Johnny Wagon Wheel

My brother John was always a bundle of troublesome energy in a hurry. 

Born two months early and six years after I came along, I remember many of his milestones, such as his first steps across the living room. 

Or years later, at fifteen, sneaking out our mom’s little red Renault and demolishing it. 

When he announced after graduating high school that he was leaving the warm bosom of suburban New Jersey for university in Alaska, everyone expressed little surprise. The destination promised a purpose-made, larger-than-life venue for someone who sprouted to six-foot-three and hulked as if could set fence posts by pounding them into the ground with his meat-hook hands.

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Time passed, and sibling familiarity faded as he lived his distant, mysterious life, a quarter of the way around the world, on the edge of the American Empire. 

Occasional reminders of his existence came via handwritten letters claiming he found majesty and magic. Included photos gave proof of his exploits with panoramas fronted by a tall frontiersman sporting a bushy beard and a braided ponytail down to his ass. 

Impressed, I prized the pictures, proud of him as he posed with a sled dog team. Or wielding a giant chainsaw, felling trees—one going awry and crushing his pickup—to build a cathedralesque post-and-beam home.

Somewhere about the ten-year mark of our amicable estrangement, I took a break from my frantic rat race, chasing my tail in the vortex of computer consulting. 

Winging across the Atlantic can be daunting, but I’ve done it beyond counting. So I expected my flight to Fairbanks would be a breeze in my journey to learning what John made of himself.

The trip west and north, however, brought home the sheer distance. 

Traverse what most people consider America, and they’ll claim a right to complain about the indignities of flying in steerage.

But wait! There’s more! From the East Coast, the West Coast is only halfway to Alaska. In doubling down, I hoped my quest was worthwhile, seeking an understanding of the magic he claimed existed.

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Fairbanks International proved more quaint than international. Memorably, the surprise of trudging to the car rental desk past stuffed wolves, Dall sheep, and polar bears.

I had yet to own a cell phone but still drove distracted while fumbling with a paper map. On dubious roads, I navigated the landscape, which offered another surprise—trees turning from green to yellow in late August—far too early.

In a time warp, I learned that cozying up to the Arctic Circle meant I fast-forwarded to fall, putting the rest of summer on ice.

Dusk fell, and ahead, five cars idled on the shoulder of Chena Hot Springs Road. A generous term for a bumpy strip of asphalt heaving like a rollercoaster over the now-imperiled permafrost. 

I suspected an accident until I happened to turn my eyes skyward.

Overhead waved some of John’s reputed magic, and I halted, joining the other stopped motorists. Above, ghostly green curtains undulated, tinged with purple, eerie, angelic flowing robe beautiful.

The phrase “God’s laser show” jumped into my agnostic mind, damning every photo or video I’d seen of The Lights as pale, failed representations of what danced with the stars.

“OK, John,” I thought to myself, “that’s an impressive introduction to this magic of yours.”

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Magic is like love, and both can be resistant to logic. 

In a week, I gained an unshakeable certainty of where I belonged. 

In a year, I became John’s neighbor, living nearby without indoor plumbing or electricity in a ten-by-ten cabin I built before tiny homes became a fad. 

More magic followed as I became an explorer, warm in the frozen landscape shared by a small community of bighearted people—the best, a local woman who became the love of my life. 

In the meantime, John and I became better and soon best friends, trading favors and assistance without accounting, benefitting from our shared and complementary skills. 

One friend nicknamed us Johnny wagon-wheel and Ricky flywheel, monikers capturing the essence of our similarities and differences. 

From the outset, I embraced Alaskan ways with vigor while continuing professional employment, enjoying such benefits as a steady paycheck and health coverage. By contrast, John was, to my mind, the real Alaskan, living on the edge.

Under his Heavy Horse business, a nod to an album by the rock band Jethro Tull we grew up loving, he filled the bucket-visit of more adventurous tourists with sojourns into our wilderness. His expeditions, using half a dozen horses, might go a week during the continuous daylight of summer, switching in winter to teams of sled dogs hauling gear and guests.

Against the cattle calls of industrial tourism, one of John’s legacies is thousands of people spread over this planet who took home an authentic and fulfilling experience of Alaska. John loved his self-appointed mission, and he did it with finesse.

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I was sitting at the kitchen table in the house I finished, next to the micro cabin I had since vacated. Outdoors, a diesel plow truck grunted into my driveway, its bed laden with a mini condo of yowling sled dogs.

Goosing the “fuel pedal,” as he called it, John killed the clattering engine, heaved the squeaky driver door open, hopped out, and shushed his furry friends. Striding to my porch, he used his long legs to take all three steps at once and let himself in, asking if I had anything to eat.

He used a word, schlemdeenya, of mysterious origin to describe himself. Someone with his uncanny ability to appear unannounced at mealtimes, but on this rare occasion, he miscalculated.

I nodded to the fridge, remaining quiet while a digital blood pressure cuff I wore finished cycling down. Rummaging for and devouring hunks of cheese and moose slapped between slices of bread, he asked me to test him next.

