A Last Hurrah

摘要

"I have been dreading the morning I drive up to this," says the Westours driver as I step onto the first bus of the day. Fairbanks has just had its first frost. Summer is over. This job is almost over. Last month you couldn't have convinced me that this time would ever come. Tourist season had reached a crescendo. The numbers of farm visitors exceeded even those Joe had predicted in his most exaggerated warnings. At least six to eight tour company buses lined up at the garden's edge by 10:00 each morning. Most afternoons ten to twelve buses rolled in. Recreational vehicles, cars, and pickups of all sizes and shapes jammed the parking lot, many of them coated with mud from the Alaska Highway, the haul road to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, or any of the other roads to adventure, paved or not, that one can drive in Alaska, if one knows where to find them.