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Yes, my taxi driver was more than a cabbie. He was also a prophet!
    I spent my mornings with Pat Walsh, planning and finalizing what I wanted to do, and more importantly what we couldn’t do as a family. I had met her when I’d first visited Fairbanks several years ago. She had her own specialized tour business and what she didn’t know about Alaska wasn’t worth knowing. There were some trips it would be foolish to attempt as a family. Months before our arrival I had enlisted Pat’s help to arrange a stay with the Eskimos on the Bering Sea coast. She had assured me that Eskimos adore children, especially blond-haired blue-eyed ones, but life was very, very basic and very, very hard. There was nothing in the way of luxury or entertainment for a four-year-old and a not yet two-year-old from Dublin’s suburbs. When she mentioned that sanitation would be crude in the extreme and that washing or showering, if it was at all possible, was normally a communal affair, my problems resolved themselves. Even if I wanted her to and pleaded and promised eternal, undying love, would Audrey follow me into the Arctic North under suchconditions? Once the subject of native cuisine was discussed I knew there wasn’t a heathen’s hope in hell of my wife warming my igloo for me. Seal blubber, moose, caribou, musk ox and raw fish washed down with boiled snow was, quite simply, not on.
    In preparation for our trip, Audrey had been reading
Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer, the true story of a young man’s fascination with the wilderness and his ultimate renunciation of ‘normal’ life, which occurred in 1992. Chris McCandless, about whom the story was written, seemed a driven man. He had handed over the entire balance of his account – some $24,000 – to charity, abandoned his car and possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet and simply walked off into the Alaskan wilderness alone. Such is the action of a madman, but this young man was anything but mad, at least to all outward appearances. He came from an affluent Virginian family and graduated with honours from an Ivy League university, where he was an elite athlete. ‘Given a few years or so and with a few minor adjustments here and there, he could be you,’ my wife quipped as she outlined the bare bones of the story. I disagreed, but she continued, ‘You’re so bloody stubborn, you keep too many things to yourself. You’re worse than Greta Garbo sometimes with your “I want to be alone”!’ I could only smile, but I felt the ghost of Chris McCandless closer than I care to admit. When Audrey remarked that a piece of wood carved with the words ‘Jack London is King’ was found at the side of the young man’s corpse, I was profoundly intrigued and not a little disturbed.
    Chris McCandless’s last words to the world were written on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol. Audrey read it to me: ‘SOS. I need your help. I am injured, near death and too weak to hike out of here. I am alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am collecting berries close by and shall return into the evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless, August?’ She remarked on how tragic and pathetically sad it was that he had died so young and so helplessly alone. The sadness of the young man’s words struck me too, but I didn’t want to show it. Instead I responded by saying that a loving wife should not betelling her husband ghost stories about people dying in the Alaskan wilderness just before he was about to disappear into it himself. My humour was lost on her. She replied pointedly, ‘But it’s not a ghost story, it’s real, and that’s why I’m telling you about it!’ I was unsure what to say, and to fill the silence I suggested I might read the book after her. ‘I’m not sure I’ll let you,’ she declared adamantly.
    â€˜What, not let me