My numbers rated healthy, but his hit the stratosphere. He dismissed his result as a temporary anomaly brought on by the stress of my annoying presence. Clarifying, he said my engineering analytical ways—emphasis on anal—caused his scary high reading. We both laughed, but I admonished he should see a doctor.

“Can’t afford one or the insurance because I’m self-employed,” he replied.

Unlike in England, where we grew up, or a few hundred miles south in Canada. 

I suggested we examine the new Obamacare option, but the website proved unreachable. Far beyond our fourth-world internet ghetto where the broadband, at one micro-baud per cubic century, is slower than a snail on valium in a jar of cold molasses.

“Hypertension? Not to worry,” John claimed, noting he was lean, muscular, worked hard, and looked good. Indeed, irresistible for a series of smitten women, he obliged with minimal resistance, one confiding that John’s seeming gift of turbocharged pheromones was, in truth, a curse in disguise.

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I’d just gotten home from work, the thermometer read twenty-five below zero, and Kaiser, our Alaska-sized German Shepherd, had been indoors all day. Though dusk, our latitude means twilight dawdles, giving us time for a brisk walk on the snowy path we kept trodden flat along a ridge in our birch forest.

Down in the valley, howls carried on the frigid air. A sure sign John and his sled dog team were running the trail with a tourist or two. 

The canine chorusing sounded more frantic than joyful, however. Concerned a wild tangle of Kaiser’s cousins needed assistance, I twinged I should hike down the trail, but I was only dressed for a quick walk. Against this, John had mushed thousands of miles, surviving almost every imaginable predicament a rugged outdoorsman might encounter.

Upshot; although a little voice whispered fear in my amygdala, my neocortex counter-argued, “he’ll be fine,” and I went home.

Five minutes later, flashing red lights passed by. A rarity since we’re after the “End of Road” sign, and only a scant few neighbors or a woefully lost person venture our way.

I stoked the woodstove, donned full winter gear, and, accompanied by Kaiser, clomped in my bunny boots up the narrow dirt road. Ahead, a Trooper Crown Vic and an ambulance idled, and I worried the dream of a customer of John’s now suffered a nightmare.

Introducing myself and venturing my brother was likely involved; the Trooper hesitated before replying they received an emergency call from a tourist who didn’t know their location. Fortunately, they could give GPS coordinates from their phone via the marginal connection.

Unfortunately, the only other information was that the guide was in cardiac arrest after, I later learned, pushing the sled half a mile up a hill to assist the dogs while sucking in mass quantities of semi-cryogenic air. 

Pausing for a photo-op requested by the visitors in the dying light, he took their picture, then said he felt faint, collapsed, and CPR proved useless.

At the time, though, my agony teetered on waiting for Search and Rescue to arrive with a snowmobile.

Clinging to hope, I insisted, then begged, that I could run down the trail in minutes and mush the team back with John onboard to the ambulance and resuscitation. The Trooper, though, implored me to return home and wait. Deferring to his expertise with much reluctance, I departed.

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The walk back to my house is blank, but I remember sitting by the woodstove, sick that my heroic, troubled, amazing brother was now freezing solid. Making a frantic call to my wife, who was still at work, I made it halfway through, filling her in when a hot tsunami of tears struck.

Then a black hole of howling grief engulfed me, Kaiser joining in solidarity with words spoken long before humans hit the scene.

A little later, the Trooper knocked on my door to give me his shivering report. I insisted he come in and warm himself, and thawing into deep kindness and empathy; he relayed from the visitors that John’s passing was quick and peaceful. A small mercy for everyone, including the Trooper, in what must be one of the most difficult tasks; breaking the news to someone that a loved one is dead.

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Many times since, I’ve tortured myself with the guilt that I did not run down the trail.

My dear wife reminds me in firm words that such exertion in frigid air ending with the shock of finding John dead would have likely killed me too, and she couldn’t handle losing both of us.

In desperation, I wish for a time machine to return to that fateful day’s morning.

How can I convince John I come from this broken future? What must I beg, so he saves himself? Shall I threaten to high-kick his stubborn ass to a doctor?

My imagination unbinds, and I dream of inventing implanted cardiac monitors uplinked to satellites, dispatching an AI-controlled MediDrone. It arrives equipped with an onboard defibrillator to halt an infarction in progress while jabbing in adrenaline, nanites, and brain-seeking hyper-oxygen, rescuing dying neurons.

I imagine, with increasing wildness, many other things, too, oh so many other things.

All fantasy, and from imagining, I turn to dreams of alternate timelines. Less savage and primitive, more enlightened and advanced.

Sweeter, kinder. One where my brother still lives.

What was no fantasy was the state coroner’s report. 

Cardiomegaly. An ugly word, and the term for an enlarged heart from atherosclerotic blockage of the arteries due to uncontrolled hypertension and hyperlipidemia. 

That was what lurked under the hood. But if you selected ninety-nine people at random and put John in a room with them, all would agree that he appeared the most striking specimen of health.

