Drifting Home Read online

  My father reached the canyon on July 7, 1898, and promptly sent a postcard to his mother: “We have now passed one of the greatest obstacles in our journey, the White Horse rapids, which we did not attempt to shoot. We had the stuff packed on the tramway from the canoe, and the canoe as well, and part of the stuff from the boat. A pilot took charge of the boat through the Canyon and Rapids with Charlie and Mart in it. It must have been very exciting. The rest of us walked. The tramway (there are 2, one on each side of the canyon) is about 3 miles long with wooden rails, squared on the one we came by & round logs on the other. Canyon is 3 miles long, 9 mile current & 60 ft. wide with cliffs of columnar basalt, probably like Giant’s Causeway in Ireland … 30 or 40 feet high & perpendicular. Current in rapids 15 miles an hr. A boat went up yesterday with 1st consignment of gold from Dawson. Reports vary from ½ to 2 million. The owners were pitching horseshoes at $100 a shot. (Not a game, mark you, but a shot!) Mosquitoes frightfully thick & vicious. Love, Frank.”

  The red basalt walls rise above us as we slide into the canyon. My father underestimated their height; actually they rise for seventy-five feet. In the centre, the canyon widens out and here, in the old days, the stampeders encountered a great whirlpool that sucked more than one boat under. It is scarcely visible now in the higher water caused by the dam.

  Above us people are standing on the bridge across the canyon, waving to us; our passage, seen from above, looks far more hazardous than it really is-or so Robert tells me. I can see him, on the bridge, focussing his camera. With his blonde beard and long hair he looks a bit like General Custer.

  On the far side of the canyon, we can see the power dam which has obliterated the famous rapids from which the town of Whitehorse takes its name. The Yukon river runs for 2200 miles from Lake Bennett to the Bering Sea, navigable for its entire distance, and the dam is the only obstacle in all that distance. The power interests have for years looked at this wild river with hungry eyes. There is an immediate four millions of horsepower to be harnessed here and an ultimate twelve millions or more. There have been plans on both sides of the border for a series of dams on the Yukon-projects I find truly horrifying. One scheme is to dam the river below Whitehorse and then turn it back upon itself so it flows towards the Alaskan coast. This would involve flooding the beautiful land through which we have just come. The sinuous lakes would become bloated. Every trace of the goldrush would be obliterated. The river would be forced back through tunnels in the Coastal Mountains into penstocks on the Alaskan side. The results would be similar to those caused by the Kitimat power development in British Columbia. That project destroyed half of Tweedsmuir National Park. I have seen the destruction from the air: each swollen lake is encircled by a ring of broken trees and rotting vegetation several hundred yards deep-a labyrinth of deadfalls, drowned in the rising waters, so impenetrable that the moose and other game can no longer make their way to the water’s edge to feed. No energy crisis in the world is worth this obscenity but there are still those who talk glibly of the Yukon’s great potential. The potential is there-but not in horsepower. The potential is the river itself, unchanged and unchanging, coiling majestically through the whole of the Yukon and Alaska, past unscarred forests to its rendezvous with the sea.

  We pull the boats into the shores of the man-made lake, named for Lieut. Schwatka. Trucks will move everything around the dam site. Meanwhile, Janet will forage for new food cartons and extra supplies-especially rubber boots -while the rest of us look over Whitehorse.

  It is not the most prepossessing community in Canada. Patsie describes it as “a minute cosmopolitan blight upon the rich land of stark rock and evergreen mountain.” I was born here but my parents moved back to Dawson when I was still a baby. I cannot even find the house in which I was first raised, though I know it still exists. My memories of White-horse go back to the fall of 1939, when it was a sleepy hamlet of three hundred people nestled on a strip of volcanic soil between the benchland and the river. There was scarcely any traffic on the dusty roads. The biggest event of the day was the arrival of the train from Skagway. But on that day in 1939 there was more important news: war had been declared in Europe, a catastrophe that would transform Whitehorse. When I next saw the town, it had become the anchor point for the Alaska Highway and the North West staging route-and was almost unrecognizable. Today, except for the old steamboats, a few log cabins and some relics in the goldrush museum, Whitehorse is like any other small, badly developed Canadian town of twelve thousand. We drive out to the Takhini Hot Springs through the inevitable strip development-chicken palaces, car lots, motels and drive-ins-and we might be anywhere: Brampton or Calgary or Victoria. Only the green river, rustling past the town on its long journey to the sea, makes Whitehorse special.

