Drifting Home (11 page)

While I am pondering these paradoxes we have come into the lee of Dutch Bluff, an immense escarpment around which the river sweeps in a wide arc known as Fourth of July Bend, and there, at the far end of the arc, half submerged in the sand on our right, is the rusting outline of an old dredge. I did not know that there were any dredges working the Yukon river itself and I do not know the history of this one but I see that it is marked on the steamboat charts, which means that it has been here for a very long time, a prehistoric monster, all skeleton and no flesh. It was probably here in the days when our family drifted down the river and almost certainly was here when my father came down alone in the
Bluenose
. Dredges were commonplace pieces of machinery in those days.

One of my regrets is that I did not go with him on that last voyage. My mother was not enthusiastic about the idea; she loved the river but also lived in terror that it would claim one of her children as it had claimed more than one of her friends. Our doctor had vanished into the river one summer during a canoe trip and only his dog was found. Later, the river took Harry Francis, the teamster who had been one of my father's party on that original voyage in 1898. It is cold enough to paralyze you in a few moments and angry enough to suck you under forever should you tumble from your boat. My mother was afraid of that. On the family trip in 1926 I had been frighteningly restless, continually jumping up and leaning over and putting my hands in the water against all orders until I was confined to a small space in the bow, behind a seat, from where I could not squirm out. I was older when my father made his proposal, but still she feared that without another person in the boat, my father, busy in the stern, would not be able to control me. He did not argue but he was determined to make the trip anyway and so it was decided that he would go on ahead of us, for he had a work deadline to meet. He would take his boat down the river and we would follow some time later by steamboat, after a stopover in Vancouver.

He had the
Bluenose
shipped to Whitehorse and from there made his way down the Yukon all alone, loving every minute of it. For the river in those days was very much alive. At Big Salmon and Hootalinqua and Yukon Crossing, at Fort Selkirk and Minto and Stewart City, there would be people on the bank to greet him. They would know him well and he would know them all, too. After thirty years he knew everyone in the Territory; many of them had filed mining claims in his recorder's office in Dawson. The journey down the river would be for him a journey of renewal, allowing him to live again the days of the stampede and the days of the family trip and to greet acquaintances and old friends whom he had not seen in decades. In between the larger communities were single cabins and here it was obligatory to stop; a man living for months in the wilderness was starved for company and for news and it was an act of cruelty to ignore him. I can remember seeing them tearing down from their cabins at the sight of our boat and waving wildly and shouting their heads off, fearful that we might pass them by; and then, when we landed, pressing food and drink upon us and urging us to stay the night and pleading, almost with tears in their eyes, for us to tarry a little longer, and running after us down the bank as we left, crying “Please don't go yet! Not yet!” So for my father a journey down the river would be like a stroll down a familiar street and I wish I could have gone with him, although I do not blame my mother since she acted out of love.

While my father navigated the river we stayed in Vancouver at Sylvia Court on English Bay, visiting old Yukon friends. I was still dazzled by the wonders of the Outside world: the Bapco Paint sign on the Granville Street bridge, with a mechanical man painting in different colours; a new confection called a Popsicle; the Chute-the-Chute at Hastings Amusement Park; a movie called
Skippy
starring Jackie Cooper; and a sing-song at the beach sponsored by the Vancouver
Sun
where a strapping girl my own age wrestled me to the sand and asked a curious question: “Has your father got a job?” Of course my father had a job. Didn't everyone's? I was vaguely aware of the Depression; men came almost daily to the back door of my aunt's home in Toronto begging for food; but that had nothing to do with me. It was unthinkable that my father should have no job.

But when he brought the
Bluenose
into Dawson, he found that he, too, was jobless and his world was shattered. The civil service was cutting back; he was being “superannuated,” as they called it, before his time on a pension of forty-eight dollars a month. That meant goodbye to the Yukon, goodbye to the
Bluenose
, goodbye to the dog, goodbye to the lazy days on the river, goodbye to the picnics in the hills, goodbye to friends of long standing and goodbye to the good life. Suddenly, every penny counted; we could not afford to bring more than a few prized possessions out of the country with us to our new home in Victoria. When we left at the end of the summer, we left the house we had lived in just as the miners left their cabins, almost fully furnished, new addition and all. My father got seven hundred dollars for that house, which was about what he had paid for it a decade before. There is never a housing shortage in a ghost town.

