From Window Magazine: Journeymen
There is only one road in the United States that crosses the Arctic Circle: Alaska Highway 11, The Dalton Highway.
It's more than 2,300 miles from Seattle – roughly the equivalent of driving from Seattle to Detroit. The trip takes more than 50 hours.
Tom Graham knew this. Knew it so well that when his father, Louis, wondered if the pair could drive to the Arctic Circle in time for the Summer Solstice, Tom only had to look at his watch to know the answer.
Louis Graham(’66, Special Education and English; '68, English; '70, M.A, English) and his wife Penny Graham (’65, Spanish) met at Western. Louis became a popular high school teacher at Central Kitsap High School and later a professor at Olympic College. Penny was a librarian in the Central Kitsap School District. Their only child, Tom, had a fairly severe form of autism, and many thought he would never graduate from high school, let alone college.
But once Tom Graham came to Western, he discovered a deep passion for geography, maps in particular, and he graduated in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in Geography from Huxley College of the Environment.
One June day, as Louis and Tom were sharing a beer at a bar in Seattle, the conversation turned to the summer solstice and what it would be like to witness the season’s first midnight sun at the Arctic Circle.
“Tom looked at his watch and said, ‘If we leave at 4:45 this afternoon we could just make it,’ ” said Manca Valum, development director of Huxley College. “So they went home, packed up their things and drove to the Arctic Circle.”
Where the world’s extremities drew Tom, Louis followed, drawing closer to his son with each mile on his Honda CRV. Even after Penny passed away on June 13, 2006, the two continued to travel to the obscure spots Tom found on the map.
The pair drove to the Arctic Ocean and back several times. They visited the northernmost, easternmost, westernmost and southernmost points of North America (Prudhoe Bay, Alaska; Cape Spear, Newfoundland; Cape Flattery, Wash.; South Point, Hawaii). Louis and Tom journeyed together to the southern tip of South Africa, where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic. They traveled around the edges of Ireland. They went to the lowest point in North America and the highest point in Scotland.
Tom was fascinated by these places, and Louis was delighted purely by his son’s fascination.
Tom died unexpectedly in 2007 at age 35, while descending from a hike on Mount Jupiter on the Olympic Peninsula.
“While the human world of thoughts and feelings befuddled him, the physical world was Tom’s window to his place in time, his purpose, his selfhood,” Louis wrote.
“His travels, an intrinsic mix of latitude, longitude and spirit, gave him a Zen-like understanding of his life and the way it should be led.”
Louis passed away on Oct. 2, 2012, at the age of 72. The Grahams’ legacy lives on through gifts of more than $100,000 to Western in support of the geography field camps and scholarships for Huxley students, in honor of Tom.
Brian Sibley is Western's director of Campaign Communications. His favorite road trip was from central Colorado to the Grand Canyon by way of back roads.