TRAVERSE 97
TRAVEL- CANADA
LEIGH WILKINS
WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FROM A ROAD?
I
’ ve ridden motorcycles in some fairly questionable places. Once through a dry riverbed in Australia that turned into a wet riverbed halfway through. Recently through a forest in Fiji where the track was so steep I questioned whether I was riding a motorcycle or preparing for some sort of jungle-themed funeral. But nothing, nothing, quite prepared me for the brutal romance that is the Dempster Highway. That noble strip of Canadian chaos. That long, dusty path to both self-discovery and mechanical despair.
The Dempster is a road in the technical sense, but that’ s like calling a grizzly a large squirrel. It stretches 740 kilometres from Dawson City, Yukon, to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean— crossing the Arctic Circle, two ferry-loaded rivers, and approximately a billion corrugations, each with its own gravitational pull. It ' s part wilderness corridor, part spiritual boot camp, part gravelblasted fever dream. And it was here, somewhere north of Eagle Plains, that I lost the single most important item in my motorcycle kit: my beloved, battered, utterly irreplaceable canvas cap.
Let me tell you about this cap. It wasn’ t new. It wasn’ t fashionable. It had all the visual appeal of a potato sack with a brim. But it had character. It had earned its place on the trip. This was the cap I’ d worn on riding adventures through sandstorms on the edge of the Sahara, through the tropical heat in Southeast Asia, and once during a heated confrontation with a particularly aggressive ostrich looking thing in Argentina. It had survived more than I had. Indiana Jones has his fedora, Leigh Wilkins has his Afro-Blonde recycled truck canvas cap, it is weathered, slightly musty, and constantly in danger of being crushed by something large and heavy, most likely my head.
TRAVERSE 97