  At Takhini we shower away the Yukon’s grime and then sit and relax up to our necks in the steaming water. The small children splash about in the shallow concrete pool and giggle with delight; the rest of us just soak. There are hot springs to be found all through the so-called Frozen North, from the top of British Columbia to the heart of Alaska. The finest of all are on the Liard river. There, the wild violets, grown fat as pansies in the steam, are bunched right to the water’s edge and the pools have been left in their natural state.

  “Remember last year, eh Dad?” Peter reminds me. “How good it felt?” We had come down from the Chilkoot and picked up the Whitehorse train at Bennett and gone directly to these hot springs, every muscle aching from our long climb over the Pass. These therapeutic sulphur waters were exactly what we needed.

  We soak for an hour, dress and return by car to the boats, which are moored downstream hard by the old shipyard, in the very shadow of the decaying sternwheeler, Whitehorse, which towers above us, her white paint long faded but her name still visible on the pilot-house. On the other side of town, they have restored the Klondike, the last steamboat ever built on the river, but it is really the Whitehorse that should be kept as a reminder of the steamboat days. All her sister craft foundered. The Dawson sank in Rink Rapids in 1925. The Casca struck the Dawson’s hull a few years later and was abandoned. The original Klondike sank in the Thirtymile. The Nasutlin and the Aksala and the Yukon are all gone. But the Whitehorse continued in service to the end. Now this brave old steamer, which survived the rapids and the ice and the vagaries of the twisting channels, cannot retard the onset of old age any more than she could compete with the changing cycle of transportation. Like the old sourdoughs, who used to sit on the verandah of St. Mary’s Hospital in Dawson, she is slowly fading away and will soon be gone.

  I never think of the steamboat days without thinking of my friend Hambone. In Victoria, after we left the Yukon, he was my closest crony. We met in the Boy Scouts and each became patrol leaders. We put out the troop newspaper together, helped plan the campfire entertainments and every Sunday, rain or shine, we took our patrols together on a hike, usually to Thetis lake, then a wooded area far from town. When the sun shone, the others came along; but when it rained Hambone and I would set off all alone, wearing our yellow slickers. It is those rainy days I remember best, the two of us trudging resolutely through the woods, with the water dripping off our broad Scout hats. It was a point of honour to cook a meal in the rain. Usually, we took shelter under a bridge, made a fire using the mandatory single match, fried up beans in a pan and talked about life and the future and our friends at school and the girls we were afraid to date.

  When I was 17 I set off again for the Yukon to get a summer job in a mining camp. Nobody believed I could get a job because jobs were almost nonexistent in the 1930s. When I told my friends that jobs in the Yukon were paying the unbelievable sum of $4.50 a day, they refused to believe me. But with my father’s help I got such a job and when I returned to Victoria in the fall I urged Hambone to come north with me the following year.

  All that winter we made our plans. Then, in May, a few days before we were to leave, a telegram arrived from Dawson. Jobs had suddenly become scarce. Scores of unemplo
yed men were roaming the streets. There would be a job for me but not for Hambone.

  “Dammit,” said Hambone, “I’m going anyway! I’ll find something.”

  What he found was a job on a steamboat. He became a steward on the old Keno and though it didn’t pay as well as the mining camp it was far pleasanter to spend the summer chugging up and down the river, than to work in ankle deep mud on the flats of Dominion creek. When we met again that fall Hambone had become a confirmed and enthusiastic Yukoner.

  Our close comradeship ended about that time. University and the army separated us. In the thirty-odd years since, I have seen Hambone on only two occasions, both of them lamentably brief. He went into the tourist business for a while, I heard, but after that I lost track of him. Now, looking up at the splintered bulk of the old sternwheeler, I think of him again and wonder where he is and what he’s doing.

  We are not yet ready to leave. My nephew, Berton, who plans to become a journalist in the family tradition, is writing a series of articles about the trip, which he hopes will help him get his foot in the editorial door of a Vancouver newspaper. He is off interviewing Alan Innes-Taylor, the old Yukon hand who knows more about the river than anyone alive and who has provided us with a set of old steamboat charts for our journey. Some of us go off in search of Berton, stopping for a cold beer on the way.

