Drifting Home Read online

“What about Ben-My-Chree?”

  “Some fella from the Outside bought it up.”

  “Bought it? All of it?”

  “Whole place. Big wheel in the tourist business in Vancouver, so I hear.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Maybe for tourist resort. He was up this way years ago, I hear tell. Maybe for sentimental reasons.”

  “Maybe he’ll put the old Tutshi back into the water.”

  “Maybe. Be nice.”

  “Hey-that’s neat,” says Patsie.

  “It’s only neat if he fixed it up like it was before-or leaves it alone,” says Pamela. “If he louses it up with hot dog stands or chicken stands, then it won’t be so neat.”

  We stroll up to Matthew Watson’s store to pick up a few provisions and I walk across to his home and talk to his mother, who knew my family in Dawson, where her father was the fire marshal. I remember him well, a sturdy man who wore a big fireman’s hat and was the envy of every boy in school. I remember the firehall, and his men sliding down the pole when the siren sounded and the harness automatically dropped onto the horses. And I can remember the steam pumper, shining in the sun, full of chemical foam, rattling down the streets, pulled by the snorting animals. Steam pumpers were obsolete almost everywhere in Canada in those days except in Dawson. We used to buy a chocolate marshmallow bar called Jus’ Kids, I remember, from which you could collect a set of cards about the Good Old Days, drawn by Jimmy Frise. One of these cards contained a drawing of a steam pumper, just like the one in Dawson, pulled by a spanking team of white horses and I could not for the life of me understand why such a commonplace spectacle should be included as part of the Good Old Days, which were, presumably, long past.

  I say goodbye to Mrs. Watson, and join the children who have, as Patsie writes in the log, “gone to the pub to see the decrepit, swearing parrot.” The parrot is very old; he was old in 1898 when he was brought here, which means he is probably twice as old as Johnny Johns. He is also very famous-so famous that when he dies, as he will in a few months, Canadian Press will carry his obituary. He is too decrepit to swear at us this morning, so, after buying a case of Yukon beer, we leave him and head for the boats.

  “Watch out for Windy Arm,” Johnny warns us, as we move down to the dock. “It can be very bad. But then you got good boats for it.”

  The Windy Arm of Tagish lake, an unprotected and shallow stretch of water that cannot be avoided, is known as the roughest in all the Yukon. Here the waves can reach five feet in height. In the goldrush days, this was many a prospector’s finish. One can imagine that ill-assorted fleet of small craft, strung out at this point for the entire length of two lakes, facing those mountainous swells. Those who were wise waited for the wind to die; those who were greedy for the Klondike’s gold went on to be drenched or swamped and sometimes drowned in their ungainly floating coffins.

  Skip has laid his plans for Windy Arm. We must lighten our boats before we face those waves so we remove from The Pig all the provisions that we will not need over the next two days. These will be shipped by train to Whitehorse and Scotty Jeffers will go ahead with them and pick up a suitable freight canoe. This accomplished, we wave goodbye to Johnny Johns and set out down the mountain-ringed expanse of Tagish lake, in the face of a stiff breeze. We can guess what Windy Arm is going to be like.

  Peggy Anne, who is 11, says she doesn’t like the colour of the water-a dark, almost navy blue. When the sun is shining and the air is calm, these mountain lakes change to a soft green, almost exactly the colour of the larch in the early spring; but when the weather grows angry, the lakes darken and seem to frown. Peggy Anne is an imaginative child, fearful of nameless things that lurk in the gloomy forests and dark corners. When she travels she expects that airplanes will crash and ships will founder and I can sympathize with her, for I believed exactly the same thing when I was her age. I still remember the terror of my first trip to the Outside, as Northerners call the rest of the world. I was five years old but not too young to pray and after we left Skagway I prayed every night that the s. s. Princess Louise would not sink. I had some reason for apprehension because the Louise’s sister ship, Princess Sophia, had done just that in 1919, slipping off a rock and sinking with every soul on board, a disaster that affected almost every family in Dawson. When the Sophia was mentioned, a kind of shiver went through the room, and this was not lost on a small, apprehensive boy. Nor did it escape me or anyone else that the CPR changed its schedule so that the Alaskan vessels always passed the scene of that tragedy at night-a piece of useless camouflage that only heightened the horror.

