Drifting Home Read online

  For he had come that way, climbing over those very rocks and resting at the summit, as we did, to gaze back down through the mists towards the seacoast. It was weird, as Peter put it, to think about that. Peter was with me on that Chilkoot trip, a boy just turned 16, and so was Pamela, who was 20, and it was during that brief, exacting journey that we first discussed taking the entire family down the river the following year. Skip, who was the outfitter for the Chilkoot party, encouraged the idea: “Listen,” he said. “If you bring your family I’ll handle your tour personal. Man, you couldn’t keep me away!”

  That decided it. It would be a journey through time as well as through space, even more than the Chilkoot had been. On the Chilkoot one was always conscious of time because the trail was thick with memories of the past: old shoes, broken sleds, rotting harness, the bones of horses, the skeletons of boats, bits and pieces of clothing, rusting cable, discarded pack sacks, barrels, pails, pots and pans, and, of course, tin cans. But the Chilkoot was for me, as it was for my children, a new experience. I had never crossed it before and so my only companions from the past were the ghosts of the stampeders whose mark was everywhere. But the Yukon was the river of my childhood and of my youth-as familiar, almost, as the streets of my home town; and so a voyage down the river with my family would be more than a voyage into history: it would be a journey into my own past. I had first come down the river in a small poling boat at the age of six with my father, my mother and my younger sister. I had last come up it at the age of 19, on a sternwheel steamboat, when my father was nearing the end of his days. In between I had travelled it from Whitehorse to Dawson at least half a dozen times. On the Chilkoot trail, more than thirty years after that last river trip, standing on the summit of the famous Pass, and thinking back to the moment when my father had stood there, I felt a yearning to experience the river once again. Service, who caught the spirit of the Yukon better than any writer, called it a land that “beckons and beckons.” Dawson City, when I flew there in 1948 after a ten years’ absence, looked so old and sad that I did not want to go back again. But I did go back in 1962 for the Goldrush Festival and in the summer of 1971, standing on the very lip of the divide that marks the Alaska-Yukon border, I felt the old pull.

  My father stood there, at the Chilkoot’s summit, on June 22, 1898, and scribbled part of a letter in pencil to his mother in Saint John. He had been counting the carcasses of horses that lay on the route between Sheep Camp and The Scales and he had counted no fewer than 38, ten of them in one heap. The main rush had gone by a month before, but my father’s party was late because it had lost time trying to take the Stikine river route to the goldfields. It was an abortive trip, yet there is no sense of disappointment or frustration in my father’s letters, only wonder and curiosity. His party had been marooned for two and a half days in a sandstorm on the Stikine, a storm that ruined much of their fresh food. They had struggled on upriver, towing their boat along the edge of the ice and meeting with the inevitable accidents along the way. (“It gave way under me once and I went in up to the hips but as the ice looked very shaky I had taken the precaution to take one of the poles with me and dropped on it. I got out in a hurry and crawled on hands and knees away from the bad spot. … We had pretty hard tugging and awfully slow progress from this on….”)

  As it turned out, all this toil was in vain because the country north of Glenora was a heaving swamp and the packers wanted eight hundred dollars a ton to move goods to Teslin lake at the head of the Yukon. None of them could afford that and so they had to choose between backpacking the whole way-a delay of two months–or attempting the Chilkoot. One of the party was sent back to the seacoast to assess the possibilities of the Pass, where an overhead tramway was said to be in full operation. While waiting for his return, my father tramped the hills between Glenora and Telegraph creek, noting all manner of odd things-a species of western toad breeding in the pond and sending out spawn in long strings, flowers in wild profusion, many of which he was able to identify by their Latin names: a new species of ranunculus and of lobelia at six hundred feet, false Solomon Seal, a columbine with orange-red flowers that was new to him, monkshood and blue lupins of the kind he had grown himself, “a stonecrop very like the one you call Love-in-a-Tangle,” and several varieties of orchids, which he carefully pressed and enclosed in his letters to his mother together with samples of the enormous northern mosquitoes (also pressed) and a detailed description of the uniforms of the North West Mounted Police, of whom he had read, but had never seen. When he reached Telegraph creek, my father hitched a ride back to Glenora by steamboat, paying for his passage by stoking coal. By that time his party had decided to attempt the Chilkoot. They bought a Peterborough canoe for twenty-seven dollars, added it to their several tons of supplies, and retraced their steps. At the summit of the Pass, when he next wrote his mother, they were all engaged in the arduous task of sledding their equipment in stages down the long mountain slopes towards the lakes. It took them a week to move everything to Mud lake, where the snow ended. Here, where firewood was so scarce that a few sticks cost three dollars (the price in those days of a tailor-made suit) they hired horses to move their supplies to Bennett and here, for one hundred dollars, they had to buy a second boat.

