Drifting Home Page 5
My father could not go East with us. As a government mining recorder he was given two weeks’ holiday a year but in those days it took two weeks to reach Ontario. The Yukon was a kind of prison for men on salary. There were no airplanes; the first one did not reach Dawson until 1927. It took several days to reach Whitehorse by steamboat, another day by train to Skagway, then several more days down the coast to Vancouver and another four days by train to Toronto. In the winter, the only escape was by open sleigh–an exhausting five-day journey to Whitehorse in temperatures that often dropped to 40 below. Because of this, the government allowed its employees to accumulate their holidays over a period of years but my father had not yet saved up enough to make the Outside journey worthwhile. It would be another seven years before he was able to spend a full winter away from Dawson. For more than ten years he did not have a day off except for those three weeks on the river. He worked a five and one-half day week, week in and week out; when he met us in Whitehorse he had not seen us since the previous fall.
I do not think he minded not having holidays, since there were compensations. He walked home a block and a half for lunch. He was finished work at 4:30. He never experienced the tensions or frustrations of city life. He never needed a car. Living in Dawson during the short, intense summers was like living in a summer camp. In June, July and August, the river was his highway and the Klondike valley his fishing ground. The winters could be viciously cold but he made the most of them; it amused him to fashion a scarf pin out of mercury, which freezes at 40 below, and see how long it would last. And when he walked home from work in the pitch darkness, he could examine the stars, which were an eternal fascination to him. In the Scientific American, which he saved for winter reading and absorbed thoroughly, there were monthly maps of the heavens and these he committed to memory. He and I would study the star maps and he would teach me the names of the constellations of Orion and Andromeda and the Pleiades and the Little Bear and show me how to find the North Star by using the pointers of the Big Dipper. And then we would go out into the snow and gaze up into the night and pick out the pinpoints of the real stars, shining more brightly than they do in the cities because the air was free from smog and the stars were the only lights that shone around us.
More than most men today, my father had time for his family. Often on the way home from school, my sister and I would go into his office and wait for him to finish, watching him as he worked at his desk, the armlets keeping his cuffs high, a green eye-shade on his forehead. Then we would be allowed to ride on the carts as the great books of mining files were rolled back into the vault at closing time and we would take his hand and walk with him up the steep roadway that led to our home.
This river trip was one of the great events of his life. He rarely reminisced about the stampede; it was so much a part of the background of the town that it was taken for granted. But in the years that followed, he and my mother constantly looked back on those sunlit days when we rowed around Laberge and drifted down the river. My sister and I still talk about it whenever we meet. We were very young at the time; I had just turned six and she was not yet five, but certain moments of that journey are forever imprinted on our minds. Remember how they took the bread to bed with them to make it rise? Remember how he scooped an oven out of thebank? Remember how we shot the rapids and Mamma wanted to get out? Remember the day on Lake Laberge when we caught the big fish?
It all comes back again–that sudden tug on the rolling line. It can’t be a fish; you must have snagged the bottom … No, by George, it is a fish and it’s a whopper … Damn, I’ve got no net … have to use a knife … Don’t look, children …; My mother raised a large black umbrella and popped us beneath it, but I peeked out and in one forbidden instant witnessed a thrilling spectacle: a fish that seemed as big as a shark, lashing about in the boat, and my father, hunting knife in hand, standing astride the seat and stabbing it to death. It was big enough to serve us all for three full meals. There are fewer fish in Lake Laberge today; pollution from Whitehorse has taken its toll.
Now the present intrudes upon the past. When we are about two-thirds of the way down the lake the weather abruptly changes. The sun vanishes. A stiff wind springs out of nowhere. The waters turn choppy. A kind of darkness settles over Laberge.
The boats are strung out for about a mile. Far to the rear I can see The Pig making heavy weather, the rising waves already breaking across her bow. Scotty Jeffers, in the freight canoe, has been running beside us but now he drops back. Skip’s lead boat still rides high, but as the going gets rougher and the waves higher, it becomes more difficult to manoeuvre. We feel a cold spray on our faces and then the spray grows heavier and buckets of water begin to wash over us. The wind continues to rise, the waves to heighten, and the boats are now slap-slapping against the hardness of the water, like wagons bumping over a rocky road. This is the dreaded Lake Laberge squall, which I have been hearing about since childhood but have never experienced. I remember the entry in my father’s diary for July 9, 1898: “Bad wind across lake sprung up & we had hard time to make camping ground.”
