Drifting Home (19 page)

There is no sign of that garden now, except for some vagrant delphiniums springing out of the grass. The encroaching forest has long since obliterated any sign of a clearing in the woods. As for the buildings, they, too, are rapidly returning to the soil. “The guy's house had fallen in,” Patsie writes in the log. “But it was really neat seeing his old two-holer and his wallpaper and neat old imported door. There were remnants of milk cartons and other old supplies. … The other cabins were also falling apart and an eerie feeling prevailed. There was a lot of little things, so it seemed as if Ladue suddenly took up and left when the next boat came through. There were harnesses, sacks of sawdust, mattresses, Jehovah's Witnesses books, files and good tools, cans of spices that still smelled the same, pots and pans, washboard, paper [news] and a chair. …”

These, of course, would not have been left behind by Ladue. He turned his post over to others and set off for the Klondike's mouth as soon as he heard of the gold strike. He did not dig for gold like the others. Instead he laid out a townsite and set up a sawmill, for Ladue, the trader, knew that the real gold would be garnered by a man shrewd enough to have the only supply of sluice-box planking in the Yukon. His Ogilvie post thrived for many years after the stampede and some of the newspapers here are dated as recently as December, 1930. “Babe Ruth thinks he's worth $85,000 a year …” one of the stories begins. That, I remember, was the last winter I ever spent in the Yukon.

It is my turn to do the cooking. The menu for Day Eleven says clam chowder and so I go to work with tinned clams, condensed milk and all the left-over bacon. Meanwhile, Pamela and Patsie are determined to bake a birthday cake for Skip. They fashion an oven of sorts out of an old gasoline tin found in one of the cabins and place a flat pan of Brownie mix inside it. This goes at the edge of the fire and everybody hopes for the best. The result is passable if somewhat crumbly, and slightly burned on the bottom. After we devour the chowder, they present the cake to Skip with a candle made of wood sticking in the middle. “He had to blow like hell to get it out,” Patsie comments in the log. Meanwhile Ross Miller, who has known Skip since that first Boy Scout trip down the Yukon, is preparing a presentation. I have only just realized that Ross is 18 years old; with his dark beard and his voluminous knowledge of glacial science, gained from his father, he seems more like 26. His gift to Skip is a plaque fashioned from a tin can lid, on which he has engraved with his hunting knife, the following citation:

FOR UNDYING PERSEVERANCE
IN THE FACE OF UNRELENTING BERTONS
THE GRIN-AND-BEAR-IT HAPPY-HONEYMOON
NEVER-AGAIN AWARD PRESENTED TO
ROBERT RIVERRUNNER

Aug. 15, 1972     Wowgilvie Yukon Territory

 

Ross ties the medal to Peggy Anne's pyjama belt and hangs it around Skip's neck as we all applaud and sing Happy Birthday.

The time has come to start throwing things away. Janet and Pamela have a tendency to save everything–from tins of bacon fat to half-empty packets of Betty Crocker mix. The gastronomic story of our river trip is to be found in the leftovers and the disposal of the dead weight brings its own nostalgia.
Look at those biscuits: remember how wet we got in the lakes? Remember Dad's puffballs? Remember the fake moosemeat at Bennett? Remember when Peter caught the first grayling? We really wowed out over that one! Don't throw away the beans–they were real good!

It is hard to believe that the great adventure, which we have been planning for most of the year, is almost at an end. It seems only hours ago that we were setting out from Lake Bennett, marvelling at the mountains. But the river, we realize, moves more swiftly than we thought and home is only a few miles past the next bend.

DAY TWELVE

P
atsie describes our last morning in the log: “We planned to get to Dawson by noon, so we had a ‘quick' breakfast of coffee and Penny's famous perverse mucilage [Patsie's name for the Swiss health cereal,
Bierscher Muesli
] and used up the remaining (!! arg !) dried fruit. Then Big Pierre starts chucking out all the extra food supplies that weren't needed. …
P.S
. Dad called Betty Crocker a witch and burned all the Twinkle mixes and other useless things in the fire and Mum was running round and grabbing and snatching things to save as Dad cursed her for being squirrel-like.”