  Late on July 2 he and his New Brunswick partners sailed their two craft with all their possessions down this same lake and past this very spot at which we are camped. For all we know they may well have stopped here: his diary records that they made fifteen miles that first evening and this is a logical camping place-the ground dark with the remnants of many fires. We sit around our own embers, the adults drinking rum out of coffee mugs, speculating on all this. Today is the birthday of two of the children: Penny, who has turned 24, and Paul, who has turned 14. The date is August 5, 1972-almost another anniversary because it was on August 4, 1898 that my father reached Dawson, “the miners’ mecca” as he called it in a letter home.

  Peter’s question comes back to me: Did he ever think his grandchildren would follow after him, seventy-four years later?

  I doubt that he did, for he had no wife at the time, no prospects, no money and no plans to make the Yukon his home. But I cannot help wondering if his grandchildren will someday bring their own children down the river, on some future journey into time and space.

  DAY TWO

  Patsie has been assigned the task of keeping the log, partly because she is an uninhibited writer with an original though gaudy turn of phrase, partly because she is studying art and can illustrate her account of the river journey, and partly because she usually finishes any job she undertakes. On this Sunday morning, with the sun filtering through the clouds and the mountains around us still half-clothed in mist, she sits cross-legged on the bank with the logbook resting on her blue jeans. She is 19, but with her pixie face and puckish grin and darting black eyes she looks younger.

  Patsie’s features are rarely in repose but now as she concentrates on the log, the impish look is replaced by something else, hauntingly familiar. Where have I seen it before? In an old photograph album? When the hair is swept back, as it is now, and the grin vanishes, I suddenly see my mother reflected in Patsie’s face-not the grand old lady, stiff-backed and white-haired, whom the children called “grandmamma” -but the girl of earlier photographs, so solemn with those immense black eyes and so lovely, with the jet hair pulled back in a tight coil to complete the perfect oval of the face. Patsie’s hair is light brown and she has freckles and a snub nose, but the resemblance is there for a fleeting instant … uncanny … almost as if my mother’s youthful ghost had entered her. This was how she must have looked to my father when, twelve years after he climbed the Chilkoot, he first met her at a party at Granville, the mining camp on the Indian river. He had already turned forty and was a thoroughgoing bachelor, but in a year or so all that was to change and, looking now at Patsie, I can see how beautiful my mother must have been to him. Then Patsie looks up from her logbook, her nose wrinkles, the familiar grin lights
up her features, the black eyes come alive and the face in the photograph album disappears.

  In the log, Patsie is describing Skagway, which we had left the previous morning on our journey through the White Pass to Bennett: “The sidewalks on the main street were all board and every building was like Shaw’s old hardware [in Kleinburg]. It was a neat old place; many a derelict building with broken window or boarded-up door stood majestically-reminiscent of the glory they used to hold. I walked a while through the streets that were deserted-the wind blowing and whistling through my hair … a hollow building, a cracked window spied me from above … the wild grasses and flowers and weeds inhabited the streets where was once the adventure and splendour of the rough souls who stayed here. …”

  We are slow getting ready this morning. Tents have to be taken down, dunnage bags packed, sleeping bags rolled, breakfast dishes washed, garbage buried, latrines filled in and all the baggage and provisions re-packed in the boats. We all don our rain gear: the lake is choppy this morning and when we enter the next lake, Tagish, we expect to face heavy weather. The boats are so heavily loaded that they cannot ride high in the water and even the smaller waves often break over the bows.

