I had a dream last night that Henk's tires had been completely stripped bald and I was stuck up here in the Klondike with all the other crazies who winter here. The roads here are horribly uneven and the sealcoating and gravel picks apart Henk's rubber like teeth. Permafrost. They can't pave over the permafrost. It just heaves and breaks up and there are potholes that could swallow Henk whole.

I'd never seen a Unimog in my life until yesterday. My friend Kevin dreams of driving around the globe in a Unimog on a great adventure of a lifetime. Now that I've seen two of these houses perched atop huge mining truck tires, I get the idea. Next time I come this far north, I, too, will be in a Unimog. I'd love to travel up the Dempster in late August when the wildflowers cover Tombstone Valley like a sprawling firey orange and yellow carpet as far as the eye can see. You'd get the aurora borealis by then, too, if you were lucky... and a stop at Liard Hotsprings would be a must to catch the northern lights at midnight from the hotsprings.

I met a woman from Inuvik last night at the hostel campfire. She'd come to Dawson with a couple of friends in search of the sun. Tough luck. Seems they've had a brutal summer and this is their "southern" vacation. She's originally from Ontario and one winter over 20 years ago, a friend invited her to Inuvik for a couple of weeks. She went home and quit her job, then returned to the north and hasn't looked back. She chain-smoked and drank from one of those ridiculously enormous gallon mugs the size of her ample belly. When I was going to bed, she invited me into her cabin for a moment to give me a candle to take the dampness out of my tent. By the smell of her cabin, it wasn't just the bucket-sized ceasars that were helping her cope with life in the north.

Dawson is a crazy little city. I'm not feeling at all touristy and feel no great need to tour an old mine or listen to a Robert Service poetry reading. Yesterday, I spent a good part of the day with Greg, who'd just lost his grandmother while paddling the Yukon River and found out only two days ago. We had lunch at Klondike Kate's, talking softly and listening to Jack Johnson on the patio. He's an incredible person. He teaches "developmentally challenged" high school kids in Oakland, a suburb of San Fran, and supposedly one of the roughest neighborhoods in the states. He says most of "his kids" are just lacking in some sort of a role model, and he strives to establish a stable, grounding relationship with them. He works intensely from September til June, giving the kids everything he has, then heads out for a solo adventure by bike or by kayak to recharge his batteries. He keeps a journal and shares it with his class, hoping to inspire one or two of them... Another high quality human being from the U.S.A. They're all running away to Canada.

I met a wandering Buddhist guy from Toronto today over coffee. He lives a sort of monastic life "begging for rides," as he put it. He had some interesting stories, but the day was getting away on me so I excused myself and moved on. You can easily spend days in these places just chatting with people passing through. We all seem to have nothing but time.

I told Ron on the phone yesterday I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life and he laughed at me. He said, "You've been doing it all your life, what are you talking about?" Hmm. He's always so aggravatingly accurate.