Peter, who loves engines, has been at the tiller with Skip beside him. Suddenly Skip’s face changes. He seizes the tiller from Peter and swings the boat around. “Scotty’s in trouble,” he says.
As the boat turns, I look back and see the raised paddle that is our signal for distress. I feel a strange sensation in my stomach. The freight canoe, which holds all of our provisions and most of our kit and equipment, has fallen far behind and is clearly about to sink. Indeed, it appears to have gone under, for all we can see through the waves and the spray is the figure of Scotty in his orange rain jacket standing, apparently, upon the water and waving his oar.
The other boats are turning too, but we are the first to reach the canoe. It is already half full of water and the waves are breaking over the side, threatening to swamp it. The engine has failed and Scotty is pumping furiously.
“It’s coming in faster than I can get it out,” he tells Skip.
Oddly, he is still smiling. He is 21, and, in spite of his blonde beard, looks younger–an attractive, pink-cheeked youth, forever cheerful. He reminds me of Peggy Anne, who seems to have a permanent smile painted across her face. Peggy Anne cannot help smiling, even when she is mad at somebody or, more surprisingly, when she believes that a ghost or a witch or a vampire is lurking in the woods, ready to jump out at her. It is not an impish grin, like Perri’s or Patsie’s, but a true smile, like her mother’s–sunny, open and innocent, full of trust and good humour. It is more than a smile; it is an attitude. Scotty has it, too, and now in the midst of adversity he does not lose it.
“Can you make it over to land?” Skip asks. “There’s some shelter behind that point. We can tow you.”
“I think so,” says Scotty, still pumping.
The Slush Box takes him in tow and we go ahead in Miss Bardahl. The shore is covered in driftwood and by the time Scotty is pulled in, we have an enormous fire going.
Paul and I are remarkably dry, partly because we have more effective rain gear and partly because we are in the fastest boat. The occupants of The Pig are soaked to the skin. The waters of the lake are close to freezing. Perri and Peggy Anne are crying with the cold and the others are miserable, numbed by the constant battering of the waves in their faces, plastering their hair and running down their necks. Even their shoes are full of water and as they stand huddled round the fire it seems impossible for them to warm up. They have been literally sitting in the lake because the slower Pig does not flush out as easily as the faster boats. Paul, however, is in great spirits.
“Rationale, Mum!” he shouts. “Open up the rationale!”
It is a word he has invented to describe the emergency rations that Janet doles out daily to each boat: mainly raisins and chocolate bars. To Paul and his younger sisters, their ritual consumption has become the highlight of the trip. They live from hour to hour, expectantly awaiting the next piece of mushy chocolate, and ye
ars from now, when somebody mentions this river journey, they will probably think of Rowntree’s York Dark or Neilson’s Burnt Almond.
Patsie, who eats no meat or fish, cannot fathom her younger brother’s obsession. But I sympathize with Paul for at his age it was my obsession, too. When I recall my boyhood in the Yukon and my early teens in Victoria, I conjure it up in terms of confections (just as I conjure up my later teens in terms of popular songs). When I think of a certain walk with my mother up the Moosehide Trail behind Dawson, I think of toffee rolls; it is the earliest memory I have-a memory of a memory, really, for I was only two years old at the time; but I can still remember unwrapping each piece of toffee as we sat on two rocks by the side of the trail and how they tasted. When I think of those hot summer days in Dawson, when we hid under the shade of the wooden sidewalks, I think of the ice cream cones which the B & F Store sold, two for a quarter, and which were made of condensed milk. (It was a long time before I grew used to the comparatively mild taste of “Outside ice cream.”) When I think of taking the ferry across the river and hiking through the hills to the old shipyard, where the carcasses of the Julia B. and the Schwatka sat on the ways, I think of two square chocolate bars called Pieface and Fat Emma. Newly introduced, one was made of dark chocolate wrapped around marshmallow and nuts, the other of milk chocolate, filled with caramel. Whenever I think of those old and battered steamboats, on which we used to play (I’m captain! I’m captain! … No – you was captain last time; I’m captain!), the sweet, gooey taste of those chocolate bars comes back to me.