  I catch young Paul lugging his dunnage bag down to the boats. This is strictly against doctor’s orders and he knows it. It is hard to realize that less than six weeks ago, Paul underwent heart surgery in the Sick Children’s Hospital, Toronto. Nobody, I think, expected that he would make this trip, especially the members of the surgical team who worked over him for several hours late in June. Nobody except Paul. This family excursion probably means more to him than to anybody else except me because he has reached an age when the presence of the family has become important to him. The time will come in his later teens when the family may become too oppressive and he will want to escape for a while, but this year he is more insistent than any of the others on family outings and family rituals; Sunday dinners and summer picnics have become a passion with him. “The family is breaking up,” he keeps saying sadly, for the children are growing older. This will probably be the last time our family finds itself together for a whole fortnight and this, too, has been one of the reasons for our river journey. On the Yukon, no one can intrude upon us; no one can reach us by wire, telephone or mail. We may drift for days without encountering another human being. We will be alone on the water and in the wilderness with each other’s company and for Paul, especially, this is important.

  It was late in June-the plans all made, the outfitter contracted for, the travel arrangements completed, the food shipped north-when Paul realized something was wrong. His heart felt funny, he said; within a week, for the second time in his life, he was on the operating table.

  The doctor told us before the operation that he did not believe Paul could make the river trip. Any surgery required a convalescent period of eight weeks and this wasn’t just any surgery. This was one of the most difficult of all operations, exhausting for the doctors as well as for the patient. The suggestion that he be taken almost directly from the hospital to a rubber raft and sent plunging down the wild Yukon was unthinkable. But the doctor reckoned without Paul.

  He is the competitive member of the family, a boy who plays to win. He has a passion for games like Risk, Careers or Monopoly. There is a stubborn streak in him which makes him want to finish things he has started, no matter what the obstacles may be. The statistics of the Klondike stampede suggest that for every twenty men who decided to set out for the goldfields, only one actually made it. Paul would have been one of those who would make it, as my father was. My mother told me once that my father, thwarted on the Stikine and ready to attack the Chilkoot, was offered a chance to give up the struggle and return to a job he had long desired-a faculty post at Queen’s University. The letter accepting his application was waiting for him at the Dyea post office before he scaled the Pass. It was a job for which he was perfectly suited, because he was a natural teacher; you could not talk to him for five minutes without learning something. Probably he should have taken the post and no doubt life would have been a great deal easier for him if he had. (He drifted about the Yukon for a dozen years, trying his hand at all sorts of odd employments; he was, by turn, carpenter, cook, miner, pick and shovel man, high school principal, and French instructor before he took a job with the government service.) But he had gone too far to turn back and so he put the letter in his pocket, forgot about it, climbed his Chilkoot and thus, by a conscious decision, changed the pattern of his life. Paul has some of his qualities. He literally willed himself better and was discharged a week ahead of schedule.

  Some of our medical friends were horrified at the idea of Paul making the trip. What if his boat overturned? The shock could kill him. It was useless to explain that the healthiest of us would probably not survive if that happened. It is not just the numbing cold that makes a swim of any length impossible; it is also the current and the undertow. A stick flung in the water is sucked out of sight in an instant. We all faced an equal hazard.

  But I wanted Paul to go and go he did with his own doctor’s blessing. Keep him warm, he told us. Don’t let him get wet or cold. And don’t let him carry any heavy loads. So I warn Paul again, and he drops the bag and lopes off, muttering to himself. He is a boy who seems to find it impossible to walk anywhere.

