Drifting Home (10 page)

My mother did not find a publisher for her novel. Oddly, she had not chosen to write about the Yukon, which everyone thought exotic but which she thought commonplace, but about Ontario farm life, which everyone thought commonplace but she thought exotic. She was twenty years away from the North before it occurred to her to tell her own story, which was much more romantic and exciting than anything she tried to make up. We did, however, get to a carnival. When the Sunnyside Amusement Park opened up in the spring my father took my sister and me to the lakeshore and there, for several hours, we rode on every device until we had exhausted the list and ourselves and were sticky from cotton candy and dizzy from being whirled about in things that jiggled and buzzed and bumped and lit up. The memory of that magic afternoon with the lights flashing and the music playing and the air heady with incense of frying onions has never left me and ever since I have had a passion for such places–for amusement parks and world's fairs and Disneylands and exhibitions and sideshows. Like my father, who was 61 at the time and loved every moment of that day (he explained the principle of centrifugal force as we whirled about on the flying swings), I have never been able to get enough of the buzzing and the flashing and the jiggling, perhaps because I had to wait so many years to enjoy it.

Here on the Yukon all these by-products of civilization seem far away, in time and in geography. We have seen no human sign since we left the Indian family on the Thirty-mile. On we go, round the great bends of the river, each marked on the steamboat charts: Vanmeter Bend and Keno Bend, Glacier Gulch Bend and Big Eddy. On we go past Fife creek and the famous Cassiar Bar, where in the days before the goldrush, the early prospectors made wages panning flour gold, whose lightness brought it down the creeks into the river proper.

In his diary on July 14, 1898 my father recorded that his party had stopped at Cassiar Bar to look at the operations there and “saw plenty of large but light colours in the pan” before they moved on for dinner at the police post at the mouth of the Big Salmon river. We, too, will have dinner at Big Salmon. We reach the river's mouth and there, on the far side, we spy the cabins of the deserted village. And still we have seen no people.

Nothing moves on the river these days. Nothing moves on the banks except the moose, bear and lynx. The cabins grow up out of the grass and the grasses grow up over the cabins, for the roofs are constructed of fertile sod. Within, we find evidence of the past at Big Salmon–old mattresses, brass bedsteads, home-made tables and chairs, and in the trading post, what is left of counter and cupboards. Great salmon racks stand outside near the bank and on these we hang out our clothes to dry.

We have spent some seven hours on the river, an average run, and we are becoming more organized. One crew is at work putting up the tents. Another is cleaning and gutting the grayling for breakfast. A third is bringing up the food and utensils and making a fire. Pamela is preparing a pot of split pea soup using the hambone from a previous meal. And we have the smoked salmon as an unexpected hors d'oeuvre.

Patsie has been given the permanent job of locating and establishing a latrine at each campsite, a task to which she brings both enthusiasm and artistry. Now she comes running down the old path–a path worn smooth for more than fifty years by Indian feet–to announce that she has built the best latrine yet, not too far away and yet secluded, downwind, and, for the first time, with a real log to sit on. She is so proud of her handiwork that a bunch of us accompany her into the woods to inspect the wonderful latrine and offer her congratulations.

We do not linger after dinner. It has been a long and satisfying day and everybody is ready for bed. Only Patsie is still up, drying her damp nightie over the fire. Some of us are already asleep when suddenly we hear her excited shout:

“The Northern Lights, you guys! The Northern Lights!”

We tumble out of the tents and there they are, “literally dancing and playing music,” as Patsie describes them in the log–long streaks and curtains of violet and emerald, swirling and shifting across the heavens and making the night almost as bright as the day–giant abstract neon signs, as my father once explained to me, jiggling and flashing and whirling about like a giant carnival in the velvet of the sky.

DAY SIX

T
oday we cut another half hour from our departure time in spite of the fact that we have fresh grayling for breakfast. It is perhaps the most delicious fish I know but then I have eaten only grayling freshly caught from swift-flowing, ice cold waters. When I was a boy of eight I once consumed eight grayling at a single sitting at a fishing camp on Rock creek, a Klondike tributary. That was the year my sister Lucy caught the largest grayling taken that season from Yukon waters and got her photograph in the Toronto
Globe
. I remember it very well: the small child with the chubby knees holding up the big fish, her large brown eyes, which were her mother's and are now her son's, squinting slightly beneath her bangs as she looked into the sun. My Aunt Maude was not amused: “Teaching the child to torture animals!” she said with a snort–or so I heard later.