At last we are packed. The boats push off down the little slough and out into the main river and some of the children begin to sing a verse of an old Yukon folk song I taught them years ago, which begins with the phrase: “It's twenty miles from Dawson and times are awful tough.” We are about fifty-five miles from Dawson and we have only one more stop to make on the way. Patsie describes it in the log:

“We cruised up to a friend of Skip's place–Pete and Mary's. They were living in an old trapper's cabin, roughing it in the bush. Mary was only there, looking like she'd lived there all summer, really peaceful and full of energy and smiles. She seemed to really dig living out there and planned to live there for a long time, always if possible, living with her husband, Pete, future children and dogs. They trap in the winter. The area is reasonably hilly, not mountains, but there are lots of trees. Anyway I found it really a beautiful way of living and an incredible place.”

They are a very young couple, indeed–from California, I think. Some people might once have called them hippies. They have bought a trapline from an old timer and have learned the business, I suppose, by trial and error. There is a flock of handsome husky dogs, all going insane at the end of their chains, a good garden and a greenhouse rigged up of plastic and full of ripening tomatoes. I think of my own parents, starting out in much the same way, though they lacked the stereo sound system and eight-track cartridges that bring the voices of Joni and Jimi to the wilderness. What a boon those tapes must be in the long night of mid-winter!

The freight canoe has encountered engine trouble and Scotty will have to drift into town, but the rest of us are eager to reach our destination and decide to use the motors. For me, the scenery is becoming more and more familiar. On our right, I spot the mouth of the Indian river, some twenty miles upstream from Dawson. That was about as far as the
Bluenose
could go in a day if we were to get home by midnight, so it has connotations of excitement for me, since excursions to the Indian river were necessarily few. The islands now begin to take on remembered contours, though they have changed so much over more than forty years that it is difficult to tell which were the ones we camped on. But Chicken Billy's island, which was one of our favourites, is unmistakeable and so is the mouth of Swede creek and the little slough at Sunnydale, where the hay farm used to be.

Now, rising behind the intervening bluff, I can see the familiar pyramid shape of the Midnight Dome. The bluff ends at the Klondike flats, the site of Klondike City, better known as Lousetown. In my day there were the remains of an old brewery and a sawmill here and many cabins, including the “cribs” of the goldrush prostitutes, some of them still occupied. Now there is nothing. The wilderness has reclaimed Lousetown and this bank of the Klondike must look very much as it did in the days before the goldrush when it was a salmon stream and not an Eldorado.

In front of us, as we sweep around the great bluff, the old town lies spread out along the right bank for about a mile. Years ago it stretched for a mile and a half but age has caused it to shrink. The gaps where buildings once stood are more pronounced, great blank areas covered in bush or grass and empty spaces between buildings that once were crowded along Front Street. The old police barracks is in good shape, because the Historic Sites and Monuments Board uses it as a headquarters. St. Paul's church, where my mother sang, is freshly painted. But dancehall row is no more: the old Orpheum, the Monte Carlo, the M & N, Apple Jimmy's, the Flora Dora and Dominion Gambling House–all of these historic structures which survived to my day have since been burned in one of Dawson's innumerable fires. (I think again of my father waiting protectively in the movie house.) St. Mary's Hospital, built by Father Judge, “the Saint of Dawson,” where I almost died of pneumonia at the age of two, is long gone, too; indeed the whole north end is a decaying shambles, returning to scrub bush. But one brown old building still remains and on its side we can make out the faint letters
LADUE SAWMILL COMPANY
.

We bring our boats into a little beach just below the Bank of Commerce–the same bank where Robert Service once worked as a teller weighing gold until he was dismissed because he was making more money from his poetry than the manager made from banking. The bank, an Edwardian structure sheathed in galvanized iron, has been freshly painted and behind it, perched on the beach in tip-top condition for the tourist trade, is the restored steamboat
Keno
on which my friend Hambone once worked as a steward.

The smaller children begin to scamper about in excitement.