  It is a two-hour run under power to Carcross, the old Indian settlement on the spit of land that separates Bennett from Tagish lake. Already the three boats, with their twenty-five horsepower engines, have taken on personalities. Skip has names for them all. His is the fastest, named for a champion, Miss Bardahl. Cheri runs The Sluice Box, which the children have named The Slush Box. Each of these boats is fourteen feet long. The third is sixteen feet long and is called The Pig, and because it is much slower has already become an object of derision. Indeed, those who ride in The Pig are already being treated by the others as if they were members of an inferior social class. The loading of the boats then becomes a matter of more than logistics. Nobody wants to ride in The Pig, but each must take his turn. Every possible excuse to evade the draft is invented by those selected for The Pig. Since the boats must be equally balanced and since the weights of the passengers range from sixty to two hundred and twenty pounds and since certain people want to sit with certain other people, the arrangement in the boats requires the wisdom of a Solomon and the calculating powers of a small computer.

  At last the cries of the enraged passengers in The Pig are stilled and we set off down the choppy lake, the bottom of each boat slapping hard against the waves. The Pig’s motor keeps sputtering and failing. The other boats are forced to slow down and there are jeers from the non-Piggers and wails from the Piggers and threats by me to put the jeerers into The Pig if they continue their abuse. The Pig has definitely become a boat to which one is condemned rather than assigned. When we reach Carcross in the early afternoon it is still bringing up the rear.

  It is here that the great herds of caribou once crossed between the lakes. In my boyhood, the fall migration used to take place within a few miles of Dawson, never following the exact pathway two years in a row, but always leaving behind a trampled swath, almost as if a steamroller had pushed its way through the forest. My father would take us out on the river in his boat and we would watch the caribou thundering out of the woods, clambering down the banks, plunging into the river and swimming to the far side. Sometimes he would steer the boat into the midst of them and sometimes, when we had visitors with us, he would station them on an island and then, using his boat as a cowboy uses a horse, round up a swimming band and drive them past the gaping guests. Then we would watch as the animals reached the far side, the does getting behind the fawns and pushing them up the slippery bank with their noses. Not all of them made it. One of the keenest memories of my childhood is the sweet, not entirely unpleasant stench of rotting carcasses that hung over the river in the early fall. But all that has changed. There are still caribou roaming the forests of the Yukon, but the great herds are gon
e and the animals no longer cross between the lakes at Caribou Crossing.

  Johnny Johns greets us from the wharf as Miss Bardahl noses in. He is a Tagish Indian who has lived with history-born in the year of the goldrush, his kinfolk packers on the Chilkoot Trail. Johnny knew all the key figures in the stampede; George Carmack, who found the gold on Bonanza creek, a former packer, married to a Tagish Indian; Jim Mason, his brother-in-law, known as Skookum Jim because of the immense loads he carried over the Pass; another relative, Tagish Charley, who also took part in the famous discovery; and Kate Carmack, the wife Carmack deserted after he struck it rich. All except Carmack are buried here at Carcross and Johnny Johns tells us about the day when Tagish Charley got drunk and fell off the bridge here and was drowned in the lake, a victim of his own success because, being treated as a white man, he was allowed to drink in public. As for Johnny, he raises packhorses and makes a good living from it; at seventy-four he looks twenty years younger and it is clear that he will not fall off any bridges.

  We are standing talking to Johnny in the shadow of the old Tutshi, the sternwheel steamer that once took tourists down the lake to a little settlement with the haunting name of Ben-My-Chree. In its day, Ben-My-Chree was known as the prettiest spot in the Yukon, for the soil was rich and the flower gardens there became the talk of the Territory. But now Ben-My-Chree, like most other settlements, is deserted and the Tutshi sits on the beach in relatively good condition and under the protection of the Territorial Government, her paint still gleaming white, her smoke-stack bright yellow, her paddlewheel the traditional scarlet, her pilot-house outlined in the familiar fretwork-a memorial to another time before the automobile and the airplane changed the pattern of travel in the North.

  “Hey, you hear about Ben-My-Chree?” Johnny asks.