I am not a fisherman. I have caught only one grayling in my life and that was under very odd circumstances during the Goldrush Festival in Dawson in 1962. The town was full of newspaper cronies, all of whom had brought along fishing tackle. They treated me as an expert and asked where the best spots were. I had no idea what to tell them until I remembered that fishing camp on Rock creek and so I promised that I would lead them to a place where they could catch grayling. I found Rock creek easily enough, but there was no evidence of any fishing camp; one twist of the stream looked very much like another. Where was the bank from which my little sister had caught that enormous fish? Where was the site of George Jeckell's lodge, which my family used to visit on certain summer weekends and where my father had once constructed for us that marvellous Roman catapult? Of these there was no sign. Unmarked by man's presence, the creek raced over its gravel bed between clumps of willows and it was as if no fisherman had ever waded in its waters. I decided I must make good on my pledge and, selecting a likely-looking curve, announced that this was the spot for grayling. The assembly gave me the honour of the first cast. I managed somehow to fling my line out into the water without snagging it on a willow and, to my absolute astonishment, felt an answering tug. A moment later I had a grayling wriggling on the moss. The effect was perhaps the most dramatic and satisfying that I have ever known. I could feel waves of admiration radiating from my audience. I declined to fish further, having made my point, but the others cast all afternoon without being rewarded by so much as a bite. Then as we prepared to leave, an old timer came loping by and gazed on us as if we were demented. “What're you doing fishing here?” he asked. “Hasn't been a grayling caught in this area for more than twenty-five years.” Well, yes, there had been, we told him. Just one.

The boats are packed and everyone is clamouring to sit with everyone else in any boat except The Pig. I split the party into evenly weighted groups: “Mom can ride up with Pamela and Patsie this time. I'll take The Slush Box with Penny and the two Deaners. The Wows can all go in The Pig.”

As the expected chorus of protest arises from the Wows, I realize I have unconsciously adopted the special argot of our voyage. For reasons that have little logic behind them, the two little girls are known as the Deaners while the four boys: Robert, Peter, Berton and Paul, are called “Wows.” Both names come from Peter, a born mimic, who has for days been imitating people he knows whom he designates as Wows. The other boys have turned the word into adjective and verb as well as noun. Now they are all known as Wows and will be for the rest of the voyage and, when they meet up from time to time, perhaps for the rest of their lives. After all, most proud and closely knit institutions adopt a secret language and families are no exception.

And so we drift off down the widening Yukon, the Deaners in one boat, the Wows in another. It is a glorious day. Beside me, Penny has taken out a bottle of shampoo and now she leans over the edge, dips her head in the cold water and begins to wash her long hair. Up front, in the canoe, Scotty has hung out his washing to dry. Beside me, the little Deaners are singing to each other. Paul, in The Pig, begins his regular chant about “rationale!” The nearest settlement, indeed the only one in five hundred miles, is seventy-seven miles downstream and it is more than possible that you could go seventy-seven miles in every direction and hear no other human voices.

“It's just so peaceful and beautiful up here,” Patsie writes in the log. “There are sandy cliffs eroding down into the river, huge, weird-shaped mountains, and aspen overtaking black spruce.”

Is it here, or farther upstream, I wonder, that the big dam is talked about-the giant project that would turn all of the upper river into one gigantic reservoir? Laberge would vanish into the mother lake and so would the Thirtymile. Below the dam, this great river would be reduced to a trickle. Mud flats, dried-up channels, hedgerows of drowned trees-all these by-products of civilization and progress, which I have seen to my horror in British Columbia, would be the legacy of the power interests. Worse, history itself would be obliterated as it has already been obliterated by the great dredges that tore up the valleys of the Klondike watershed.