We have drifted past Hogan's Rock and Wolf Bar and Five Mile Bend and Seven Mile Bend and now, on our right, the log roofs of another dead community can be seen above the blazing fireweed. This is Little Salmon Station at the mouth of the river of the same name, a native village emptied many years before by the scourge of influenza. Flu to an Indian is as serious as smallpox to a white man. When I returned to the Yukon for that bittersweet summer of 1932, I found that half of my half-breed schoolmates had died of influenza. It was the only communicable disease we knew in the isolation of the North. I did not catch measles, scarlet fever, chicken pox or mumps until I left the Yukon. But for the half-breed children, who made up half the population of our school, influenza was far deadlier than these childhood ailments. All of them had white fathers and Indian mothers. In the winter they lived at St. Paul's Anglican Hostel in Dawson; in the summer they returned to the bush. The previous fall I had been playing with a boy named David Watt on a raft we made in the slough that ran behind the Hostel. When I returned, he was gone. I could not comprehend it; I had had my share of flu and I had not thought of Dave Watt as being any different from me, but it had killed him.

In Little Salmon, the graves are as numerous as the cabins. Indeed, they are like small cabins–a village of spirit houses with sloping roofs, glass windows and curtains, containing dead flowers and teapots and plates for the use of the deceased. That is the way the Yukon Indians bury their dead–or, at least, it is the way they used to.

In the grasses, Patsie finds a pair of sunglasses, which helps make up for the sweater she left behind at the last stop. “You lose some, you gain some,” she philosophizes in the log. Peter calls her Sarah Scrounger but no one is surprised any longer to discover such things along the river. At one spot Janet came upon a package of pipe cleaners and tried to use them to tie up the plastic bags but they were so old the wire inside had rusted away.

Carmacks is forty-two miles downstream. To reach it in time to gas up before nightfall, we must use our motors. A few miles above the settlement we spot, high on the right bank, the old coal mine that George Carmack discovered and worked in the days before he made the famous gold find on Bonanza creek. The only coal in Dawson used to come from this mine and soft, dirty coal it was. We have plenty of time to contemplate the mine because, at this point, The Pig runs out of gas. We hook all the boats together and take turns using one motor at a time. And so we chug slowly into the settlement, singing
Alouette
at the top of our voices.

Above us is the bridge built to carry the new highway across the river. Because of this obstacle no steamboat can navigate the river between Whitehorse and Dawson; a myopic government has allowed the bridge engineers to design a low span without hinge or swing. This is deplorable because the day is surely coming when it will again be practical to run a steamboat excursion on this waterway: there is nothing in the world to match it and the search for new adventures and sensations in a leisure society has only begun. It is difficult to describe the special quality of a Yukon steamboat journey. For one thing, there are the sounds, all of them unique and now obsolete: the steady slap of the paddlewheel against the churning waters; the chuff-chuff of the engine itself, like a great beast panting in its sleep; the regular rumble of each hand cart loaded with birchwood being flung into the belly of the boat as the boiler gang heaved it into the furnaces; and the sharp toot of the whistle greeting the lonely men, waving from the forested banks. From the deck, to use a phrase of my mother's, the long scroll of the forest unrolled hour after hour, seen from a different vantage point than from a canoe. The passengers were three storeys above the water and thus had a kind of bird's eye view of the surrounding landscape. It was always an unhurried trip, the schedule depending upon the moods of the river itself. In midsummer, it was sometimes possible to make the downstream journey from Whitehorse in two days; in the late fall, the struggle upstream could take a week. One was never sure of the schedule and so one never worried; one accepted delays with a certain fatalism and indeed a certain gratitude. Because of its appetite for cordwood the steamboat stopped every few hours at woodcamps located along the river and then we all got off, stretched our legs, picked wild flowers, lay in the sun, and waited for the whistle to sound. Not all of this ritual can be repeated since modern boats would undoubtedly use diesel fuel; yet I can foresee the day when some entrepreneur will want to reproduce those old-style journeys. When he does there will be plenty of willing customers–but not until the bridge at Carmacks is replaced by something more flexible.