For nothing better and much worse, we conducted an unintentional experiment in same-genetics, different regimens. Since my early forties, I availed myself of employer-provided health benefits and fastidiously controlled my emerging hypertension and high cholesterol.

A strange vagary of how Americans do things began during WW2 when economic controls drove employers into providing proxy wage hikes by adding health coverage. A vagary persisting until entrenched, defended by wealthy insurance lobbyists, parasitically boosting medical bills into the orbital heights of fabled military toilet seats. 

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So here we are. My dead kid brother and I, alone, benefitting from medications that raised US male life expectancy from around fifty to almost eighty since the dawn of the twentieth century.

Except, in broad brushstrokes, chiefly because of political obstructionism, my brother couldn’t afford a doctor and thus access to medications, so he died before turning fifty-two. Medically, the twentieth century bypassed him, while the chances are I will carry on a few more decades without him. 

In a perverse reversal of the natural order, older me buried younger him, channeling my grief into crafting a cedar and oak coffin he now inhabits.

Our parents are also buried in Alaska—a whole other story—and we laid John to rest two plots west and one row north of them, resembling the quirky move of a knight on his horse across a chessboard. The perfect metaphor for a person many knew as John the Horseman. 

When the snow melts and I can find the granite markers, I bring flowers and brush the headstones clear of debris. On a clear day, one can see Denali—the proper name for Mount McKinley—standing far in the distance. 

Denali, mighty. Say it with reverence, in a whisper, Athabascan for “The Tall One.”

Like my brother. 

Inside his tiny cedar and oak resting home, various mementos accompany John, including a laminated, grand, and gold-embossed proclamation, courtesy of our friend who long ago nicknamed us Johnny wagon-wheel and Ricky flywheel. 

This extraordinary gift transpired because Alaskans had previously elected our friend to the State Legislature. Upon John’s demise, and in a precious example of transcending the imperial poison of partisanship, he inspired his fellow lawmakers into a unanimous declaration that John exemplified what it means to be an Alaskan.

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A few times a year, I visit the small open shelter I built next to the location on the trail where he died. His death certificate records his place of death by longitude and latitude. My GPS indicates I’m on the spot, plus or minus two meters, but nothing mystical occurs.

Only sadness.

Nearby, I planted one of his post and beam creations, repurposed from a field nearer to Fairbanks where he farmed hay for his horses. It used to hold a four-by-eight painted sign advertising Heavy Horse Farm rides and seasonal vegetables for sale. Now, a three-by-five-foot checkered flag hangs, marking what we call John’s Finish Line. 

It’s a place of pilgrimage for friends and neighbors, out in the profound quiet of spruce and birch on the edge of a vast wilderness.

I used to walk the two clicks or so each way from my house, but now, I drive an old ATV inherited from John. This lets Kaiser ride along because he is too old and crippled with canine ALS to gimp more than short, painful distances.

In truth, my weight of grief appreciates the lift too.

While Kaiser and his new little sister Kiki, another GSD possessing anti-gravity, sniff around or busy themselves by ripping roots from the ground, I sip from a flask filled with Glen Fiddich put up over a dozen years ago. 

As a pleasant fog of fine single malt warms me, I snap a few pictures and post them via the high-speed data cellular network since reaching the valley.

A former longtime girlfriend of John’s, a sister-in-law to my mind, calls, noting John seemed designed to make many women happy for a short time instead of one woman happy for a long time. We laugh because what else can one do? I’m glad she forgives him. 

John was the first to admit trouble attracted him, but he was also generous, always helpful, and wildly talented. It speaks to his character that many people cared for him, expressing shock and devastation at the news of his death.

So many people there was standing room only at the potlatch held in the sprawling, spruce-log, mushing hall where we celebrated his life. A life all acknowledged that was as luminous as the guiding North Star on our sweetly humble state flag. Meteoric and short, ending with doing what he loved, being out under our Alaskan skies with his sled dogs.

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Perhaps I should try to do like John’s ex does and forgive, in this case, those who advocate a system that, in practice, excludes hard-working people like my brother from meaningful health coverage. 

Their laissez-faire arguments still resonate with me but are fraying from the justifications drifting toward cynical propaganda. Even before my dwindling family incurred this unexpected loss, I started harboring a growing suspicion: Lobbyist bribes and cruel indifference, not any defense of liberty, fuel advocates of the status quo. 

Perhaps I can forgive them if they stop being obstructionists or, as John would more colorfully put it, stop being such “cockblockers.”

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I have one more imagining I indulge in, where I’ll live long enough for some form of DNA revivification to emerge. I’ll be ancient by then, standing by my brother’s plot while a sleek machine with Star Fleet insignia retrieves and opens his coffin. 

Next, undulating green lights, tinged with purple, angelically washing over him, bring him back to life, memories intact. He jumps out and asks me who I am. Then he sees past my wizened, wrinkly face into my eyes, joyful recognition dawns, and he suggests we return to my place to scrounge a meal.

Absolutely, bro.

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In fond and loving memory of John Karl Hoegberg, born July 6, 1963, died February 5, 2015, aged only fifty-one years and seven months.