-hour day, I could feel the vibrating thunka-thunka-thunka-thunka of warped steel rotors, screaming to cool. We ate big greasy sandwiches at a Boston Pizza and watched the same hockey game on seven different screens, as smoke from the British Columbian wildfires smudged the sky orange and grey.
And now, on the penultimate day of travel, we’re pushing our way towards Calgary, and breaking our cardinal rule in the process – no driving after dark. It’s my fault. Google Maps, instead of routing us on a well-lit, well-traveled highway through Edmonton, sent us off on some circuitous, ostensibly shorter route, following an endless string of farm highways and pitch-black side roads.
The computer can never be held accountable, and thus, the computer can never make a management decision. I should have looked at the map, realized the purported distance of two-ish hours was a pipe dream, and overridden the Android’s plan. We should have slingshot through Edmonton, like a probe catching a ride on Jupiter’s gravity well to the outer reaches of space. We might even be there by now, watching the last half of Wedding Crashers or a rerun of Ridiculousness in a sterile, well-lit Best Western.
Instead, we took the scenic route. Or, what I assume would be the scenic route if we could see anything besides the twenty feet or so of road in front of us. Occasionally, a 16-wheeler will overtake us, LED light bars blaring in my rearview mirror, and shoot off for parts unknown, leaving my little single-cab Tacoma bobbing in its wake like a cork. We’re off on the edge of the Edmonton-Calgary corridor, and behind us are the dissipating remains of a thunderstorm, distant flashes of heat lightning blinking Morse code.
The cab is illuminated by the dull orange glow of my stripped back instrument panel. Speedometer, odometer, gas gauge, temperature, and a pernicious check engine light that we’ve only been able to trace back to an unseen leak in the exhaust system. Like a ghost in the machine, sometimes it will blink off for a few days, only to reappear below my speedo gauge like a wooden nickel. “Doesn’t affect the runnability,” my dad muttered in the AutoZone parking lot, OBD2 scanner in hand, googling the arcane Toyota code. “But it’s damned annoying to look at.”
It is damned annoying to look at, and it weighs burdensome on me as another eighteen-wheeler comes from behind, veers into the passing lane, and is gone like a passing ghost. My Android, rattling around on my magnetic dashboard vent mount, wedged in place with a gum wrapper, says that we’re still around two hours out, and I mutter curses at the Algorithm. BADBADNOTGOOD’s blue album is playing, something auto-queued from my Spotify likes, and I think idly to myself how these Canadian instrumentalists are keeping me from dozing off on Canadian roads. The song changes. I look at the dashboard to see how low we are on gas. Half a tank. Still in business. I look up.
The moose (Alces alces) is the largest member of the deer family. In Alaska and Canada, they can stand around seven feet at the shoulder, and weigh up to 1600 pounds. They grow enormous on a diet of shrubs and willow branches. They are ungainly and awkward-looking, and have earned all sorts of nicknames from hunters – “swamp donkey” being one of them. They can kill a wolf with a kick from their front legs.
The first generation Toyota Tacoma was produced from 1995 to 2004. The curb weight of my 2004 model, with a 2-door regular cab, a 2.7 liter 4 cylinder engine, and a 5 speed manual transmission, is around 3,290 pounds. They are reliable, efficient on gas, and engineered by the Japanese.
There are no moose in Japan.
There is a moose, spotlit by my fog lights, picking its way across the highway directly in front of me. In perhaps a second and a half, it will be combined, at great speeds, with my front grille, and 1600 pounds of fur, hooves, antlers, muscle, and bone will be flying through my windshield at greater speeds. A truck doesn’t walk off a collision with a moose.
Neither, generally, do its passengers.
This truck, dropped off a Fremont, California assembly line in 2004, bought new by a Virginian, sold, driven cross country, loaded on a ferry to Canada, driven to Alaska, sold again, and driven back down through Canada towards the place of its forging – has been ordained, by the threads of fate, to be crushed, along with its driver and passenger, against the unyielding flank of a woodland creature outside of time. Unless I do something – and so I do, out of instinct.
I yank the steering wheel to the left at light speed, slamming the brake pedal as I do so, hoping that there isn’t an oncoming minivan or semi-truck in the oncoming lane. The truck responds instantly, and I can feel the luggage packed in the back – record player, flyrod, duffel bag, the hermit-crab shell accoutrements of a 22-year-old – shifting to the left, losing equilibrium, threatening to tip over. I swear I can feel the Tacoma, pushed to the upper limits of its handling capabilities, hop onto two wheels for a second, and I pray that it maintains its balance.
The moose does not move, which is a blessing in and of itself, because if my lights alerted it and it started hauling ass towards the other side of the road, our collision course would be realized, and some laconic Albertan would be scraping us off the road in the morning.
The truck stays upright, and I jerk the wheel back to the right, maneuvering around the moose and into the right lane, and the truck’s right side wheels slam back onto the asphalt and something in the truck bed tips over with a loud crash, and I realize the entire time that I’ve been yelling something wordless. And then we are back on the road, beating on against the current, a toy truck brushed by the antlers of an elder forest deity.
I don’t know, for a second, if what I’ve experienced actually happened. My dad confirms it to be real by looking behind us, yelling something about fishtailing and fog-lights and goddamned motherfucking highway isn’t half-lit. The moose is gone, disappeared into midnight shadows. But it was real.
I take the rest of the trip at 40 or below, and pull into Calgary around 2 in the morning. We check into a hotel and I fall asleep with my socks on.
The rest of the trip proceeds without incident.
-- Jacob Hersh still watches the dark fringes of the highway for things with hooves and antlers. He can be found on Twitter at @youngjakeinc.