  Peggy Anne, and her younger sister, Perri, who is 7, are with me in Miss Bardahl, along with Skip and Paul, who sits beside me, warmly bundled. We are wearing rain gear with the hoods up and the pants and jackets tightly tied. Ahead of us, we can see for the first time rows of whitecaps against the dark waters. Windy Arm is indeed windy and this crossing is going to be one to remember.

  An hour later we are into it. The boat hits each oncoming wave with a hard smack, bounces high and smacks again. If Peggy Anne is frightened, she does not show it; indeed, she is laughing at the bumps, while her little sister is positively gleeful. It occurs to me that for them it is rather like a ride in an amusement park.

  We turn to the rear so that we can take the waves on our backs. Only Skip Burns, steering the boat, must face into the storm. With each smack, the bow dips under the water and a four-foot wave rolls over us. Even with our rain gear tied tightly, the water manages to trickle inside our necks and shoes. Each wave catches Skip full in the face. His shock of red hair and drooping mustache are soaking wet but he manages to keep his eye on the far shore. An ordinary boat would be half full of water by now but these inflated craft are designed to be self-flushing. Skip pulls out a plug in the stern and the forward movement forces the bilge water out.

  The waves increase in fury. The boat pitches crazily. I try to look back through the binoculars but it is impossible. Well behind us I can occasionally glimpse The Slush Box. She seems to be dipping directly into the water, like a submarine, only to rise and then dip again. Of the slower Pig there is no sign.

  So it goes for forty-five minutes until we reach a small wooded island and, for the moment, the ordeal is over.

  “We’re about at the half-way point,” Skip says. “Might as well have some lunch before we go at her again.”

  We have stripped off our rain gear and have a fire going by the time The Slush Box arrives. Behind it, rolling like a fat log and labouring in the heavy swell, we can spot The Pig almost enveloped in foam. The passengers in the other boats are wetter than we are. Patsie has already stripped down to her long underwear and, with the others, is huddling over the fire. She has opened up her dripping pack and laid out all her clothes to dry on nearby bushes. Fortunately the sun has come out and the fire is a good one. We cook hot dogs on long sticks and drink the whole case of beer. As Patsie puts it, in the log, “it was quite bliss after having our mandatory bath.” As for the journey across Windy Arm “although it was dangerous and scary it was fun and adventurous and gave us something to talk about.”

  But the journey is only half over. Two hours later, damp still but warmer, we face the whitecaps again and the ordeal is repeated for another forty-five minutes. At last we reach the lee of the shoreline and the waters grow calmer. Ahead of us lies Tagish Post in the channel that leads to Marsh lake. Here, in the stampede days, every boat was required to stop and check in with the Mounted Police. (My father stopped here and registered at 3 a.m. on July 4, 1898.) Now, like almost every settlement on the water route to Dawson, it has vanished.

  We enter Marsh lake and, not far from Tagish Post, we make camp for the evening. The boats look as if a disaster has hit them, as indeed one has. Our nineteen cardboard boxes have been reduced to sodden mush. Fortunately much of the food has been packed in plastic but some is inedible: a tin box of Peek Frean’s biscuits, though tightly sealed, is half full of
water.

  “Thank God for plastic garbage bags!” says Janet, whom Skip is already calling “Mama.” She has had the good sense to line every cardboard box with one. “But why,” she asks herself, “didn’t I pack everything in wooden crates?” She and Pamela are now sorting out the mess and trying to mark the right days on the right bags.

  Dinner is discovered in the remains of a box on which we can still see the faintly pencilled words DAY TWO. We will sit down to a meal of asparagus soup, sauerkraut, apple butter, smoked pork chops and fruit. Patsie, who is a vegetarian and has brought along supplies of her own, such as red lentils and crunchy Granola, welcomes this meal because she can enjoy all of it except the pork chops.