“Why, it's like an old-fashioned town!” Peggy Anne exclaims, looking up the street at the old frame buildings, with their cornices and fretwork, their bay windows and overhanging balconies. I am startled by her delight, which contrasts with my own despair. I am seeing Dawson now through four pairs of eyes. I see it as my father first saw it when it was in its prime: the biggest city west of Winnipeg and north of San Francisco, with running water, electric lights and motion pictures, with the buildings spanking new, the streets crowded with men from all over the globe, the restaurants serving oyster dinners while string orchestras played the classics, and the dancehalls, the gambling houses and the saloons roaring full blast day and night. I see it as I remember it from my boyhood: a very ordinary town no different as far as I knew from any other town–rather, in fact, like the small towns I used to read about in Booth Tarkington's novels, complete with dusty roads and shady walks, neat, flower-decked cottages and pretty, steepled churches, with horses clip-clopping down the main street and the river running past our front door. I see it as it looks to me now, through the eyes of a returning native: shrivelled, faded and apparently dying–so many shattered windows, so many boarded-up doors, so many gardens abandoned to the weeds, so many wooden sidewalks smothered by the invading alders. Last, I see it through the eyes of my children: a quaint storybook town, a fossilized piece of the past, romantic in its old age, even charming in its decay–a sort of Disneyland here in the Yukon, except that nothing is made up, everything is real, all is history.

Skip has a minibus to take us and our gear to the hotel – not one of the hotels of my childhood but a new motel called the Eldorado, complete with cocktail lounge, running water and keys for the doors. The old hotels are all gone. The Occidental across the way, better known as The Bucket of Blood, has been boarded up. So has the old Principal down the street. The Central is gone; the Royal Alexandra is gone; the Regina is gone; the Yukonia is gone. They were all of a piece, these hotels: the ceilings of stamped-out metal, the floors of worn linoleum, with circular black leather settees, the potted ferns, the spittoons with dead cigars floating in them, the polished desk with the mustached clerk in striped shirt and armbands, the big register book, the staircase winding up to the rooms that never needed a key, the chipped china basin and jug, the great brass-knobbed bed, the single bathroom down the hall, the polished mahogany bar downstairs, the back room with its inevitable poker game, the big doors that never closed. I drank my first Tom Collins in one of these hotels at the age of 19, to celebrate the end of my last season in a mining camp; it cost fifty cents, which was an hour's wages in 1939, and it was technically illegal. But if a hotel man had a beer licence it was tacitly agreed that he could sell anything and all of them did.

Now, behind our locked doors in the Pembroke baths of the Eldorado, we sluice a week of Yukon dust from our bodies to emerge in store clothes, well-scrubbed and barely recognizable. A man from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board is waiting in the lobby for me. He does not seem to have changed greatly since the days when we Wolf Cubs cooked our beans on the hills above the town-a little greyer, perhaps, and a bit heavier, but as calm and unruffled as ever. John Gould, whose mother made the best baked beans in Dawson, is now in charge of a multi-million dollar plan to restore some of the buildings in whose shadow we both were raised. He talks about it matter-of-factly. The old Palace Grand dancehall was the first. Now the original post office is being repaired. After that, probably, Mme. Tremblay's old store. Who would have thought of Mme. Tremblay's store as a monument? To us it was a place where, during Christmas week, you could look in the lighted windows and see the mechanical toys you hoped somebody would give you for Christmas. Now the store is to be preserved and its owner, long deceased, to be immortalized. She was, it turns out, the first woman to cross the Chilkoot Pass, years before the goldrush. I had never known that; to me she was a motherly creature, with white hair and a French accent. But her story and that of her store have already been detailed in a plaque displayed on the building. Later, other buildings will be preserved with the help of John Gould, whose even temperament and obvious good health are a tribute to his mother's cooking.

The children are already noticing something about Northerners–that they are shaped to a different mould by climate, loneliness, environment and heritage. More than once Patsie in the log has referred to the inner serenity of the wilderness people. Almost everybody who visits Dawson talks about the special quality of the old timers. Part of it comes, I think, from a kind of personal security which is the stamp of those who have survived and prospered in a harsh environment; some of it springs out of the very isolation of the northern communities, which forces the people to fall back on their own resources (we notice the absence of television aerials in Dawson) ; some of it comes from the need to co-operate for survival rather than to compete–the tradition of the open cabin door goes back before the stampede. It is difficult to bamboozle Northerners. Phoneys they can spot a mile away. Fads, fashions and sudden enthusiasms are not for them. They suffer no identity crises. Men like John Gould know exactly who they are and where their roots are and so they do not find it necessary to play a role or wear a costume.