  It is easier to drink in the Yukon than anywhere else in Canada because of the new liquor laws. You can drink anything you want anywhere you want. You can drink in the middle of the street (as long as you don’t impede traffic) and some, apparently, do. You can drink in your car, and some do that, too. You can drink while driving your car as long as you are not impaired. You can buy a case of beer in a tavern and cart it away with you. A bar can legally stay open all night, if it chooses, because there are no longer any restrictive drinking hours in the Territory. The laws were eased because those in charge decided the alcohol problem could not possibly be any worse than it was and because the Mounted Police were spending too much time dealing with simple liquor offenses. The rate of drunkenness in the Yukon, so I am told, is about the same-no more since the laws were altered (that was impossible) and probably no less. But the jails are no longer crowded.

  We finish our beer and drop in to the tourist agency that Skip uses in Whitehorse. Berton isn’t there but we chat a while about the tourist business, which is increasing. The Territory’s most precious natural asset, it seems to me, is no longer gold, silver or base metals-though many Yukoners still cling to this idea. People in the urban south are hungering for the wilderness and the more they crowd into the cities the more they want to get away. Here, the wilderness rolls on, like the river, for hundreds of miles, scarred and blackened only where the mining interests have invaded the land and retreated. Anyone raised in a mining town knows to his sorrow what happens when the mines run out, as run out they must. How transitory is gold! Most of the Klondike’s treasure, torn from the frozen bedrock, was shipped away by foreigners who mined it, profited from it and returned it to the earth again beneath Fort Knox, U.S.A. But when the tourists come, they bring gold with them and it stays in the country. The real problem is how to save the country for the visitors and at the same time save it from them. Too many newcomers could ravage the land as easily as the miners.

  “Did you know somebody bought Ben-My-Chree?” I am asked.

  “I heard about it at Carcross. Do you know who it was?”

  “Sure. Fellow named Cy Porter. Used to be in the tourist business in Vancouver. Know him?”

  Indeed, I do know him. His name, in my time, was Cyril Pridham, but he later took that of his foster parents who brought him up from childhood in one of the Gulf Islands. So … the man who bought Ben-My-Chree was my old friend, Hambone! He, too, had never been able to get the Yukon out of his blood. Well, Ben-My-Chree would be in good hands.

  When we return to the boats, we find Berton already there. He is not hard to spot in his crimson jacket and his father’s old artillery hat. He has his mother’s dark brown eyes-his grandmother’s eyes-and he has his maternal great grandfather’s instincts. Like him, he is a Marxist and like him, he is going to be a journalist. Looking at Berton, I think again of my mother’s father whom I knew only briefly as a small visiting child, and of whom I was always a little afraid, although he was the gentlest of men. He was very old and almost blind but he worked every day at his desk, dictating his pieces to my mother’s younger sister-a writer who could never stop writing. In the evenings he would sing the old songs: The International and The Red Flag and Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill and many others, most of them political. It was in this atmosphere that my mother had been raised, a city atmosphere of intellectual and political discussion and much poverty. What a contrast it must have been for her when she stepped off the steamboat in 1908 and found herself in a Yukon mining camp. But she has already told that tale in a book of her own.

  At last the boats are re-loaded and we are ready to leave. Scotty Jeffers has packed the big freight canoe with most of our provisions and we all sigh our relief, for that means there will be more room and the boats will ride higher when we reach Lake Laberge tomorrow.

  An old Indian, who has been sitting in the shadow of the Whitehorse, gets to his feet and walks down to talk to us. He is a little drunk.

  “Be careful of Lake Laberge,” he says. “Be careful of sudden squalls.”

  The words are like an echo, ringing down the corridors of the decades. My mind goes back to a July day in 1926 and to this very spot in the lee of the old steamboats, rotting on the ways. (But the Whitehorse, bright with fresh paint, was then in the water.) Another boat loaded with provisions was tied to this bank, ready to push off down the river. It was called The P and L which stood for Pierre and Lucy. My father had named it for his children.