  Most of the group retires early but one or two of us stay up to catch the sun’s glow reddening the blue hills and to listen to Skip Burns tell the story of his wedding day, just four days before-a wedding such as the North had never seen before. He tells it with great feeling in the soft North Carolina accent that Peggy Anne unconsciously imitates. (“Skip says it’s tarn to raz and shan,” she told me the first morning. “What does ‘tam to raz and shan’ mean?”)

  “The idea first came to me after three years of hiking that Chilkoot Trail,” Skip is saying. “We were originally going to have the ceremony at Crater lake, just below the summit, but the people, you know, decided it would be awful difficult getting away up there, so the second choice was the old log church at Bennett and it was a good one.”

  On the day of the wedding, one hundred and sixty-seven people turned up on the shores of Lake Bennett.

  “You should have seen it,” Skip said. “All colours of tents all over the hills. It was like the great tent city of ‘98 all over again.”

  The guests ranged all the way from Chilkoot packers to a long-haired rock group who brought along an organ, violin, flute and drums. I had heard about this band in the lunchroom at Bennett; by all accounts it never stopped playing. Two of Skip’s great aunts came up from North Carolina and so did his 76-year-old grandmother, a member of the family he described as “in the final throes of southern aristocracy.” The oldest guest was 82 and the youngest three.

  To feed this army Skip supplied sixteen hams and as many turkeys, several wheels of Canadian and Swiss cheese, sixteen watermelons, two bushels of grapes, two more of apples, and a barrel each of pickles, pilot bread, peanuts and popcorn. There were also eighty cases of beer and the logistic and legal problems of getting that to Bennett would have defeated a less determined entrepreneur. Bennett has no beer store and, since it is in British Columbia, it is illegal to import cases from either Alaska or the Yukon Territory. Skip got on the phone to the Liquor Control Boards in Victoria and Whitehorse and in the end was granted a special permit. “It’s never been done before,” the man in B.C. told him, “but I’m not going to have this on my conscience.”

  Skip has all the eloquence of a true romantic and as he tells the story of the wonderful wedding, it comes alive for us: the tents billowing on the hillside above the lake, the picnic trestles loaded with food, the rock band in full throat and then the service itself in the early evening.

  “That service was totally designed by Cheri and myself. The main part was the two of us telling the guests why we had chosen to become married. After that we had special music. One of our helpers, who’s 15, played the first song on the organ and that was The Impossible Dream. The very last song was played by the whole rock group; it was a Cat Stevens song but I forget the name right now. Then after the music, the Unitarian minister made it all nice and legal.”

  As Skip talks, the pink in the sky is giving way to grey. Cheri sits next to her husband, nodding occasionally, but saying very little. Below us, the surface of the lake loses its glitter and changes to sheet metal. Behind us, a flashlight glimmers in the woods. There is no wind; even the aspen leaves have stopped trembling. The hills go from blue to black as dusk falls.

  “Let me tell you what Cheri wore,” Skip says. “She wore this gown, which was an 1898 gown. Ruffles all the way down, you know? The most beautiful wedding dress I’ve ever seen. Well, I had for me some special pants made. They were blue suede. And I had a wedding shirt made to my own design but patterned roughly after an 1898 shirt. We played some roles that day, I can tell you.”

  I remember them as I first saw them in their tattered blue jeans, bent double under the weight of their packs and struggling up the forty-five degree incline of the Chilkoot. As Skip talks, I see them again, in that oddly effective Victorian garb, standing before their congregation of friends and explaining why they had decided to marry. Everyone was standing up for that service because the Bennett church has no pews. But Skip’s friends had cleaned it from tower to nave, spread a carpet of evergreen boughs on the dirt floor and built an altar out of rocks, decorated with wild flowers and 104 specially-made candles. The church has no windows but the work party had made one from broken bottles-worn pieces of coloured glass that had lain hidden in the sedges since the goldrush days and which now spelled out the word PEACE above the altar.

  “Cheri and I were to sleep in the steeple of the church. There’s no floor there, either, but somebody picked up all the boards they could find in Bennett and made one. You know, it was just an incredible evening. The church and the whole area around was full of some kind of energy. It was love all around.” He puts his arm around his young bride and she lays her head on his shoulder. We can no longer see the far hills. It must be close to midnight.