To this day I connect the station at Banff with Coca Cola. There was no Coca Cola in the Yukon and, though I had seen advertisements for it on the backs of magazines, I was never quite sure what it was. Svelte women in cloche hats were depicted drinking it, accompanied by young men with high starched collars and profiles of incredible regularity. It could not, then, be ordinary soda pop because that was something children drank on August 17, Discovery Day, the big fall festival that marked the original discovery of gold on Bonanza creek. This was a day of footraces and dancing and a good deal of drinking by the adult population and the consumption of staggering quantities of free pop by the children. The pop was dispensed from a booth in Minto Park by a Mr. Schwartz, who made some of it himself, and the wonderful thing was that you could have all you wanted. The kind that Mr. Schwartz made was strawberry, very sweet and fizzy, but there was also Orange Kist and Cream Soda and a brown variety with a complicated name that escapes me, the label of which extolled its therapeutic qualities and showed a drawing of a man with a handlebar mustache, wearing an undershirt and flexing his muscles. This we kept until the following day and drank very slowly over a period of several hours, shaking it from time to time to make it fizz, and examining ourselves to see if its health-giving properties were taking effect. But of Coca Cola there was not a drop in Dawson. It was not until I had turned 11, and our family made a trip to the Outside world, and I was exposed to a series of wonders I did not know existed, that I drank a Coca Cola for the first time. I remember being told by an experienced boy, who had been Outside any number of times, that you could buy a bottle of pop for a nickel, but I did not believe him. There were no nickels in Dawson and no dimes, either. The smallest coin was a two-bit piece; that was what you paid for pop, except on Discovery Day. But in Banff, when the train stopped at the station and my father was re-examining the miracle of the Rockies, I slipped inside the lunchroom with my nickel and, sure enough, was able to purchase a bottle of Coca Cola. The taste was extraordinary, being nothing like Mr. Schwartz’s strawberry pop or anything else I had ever sampled. I have drunk a fair amount of Coca Cola since that day but have never been able to conjure up the original flavour; perhaps they have changed the formula. At any rate, I understand Paul for my own childhood was a succession of Oh Henry! bars, Lucky Pops, Sweet Maries, humbugs, lemon sticks, jaw-breakers, peppermint-flavoured wax teeth, chocolate-covered cherries, Rowntree’s Plain York bar with Your Extra Piece and then Another Extra Piece, Lowney’s Creamy Toffee (covered with bits of hair and cloth from your pocket), licorice whips and whistles that froze brittle in the winter and had to be thawed out in the mouth, ju-jubes, sherbet powders sucked through a straw, comfits with mottoes on them, hard mints, and, of course, Canada Dry gingerale, which was served only on Christmas Day and always made my nose ache in the most wonderful manner.
Paul gets his way and Janet passes out chocolate bars and dried fruit, the only lunch we can manage today. I choose an Oh Henry! because the taste of it takes me back to a certain picnic with my family to the Midnight Dome, the highest point above the town, when we were each allowed a slice of an Oh Henry! bar. I munch on mine and see once again, in memory’s eye, the Klondike river below us, choked with tailing piles, and hear, in memory’s ear, the whine of a distant gold dredge – that banshee sound of screaming cables borne on the wind, which used to terrify me as a child, because I thought of the dredge as a living monster–and far below, in the streets of Dawson, the rattle of a livery wagon and the sound of voices. In the North the air is so clear that a man standing on this hill above the town can sometimes overhear a conversation in the street far below.
“It looks to me like she’s a little calmer,” Skip is saying. “It’s hard to tell from here but it doesn’t look too bad out there. What do you think?”
