Drifting Home (9 page)

The four or five summers that followed must have been the happiest in my parents' life. We lived on the river. Almost every day, when he finished work, we would pack a picnic and set out for one of the Yukon's many islands. In July we would pitch a permanent tent on one of these islands and camp there, my father commuting to work by boat. Thus I came to know the river in all its moods. As the water dropped in the summer, divided islands would be joined by spits of sand in which warm ponds would be left behind for bathing. Between the larger islands were sloughs, some of them shallow enough to wade across, so that you could sometimes move from island to island, wading and walking. There were fish in some of the smaller tributaries, in Swede creek, for instance, and in the famous Indian river–dark, beautiful streams near whose mouths one could find limpid pools.

Drifting down the Thirtymile it all comes back to me: the familiar Yukon hills, their erosion creases choked with evergreens; the little pup creeks gurgling down through the thick forests; the bank swallows pouring from their cliffside caves and filling the air with chatter; the great bluffs around which the river courses and eddies, so that the water, in some places, is going in two directions at once. This is the river of my childhood and of my dreams, for it has often returned, grotesquely distorted, to haunt my adult sleep.

The temperature has risen to 75, the sun is baking our skin, and the fishermen are busy. By lunchtime we have four grayling. By the time lunch is over, we have eight, caught near the bank between bites of sandwiches. In the afternoon, there are other excitements. The lead boat spies four cow moose, grazing in the swampy mouth of a small creek. They look up from their foraging, their shovel snouts dripping weeds, inspect us curiously with their great, soft eyes and then lope leisurely away as the river sweeps us past. Then, in the space of a few minutes, we spot no fewer than three bald eagles in the sky. On the eroding left bank stands a lone cabin, tottering on the very lip, about to plunge into the river; a former steamboat refuelling station. After that we sweep around the great
U.S
. Bend, where the river forms a tight “S” between high, brooding cliffs.

An hour later we come upon an Indian camp and smoke rack. We beach the boats and walk up to greet a family of four. Long strips of moosemeat hang from the outer rack, drying in the sun, while on the inner rack halves of salmon are turning dark red over a wood fire. We buy a smoked salmon for two dollars and continue on our way. Behind us, we can see the blue smoke drifting out of the forest and mingling with the blue of the sky–the only evidence of human life we have seen all day.

In mid-afternoon we reach the end of the Thirtymile and the mouth of the Teslin, or Hootalinqua. Here, in 1898, the boats that were built by the men who crossed the White and Chilkoot passes joined the boats of the men who came up the Spectral Trail from Ashcroft or up the Stikine or Skeena rivers and trekked overland to Teslin lake. Opposite the Teslin's mouth, clinging to the left bank of the Yukon, are the old buildings of Hootalinqua Station, one of more than a dozen ghost settlements that dot the river between White-horse and Dawson, all of them tenantless since the highway put the steamboats out of business. We pull up the boats and explore the empty community. The old Mounted Police post is half hidden by the Yukon's official flower, the crimson fireweed. The blooms reach up to the empty windows, almost touching the grasses that hang down from the crumbling roof.

On an island opposite Hootalinqua Post, an odd sight catches our eye. Above the willows and aspens we see a great smoke-stack. We nose into the beach and make our way into the woods. There, rising above us several storeys high, with willows poking through the holes in her deck, is an entire steamboat. She is very old, the paint long gone from her hull, but intact except for the paddlewheel, which lies in pieces beside her. She is called
The Evelyn
and a plaque on her hull proclaims that she is under the protection of the Territorial Government. There is a similar placard on the Hootalinqua police post and on every other ghost town along the river. It is about all the local government can do at the moment to draw attention to the fact that these are historic sites worthy of preservation. Unhappily, there is no money yet for restoration.

I have never heard of
The Evelyn
. She did not ply the river in my day. Later on I learn that she was purchased in 1922 by the White Pass company, which ran the steamboats and the trains, but having bought her they found they had no use for her. She has been here ever since, with the brambles growing round her and the willows growing through her and only her smoke-stack protruding from the new growth on an island that was once a bustling shipyard.