  Down the bank to see us off came the Bishop of the Yukon, Isaac Stringer, dressed in traditional fashion, black gaiters and all. This was no comic bishop out of a Chaplin movie. This big man was as tough as a pilot biscuit-the same bishop who, starving on the Rat River Divide, had boiled and eaten his boots, thus saving his life. That, it is said, provided Chaplin with his most famous scene.

  “Be careful of squalls on Lake Laberge,” I can hear the bishop saying and I remember wondering to myself exactly what a squall was. Was it like a squaw? I had only turned six and did not know all the words yet.

  “We’ll watch out, Bishop,” my father said.

  “Keep close to the shore, Frank. If a squall comes up and you’re out in the middle, you’ll never make it. You know how fast they come up on Laberge.”

  “We’re going to creep around the shore, Bishop,” my father said. And then we got into the boat and waved goodbye to the Bishop Who Ate His Boots and went drifting with the current towards the lake.

  Dusk is about to fall as our own rubber boats and freight canoe push off. We will not travel for long. But we want to get as far downstream from Whitehorse as possible, to escape the pollution it has brought to this section of the river. Raw sewage from the town pours directly into the Yukon and, as we round the corner, we see a mountain of steaming garbage clinging to the high bank and spilling into the water. The dump was not there when The P and L slipped down the river forty-six years ago and it was not there when the steamer Whitehorse brought me past these banks on the first day of a new war. If my children bring their children down the same river on some future odyssey, will the spreading chancre of civilization have turned the whole river into a sewer? Or will that generation, wiser than ours, find some way to preserve these waters for the children who follow?

  DAY FOUR

  I wake to the unwelcome sound of rain pelting against the nylon tent. We have forgotten to fasten the flap and the foot of my sleeping bag is soaking wet. It is well past seven but no one is stirring. Perri, I am sure, is awake for she is a morning person, chipper as a squirrel at the earliest hour. On this trip, she has usually been the first to rise, the first to dress and the first to pop out of her ten
t but there is no sign of her this morning.

  Reluctantly, I pull on my clothes, rain gear and rubber boots and poke my head out. The forest is sopping. Pools of water drown the grasses under my feet as I slop over to the riverbank. Last night’s campfire is a blackened mush. Many of the new cartons that Janet picked up in Whitehorse are already damp under sodden tarpaulins. We have two choices: we can stay huddled in the tents and wait out the rain or have a swift breakfast and push off toward the patch of open sky that lies in the direction of Lake Laberge. I choose the second course. We will try to outrun the rain.

  I search about for a large tree, chip off the wet outer bark and make a fire out of the drier inner pieces, recalling the old days at Thetis lake with Hambone. This morning one match is not enough: it takes a tinful of gasoline to get a blaze going. My plan is to feed everybody in the tents, so that they can keep dry as long as possible. Last night we ate most of a fine country ham. Breakfast will be hot ham sandwiches and cocoa. Perri turns up, wearing her rain hat, plastic coat and rubber boots, and volunteers to help. Skip and his crew start to load the boats. When everybody is fed, the tents come down in a rush; then in a burst of energy we pack up and set off under full power, fleeing from the rain. By the time we reach Laberge we are out of it.

  As we enter the mirror-smooth lake we can see the ruins of the old Mounted Police post on our left. The rain is following us, a dark smear against the forest, but here the waters are smiling in the sun. Around us, rocky cliffs and steep hills rise from the shoreline, and to the west and southeast we can see lines of snowcapped mountains, but as we move farther down the lake, the hills grow smaller. We scud across the glassy surface, each boat nicely trimmed and up on its step, like a seaplane’s float. It will take us only a few hours to make the thirty-one mile run. It took The P and L the better part of a week.

  The crossing of this lake and the sudden plunge through the Five Finger Rapids are the two memories that stand out from that childhood voyage. My father had made a sail for our boat but the wind did not rise and we had to cling to the shoreline while he rowed the full length of Laberge. The exercise did not bother him. He was 56 but as powerful as a grizzly and this was the first holiday he had taken since the end of the Great War. The previous winter had been a lonely one, for the rest of us had been Outside, visiting my mother’s parents in Ontario. No doubt that was the reason he bought up the equipment of a departing dentist and began to fill and pull teeth: it was a way of putting in time. Where he learned the technique I do not know; perhaps he got it out of a book. At any rate, for several years after that my mouth was filled with plaster of Paris, as he experimented with making moulds for false teeth.