I think we should press on, before the wind springs up again. Though the lake is still choppy, the fury has abated and Scotty has fixed his motor. We douse the fire and tumble into the boats, but not before an extra ration of chocolate is divided among us.
The surface is bumpy but navigable, and within an hour we have reached the end of the lake and the ghost settlement of Lower Laberge. Here on a deserted bank some of the children spy a little white table, sitting all by itself as if waiting for guests who will never arrive. It is such a curious sight that they insist on bringing the boat closer for a better look and Penny, the film buff, constructs in her imagination a Fellini-like sequence in which, as we move closer, the table is seen to be laid with white linen and silver candlesticks and an untouched pheasant under glass. Furniture in the wilderness is not new to me, though. It forms part of the backdrop of my boyhood: tables and chairs, bedsteads and stools, armoires and sideboards rising out of the tall grasses; locomotive engines rusting in the woods; boarded-up stores chockful of the discarded paraphernalia of the goldrush: couches, gold pans, seltzer bottles, hand organs, grand pianos, Yukon stoves, chimney lamps, walking sticks, flowered chamber pots and glassware; cabins, their doors swinging permanently open to reveal a jumble of old newspapers, discarded letters, fading calendars, unstuffed mattresses and peeling wallpaper. In Dawson we lived surrounded by old machinery that no longer worked. Rusting boilers, huge cogwheels, gears, axles, frayed belting, pumps and pieces of dredges, drive-shafts, pistons and engines of every description were piled in hedgerows along the streets and the riverbank. Behind the school were great boilers, half hidden by the willow, so big a boy could (and did) hide inside them and beside these boilers were massive keystone drills, around which we clambered, playing at cops and robbers. Across the Klondike river lay the remains of a railway: passenger cars, green with age, lined up in the bushes and a pump car that actually worked sat on a small stretch of track beside Bonanza creek. A little white table all alone on a beach is no surprise to anyone brought up in a decaying mining town.
Now, on our right we see another odd spectacle. Like a vast, wooden whale, the hull of an old Casca looms out of the willows. There were three steamboats successively named Casca but all are fused in my memory as a single stern-wheeler. It is hard to connect this rotting hull with the proud ship, pennants flying, whistle sounding, paddlewheel whirling, that was generally the first to round the Dawson bluffs in the spring after the ice had broken in the river.
In those days, when winter sealed us off from the world, the arrival of the Casca signalled the arrival of summer and caused a wave of excitement to sweep over the town. We ha
d not seen fresh fruit since the previous fall. Now great piles of it would grace Apple Jimmy Oglow’s stand across from the steamboat docks on Front Street. Familiar faces, driven from the town by the onset of winter, would reappear. American tourists from California and Texas would mingle with us briefly, snap their pictures in front of Robert Service’s log cabin and spend their money in the souvenir shops. On boat nights there would be dances for the tourists in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall and in the movie house we called the D-Three-A’s–the letters standing for the defunct Dawson Amateur Athletic Association. The Casca represented our link with the Outside. As long as the river was open and the steamboat whistle could be heard, we knew we were tied to civilization. When the ice floes began to drift past town and the last boat chugged out onto the grey river under the grey clouds of October, then we realized we were again in prison.
The sound of that first whistle in early June was as musical as the robin’s first call. Those three long blasts would electrify the town. One Sunday morning my sister and I set off for Sunday School and had barely reached the church door when the Casca’s whistle sounded. St. Paul’s Anglican church sits almost on the very rim of the river bank and as we looked south we could see the familiar white wood-smoke moving along behind the islands; and then the big yellow stack itself came into view. The church service, which preceded Sunday School, was still in progress but within moments the congregation broke from the double doors and raced down Front Street towards the White Pass dock. My sister and I and our friend, Axel Nordling, were borne along on the wave. We stood in the crowd on the wharf, marvelling as the big boat puffed in. A rope was thrown out and snubbed tightly, the gangplank rattled down and the passengers moved off. The freight doors opened and we could see crates of fruit – bananas, apples, oranges, even grapes-being trundled over to Apple Jimmy’s. There would be no Sunday School that day; our collection money-fifty cents and twenty-five cents respectively–burned in our pockets.