The day is wearing on and Big Salmon, where we expect to camp for the night, is another thirty-five miles downstream, so we turn on the motors and skip along with the current. Five miles farther on we spot more moose, grazing in the backwater at the foot of a steep slide of black clay. But I am not looking at the moose. My chart tells me that the hull of the original
Klondike
, which sank in the Thirty-mile but drifted to this point, lies just under the water at the base of the slide. As the others watch the moose, I spot her, like the shadow of a mammoth fish, outlined by a series of ripples. And now my mind goes back to a summer's day in 1928 when the
Klondike
, fresh from the shipwrights, first puffed into Dawson. She was a freighter, with a big open deck and only a few cabins for passengers-the biggest steamboat on the river then, though not as big as those great Mississippi packets, the
Susie, Sarah
and
Hannah
, that plied these waters in the stampede days. Now, like the
Susie
, which rotted slowly away in the shipyard downriver from Dawson, the
Klondike
is only a hull-shaped ripple in the whispering river.

I think one of the reasons why the steamboats held such a fascination for me was that they represented, in a kind of second-hand way, the mysterious wonders of the Outside, which I only vaguely remembered from my visit at the age of five. Sometimes there would be as many as three stern-wheelers tied to the dock at one time: the
Yukon
from downriver, the
Casca
or the
Whitehorse
from upriver and a freighter, such as the
Klondike
. These boats, which brought fresh fruits, also brought people from far away places. Most of them were American tourists and we thought of them as a different race. “These aliens seem quite friendly,” my father heard one of them remark and the phrase tickled him so much that he repeated it many times over the years. We were always polite to the tourists. When they passed me on the streets I spoke to each one and was surprised when they did not always return my greeting. I had been told that on the Outside people did not say hello to every Tom, Dick or Harry they met on the street but I refused to believe that. My experience was limited to that single journey at the age of five, when we had gone straight to my grandparents' home in Oakville, then a small town. I had no experience of the big city–I had only read about big cities in books–but with all my heart I longed to experience one.

Now, as the Yukon shoreline rolls by me and the river widens and the wooded islands grow more numerous, I think how strange it is that my own children, brought up on the edge of a big city, loathe and despise the metropolis. They seek to escape the asphalt and the highrise, the buzzing traffic and the flashing lights and so this wilderness experience is for them a kind of Elysium, as it is, indeed, for me. Yet when I was their age, enjoying the river almost daily, all the Elysian fields were asphalt. I longed for lights and advertising signs. I longed to ride a streetcar or a railway train. I longed for tall buildings and throngs of people. Most of all I longed for circuses, carnivals, amusement parks, radio and talking pictures, none of which I had ever experienced. Like Coca Cola, they were no more than images in magazines, totally unattainable.

In the fall of 1931, when my father had accumulated enough holiday time and my mother had finished the novel she was writing on the kitchen table (my father typing it out for her each night on the old Remington), the voyage to the Outside at last took shape. We would go to Toronto, live in my Aunt Florrie's house on Huntley Street, visit my mother's parents in Oakville and she would place her novel with a publisher and we would all be rich and would go to circuses and carnivals all day. It did not quite work out that way and yet in retrospect that winter seems to me to have been one long carnival. I saw sights I had never seen before and spectacles that I did not know existed and I developed, belatedly but permanently, a childish delight in things that whirr and buzz and flash and rotate and jiggle. For that is how I saw the Outside: a whirring, buzzing carnival of light.

In the tomb of the Yukon winter, when the smoke rose in perpendicular columns from the chimneys and a chill fog hung like a shroud over the valley, Dawson was as dark and silent as the forests that bore down upon it. Noon was twilight for the six sunless weeks of December and January. The only automobile that dared to venture forth was the one owned by Archie Fournier, who brought around the milk–when there was milk–in beer bottles stopped with old corks, and who cranked his Model T at every house as the steam poured from the radiator. Even the police kept their horses in the stables when the temperature dropped to 40 below so that virtually nothing moved in Dawson and certainly nothing buzzed or flashed except in the week before Christmas when a few mechanical toys went on display in the window of Mme. Tremblay's store.