  I had heard that it poured rain all night but Skip tells us that this in no way dampened the spirits of the wedding party. The following day everybody packed up and tried to get on the train to Skagway. By some misfortune the reservations had been ignored and, as the train was oversold, there were no seats left.

  “What did you do, Skip?”

  “They were very good about it, the train people. They just kind of broke the rules and let everybody ride back.”

  I had heard about the ride, which must have been a memorable one: one hundred and sixty-seven people, soaking wet, standing all the way and singing their heads off to the music of the organ. The tourists who came to visit the peaceful Yukon must have been baffled.

  “Well,” Skip says, “there were some who were just a bit overwhelmed, yes.”

  “What about your grandmother and those two great aunts from North Carolina? How did they take it?”

  “Well, sir, that was probably the tensest part of the whole thing. I was really apprehensive, you know, about what they might think of that wedding, particularly the great aunts that I hardly knew anyway. But it was a good thing for them because they all left with smiles on. And one of my great aunts at the wedding, well it took me half an hour to get her to stop crying, even when it was over.

  “Come to that,” Skip says, “I was pretty choked up myself.”

  DAY THREE

  We are not yet an organized camping party; merely a cheerful rabble. It is eleven before we push off down Marsh lake and Skip says it will help if we can cut an hour off our departure time. Yet this is, after all, a holiday and nobody wants to be part of a military operation. “Stop cracking the whip, Dad,” says Penny, when I try to hurry everybody along. I swallow my retort. “You’re so much alike, you two,” Janet reminds me. “You strike sparks off each other. You can’t push Penny.” You can’t push her sister, Pamela, either but for totally different reasons. How is it, I often wonder, that two daughters born of the same parents within eighteen months can be so different? “Penny reminds me a lot of you when you can’t find your socks,” Janet says. I see myself, rushing about the house, screaming for my socks, and I have to laugh. If Pamela cannot find her socks-and there are days when she cannot seem to find anything-she merely goes barefoot. One is like the mother, the other like the father-even to the physical resemblance. But both have my own mother’s large brown eyes, which she, in turn, inherited from her father.

  Penny wants to be a film maker and she is making films now with our Super-8 as we set
off down the lake. The morning is bright and the water is calm. All of these lakes are exquisite when the sun shines. The colours change constantly, from Nile green to deep purple and the surrounding hills change colour, too, depending on the mood of the weather. Today they are shadowy blue, blending imperceptibly with the frost blue of the sky. The occasional cloud scuds across the mountain tops, its shadow turning the slopes violet. The flanks of the mountains are scarred and pitted by glacial fans and spangled with the silver thread of cataracts that hang suspended from the upper ledges. Ahead of us, a flock of Merganser ducks scoots up from the water and settles again a hundred yards away. Little spotted sandpipers skitter along the banks. Sometimes in the sky we can see a kestrel wheeling and later on the occupants of The Pig gain status by spotting a bald eagle diving for a fish.

  In time we reach the end of Marsh lake and there, ahead of me, I see the first familiar hills bordering the Yukon river proper-hills that are for me like no other hills, their shoulders dark with spruce, their rounded tops bare of trees and grooved by time. Directly ahead lies Miles Canyon, the once-dreaded gorge which Lieut. Frederick Schwatka, the explorer, named after his boss, General Miles of the United States Army. Schwatka also named Lake Bennett after the publisher of the New York Herald. In fact, he named every major point on the river so that today a good many familiar names in the Canadian Yukon are American; but then it was a United States cavalry officer, not a Canadian, who first thought to follow the great river from its source to its mouth.

  We turn our motors off and plan to paddle through the canyon while Penny’s friend, Robert Holmes, leaps off onto the shore to photograph the adventure. There was a time when this journey through the gorge and the rapids beyond was considered a dangerous feat. In the first days of the stampede scores of boats were wrecked here; outfits were ruined and several lives lost. But a power dam at the far end has tamed the canyon so that it is now no more than a carnival ride.