On the Road

Andrew Hunter

It was clear from the beginning, that The Road should be less about an engineering achievement (which is how the story of the highway is often told) and more about the individuals and communities that the Alaska Highway has impacted and defined. As previously stated, this approach focused the selection of images and items and provided a guide to filtering through the phenomenal layers of material. The key became connecting to individual lives and in the true spirit of the road trip seeing where, and to whom, the highway would take us. George Johnston was obviously a critical historical figure on this journey and Marl Brown was just one of the key people I met along the road. Brown proved to be a key connector in my experience of the highway for it was in the gift shop of the Fort Nelson Heritage Museum, while chatting with Mr. Brown, that I came upon a book that would take me on a most unexpected detour to meet man whose relationship to the highway deeply shaded my sense of what is, for me, a distant place.

At the beginning of the research process for The Road, I had a list of places, besides the Alaska Highway itself, which I knew I would visit. This included the Library and Archives of Canada and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, archives in Edmonton and Calgary and possibly the National Archives in Washington DC. The suburbs of Baltimore, however, although close to Washington, were not on my list. But in December of 2004, I found myself watching a tiny freight train make its way through the towns, factories, farm fields, wilderness, and tunnels of a miniature landscape that had sprawled to completely take over the basement of a small suburban house. Its maker, 87 year-old William E. Griggs, worked the switches and described the history of a landscape that included the segregated Baltimore of his youth and bits of northern terrain, fragmented memories of a brief but potent period in his life made physical. As I tell a little further on in more detail, William E. Griggs was the photographer for one of the engineering regiments comprised exclusively of African-Americans that built the northern section of the highway. His images exist as the only comprehensive document of their contributions in Alaska and the Yukon, significant contributions that have only recently been fully incorporated into the history of the highway.

Mr. Griggs took me on a drive around his neighbourhood, a post-war suburb linked to an old working-class area of apartments and industry that had been hit hard by factory closings and the subsequent rise in crime. In the fish shop where we had crab cakes for lunch, he spoke of his experiences during 1942 building the highway, the lifelong friendships he forged and the impact of a landscape and climate that was alien to him. He joked about being considered the "Northerner" in a regiment of men primarily from the south and he talked about the racism that created the segregated regiments during World War II and that forced him and his wife Becky to pursue their educations out of state (in Pennsylvania and New York) after the war. I asked him why they stayed in Baltimore. "Because," he told me, "It's our home. We never wanted to leave, we wanted to work for change at home." Griggs claimed that the highway was a central experience in his life, that it started him on a path that would take him to officer training and on to earn both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Working through extreme conditions, witnessing the impact of the highway on native communities and gaining the support of his commanding officer (a White Captain far more progressive than many of his colleagues), key things experienced and witnessed that would inspire and motivate his commitment to change in Baltimore. I'm not projecting this connection onto Griggs, trying to imagine a profound link between the highway and his subsequent life. This is how Mr. Griggs saw the road and it's why telling people of the experience was so critical to him.

Griggs was fascinated by the images I brought of the highway today and equally keen to hear of the issues surrounding much of the current change. He found the Whitehorse controversy between Wal-Mart, who allow RVs to park free in their lots, and local park operators whose businesses obviously suffer, particularly intriguing. While driving under some local businesses, the Wal-Mart also drew tourists down into the town, a place many of the RVers (parked above the town along the highway) rarely did. He clearly got the complexity of the issue, seeing the parallels in his own city. At the end of my visit, Mr. Griggs insisted on driving me back downtown to my hotel. We shook hands and he encouraged me to visit again, next time with my "girls." A week later I received over 50 digital prints, scanned from the only surviving copy of his original photographs, that he'd printed himself on his newly acquired computer. Just like when he was a boy hanging out with his father building radios and learning to use a camera, his hands-on curiousity for new technology had not faded. Like Marl Brown, whose unique vision greatly influenced the execution of The Road exhibition, Mr. Griggs deeply influenced my view of the highway. He imbued the history with a deeply personal and poetic touch that framed not only my thoughts on the Alaska Highway, but my approach to subsequent projects as well. As I said, you never know where a road trip will take you.

Andrew Hunter Photograph Gallery