We bring the boats into a little beach on our left just beyond the bridge. Skip and his crew head into the settlement to arrange for gasoline and some of the others walk up the dusty road to the local tavern for a cold beer. My nephew finds a pay telephone to relay his latest dispatch to his newspaper. There is not a great deal to see at Carmacks. The town is named for the discoverer of the Klondike's gold, who ran a small trading post on this spot before the stampede. But the settlement that grew up around it, the last remaining centre of civilization between Whitehorse and Dawson, has long since turned its back on the river. Today it faces the new artery of the territory: the highway. Once it was a typical river town: cabins, church, mission house, trading post, school, all constructed of logs, laid out in a neat row on the high bank. Now it is a hodge podge: tavern, gas station, motel, snack bar, grocery store. Carmacks has become a truck stop.

When we return to the boats, the sun, blood red, is low on the horizon. Beside us, three Indians are pulling in their net, silhouetted against the glittering waters. The three big salmon they have trapped are as crimson as the sunset.

I find the Odyssey of these Yukon river salmon almost miraculous. For the entire length of the river, they force their way upstream, battling the stiff current, seeking out the exact spot where they were born so that before they die they may reproduce their likeness. In the smaller streams of British Columbia the mystery of the salmon's homecoming is baffling enough, but here it is eerie. These great fish, wriggling in the nets, have been swimming against the full force of the river for two thousand miles, obsessed as no other fish or beast or fowl is obsessed by a craving to return home. So strong is this instinct that they stop at nothing to reach their goal, leaping over obstacles, fighting rapids and shallows and eating nothing until, battered and exhausted, they find that one particular stream where they were raised. That is why the salmon must be netted along the Yukon, or scooped up in a fishwheel, driven by the current; they will not pause to take a fly. Before the white man, the Indian culture was a product of the salmon run and today, sensibly, the law prevents anybody but Indians from taking them. We buy a freshly frozen salmon at the Carmacks store and load it into the freight canoe along with the new supply of gasoline. Then just before we push off, one of the Indians walks over to us.

“Be careful at Five Fingers,” he says. “Don't forget to use the right-hand channel.”

“I know,” I tell him. “The old steamboat channel.”

“That's right. The steamboat channel. Keep to the right.”

And then he adds, as if by an afterthought: “I lost my father in Five Fingers. Many years ago. He took the other channel.”

We thank him and, as the sun turns the waters golden, head down the river, out of range of the Carmacks pollution, and pitch our tents among the tall aspens on a sandy bank above the water. Tomorrow we face the only real obstacle on the upper Yukon–the famous Five Finger Rapids.

The menu calls for corned beef hash and this is my specialty. I soak several packages of dried onions and potatoes until they are soft and crumble in three or four tins of bully beef. I add a couple of eggs, newly purchased in Carmacks, a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce, a chopped clove of garlic and some salt and pepper. Then I sift in a little flour to bind the mixture. In the heavy pan, the bacon grease saved from this morning's breakfast is already sizzling. I form the mixture into patties the size of hamburgers and slide them into the pan. On top of each patty I sprinkle some dried English mustard and spread it around as the patty cooks. Then I flip it over and apply the mustard to the other side. Besides adding a certain tang, the mustard helps the patties to crisp so that when you devour them there is a hot outer crust that crunches under the teeth. Like the salmon, I am also going home; but unlike them, I have no intention of fasting all the way.

DAY SEVEN

T
his morning we are to face Five Finger Rapids. They lie just around the first bend in the river downstream from our camp and they have been the main subject of discussion during breakfast. My father scarcely mentioned them in his 1898 diary. “Shipped about three bucketsful of water in Five Fingers but none in Rink,” he wrote laconically. Like everybody else he kept to the right-hand channel.