Outside, everything was different, right down to the milk bottles. I saw my first neon sign in Juneau. It was as exciting to my father as it was to me, for he, too, had never seen one. Of course he knew exactly how it worked and explained it in detail, comparing it to the Northern Lights. We stood under it and watched it wink redly in the night.
EATS
, is what it said, as it flashed on and off.
EATS
…
EATS
… EATS. Marvelous!

In Toronto there were bigger and better signs–enormous ones advertising various chocolates hanging over Bloor Street. Willards had a gigantic sun made up of hundreds of coloured lights that sent its rays shooting out in every direction; Neilson's had another, showing three shooting stars made up of crimson neon, that darted above our heads. Everything was new to me: milkshakes I had never known made on machines that rotated and buzzed, fizzy drinks called “phosphates,” fireworks, cent candy, searchlights, tandem streetcars, roller skates, songs I had never heard before, comics I had never read, talkies I had never seen.

Dawson, in those days, seemed light years behind the world. People still danced the two-step and the one-step in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall. Fashions and popular songs were years old. Until 1926, my mother wore her hair in a bun at the top, like Mrs. Katzenjammer in the funnies, and sang such songs as “After the Ball is Over” and “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.” Movies reached Dawson only after every other theatre on the continent was done with them. We saw Griffith's
Birth of a Nation
in 1929. And there were no talkies.

We were allowed to see movies only rarely and then it was a rule that we must be accompanied by our parents. Once, when the Wolf Cubs were taken on a surprise treat to see a cowboy film, I had to phone home for permission to go. It was given to me, but after the cartoons were finished I noticed my father slip into a seat a few rows behind us. I found it embarrassing at the time but years later I came to understand the reason for it. Dawson's public and commercial buildings were forever burning down and he was deathly afraid of fire in the movie house, and rightly so, for a few years later the
D.A.A.A
. theatre was destroyed by flames. So there he sat, watching Rex Bell knock down no fewer than seven desperadoes.

“Were there cartoons?” he asked me, after it was over.

“You missed them. There were two: Oswald the Rabbit in
Panicky Pancakes
and
Mississippi Mud
.”

“Oh, damn; did I? I'd much rather have seen them than the cowboys.”

For anything that was animated fascinated him. He explained to me how cartoons were made and demonstrated the technique by flipping the pages of a book on which he had drawn a bouncing ball. In Toronto, we saw a lot of cartoons and talking pictures and plays and concerts as well.

“The boy is here for an education,” he told the principal of Rosedale Public School, “and so I intend to take him out of school whenever necessary. He has a bit of catching up to do.”

The principal looked startled but nodded agreement. There was not a great deal he could do since my father had obviously made up his mind. My father was there for an education, too. He signed up for three courses in mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto and went to lectures every day for the sheer enjoyment of it, not in the least bothered by the fact that he was three times the age of his fellow students. “Those fellows are smart as whips,” he'd say. “It takes some doing to keep up with them.”

He took me out of school whenever something came up that he thought I ought to see. We went to the Passion Play in the Royal Alex and
As You Like It
at Hart House and a wonderful marionette show at Eaton's and the Ice Carnival in the new Maple Leaf Gardens; and we listened to the Hart House String Quartet and saw some new paintings by people called The Group of Seven. We visited Ottawa for the opening of Parliament where George Black, the Member for the Yukon and new Speaker of the House, actually winked at my father as the procession went by. There, in his brother's home, I first tasted French fried potatoes and, more important than Parliament, saw a film called
Union Station
, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Joan Crawford, both of whom actually talked. My father often picked the movies we would see by finding out what the accompanying cartoons were. We saw the first Silly Symphony ever made,
Skeleton Dance
, at the Uptown, and the second,
The Old Clockmaker
, at the Hollywood, where the feature was
The Smiling
Lieutenant
, starring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert. And if I remember all these details after forty years, while forgetting other, more important world events and my own schoolwork, it is because they made an enormous impression on a small boy, who had been cooped up for all of his eleven years in a northern mining town.