And this is a curious thing. After a certain interval, junk becomes treasure. In the Middle East that transformation took several thousand years; in the Yukon, not much more than half a century. Skip Burns is already searching the forests for pink insulators, which can be seen occasionally clinging to the tops of the trees, marking the route of the old telegraph line between Whitehorse and Dawson. In less than a decade, these have become prizes. In my boyhood, we were surrounded by junk, much of which would be priceless today. Across from Billy Biggs' blacksmith shop on Third Avenue stood the old Red Feather Saloon, boarded up and jammed to the ceiling with all manner of strange odds and ends. Hidden beneath the heaps of gold pans and picks was an ancient piano, which nobody bothered with until my friend Bob Darch, the ragtime entertainer, came through town in the Fifties, rummaged beneath the rubble and discovered it was a rare five-pedal Cornish, one of only three ever built. He bought it cheaply, cleaned it up, made it part of his night club act and turned down an offer of three thousand dollars for it. When my father was building his boat in the abandoned hotel on Front Street, my sister and I, rummaging through the accumulated waste at the rear, came upon a thick package of old letters tied with a pink ribbon. They turned out to be love letters, written in 1898 by a prospector on the creeks and sent to a dancehall soubrette in Dawson. We read a few of them–two small children giggling among the cobwebs and sawdust-then threw them away. What would I not give to have them now! In 1954, on Sourdough Gulch, a pup of Bonanza, Colin Low of the National Film Board while making a documentary about the stampede found in a disused cabin a book titled
The Politics of Labour
by Phillips Thompson. Phillips Thompson was my maternal grandfather and the book was autographed and inscribed to my father on the occasion of his marriage to my mother. He had been working on the steam points that summer, thawing ground for the dredge, and, since he had no money, he and my mother had spent their honeymoon in a tent on Sourdough Gulch. No doubt he had lent the book to a neighbour and did not get it back. When Colin found it, the book had been lying on the cabin floor, untouched, for forty-four years. But then, in my boyhood, every cabin contained such curiosities, and there were thousands of cabins and thousands of picks and thousands of wheelbarrows and thousands of shovels, all scattered about on the floors of the famous creeks–bric-a-brac of every kind, some of it worthless and some of it no doubt priceless, littering the countryside. The individual miners had taken all the gold they could find and departed and, because high freight rates made it impossible to take very much with them, they had left almost everything behind–tinned food, beds and mattresses, books and magazines, letters and documents, pictures and photographs, mining equipment of every description and even musical instruments. To be sure, they had ripped open the ground, slashed down the trees, sullied the clear streams and scarred the landscape. But this pollution was as nothing compared to the ravages that followed when the great dredges were built. Then came the brush-cutting crews, stripping the land of every scrap of green growth and, following them, the bulldozers, knocking down the cabins and after the bulldozers the hydraulic monitors whose jets of water could cut a man in two; and after the nozzles had torn off the rich topsoil and sent it rushing down the creeks towards the river, the thawing crews arrived to turn each valley into a sea of mud–a hideous scar from rimrock to rim-rock, but so pliable that the dredge could bite into it and retrieve what gold was left by the miners. Thus almost all evidence of the historic stampede was obliterated from Bonanza and Eldorado, Last Chance and Gold Bottom, Gold Run, Hunker, Dominion, Sulphur and Quartz creeks. Only in the high benchland and in the dead little towns along the old roads can you find the occasional cabin that dates back before the century. Was all this ruin worth the gold that was left? Or would the relics of the stampede have been more valuable in the long run? The curious thing is that the dredges themselves, having been rendered obsolete when the gold finally ran out a decade ago, have themselves become archaeology. The biggest of them all, which lies half sunken in the baked mud of Bonanza like some trapped dinosaur, has become a prime tourist attraction. Visitors pour out to gaze up at it, towering several storeys above their heads. Children clamber up the links of its giant securing chains – each link as tall as a school-age boy. Its stacker, which once spewed out a steady shower of gravel dross, hangs over the road like a brooding presence. And its buckets, which once bit deep into the bedrock and ripped up the land, have been dismantled and used as road markers. The dredge has become history and if admission were charged to view it, might eventually bring in as much gold from the pockets of the curious as it once dug out of the old creeks.