Drifting Home Read online

  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. T
here 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 SmilingLieutenant, 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.

  My mother did not find a publisher for her novel. Oddly, she had not chosen to write about the Yukon, which everyone thought exotic but which she thought commonplace, but about Ontario farm life, which everyone thought commonplace but she thought exotic. She was twenty years away from the North before it occurred to her to tell her own story, which was much more romantic and exciting than anything she tried to make up. We did, however, get to a carnival. When the Sunnyside Amusement Park opened up in the spring my father took my sister and me to the lakeshore and there, for several hours, we rode on every device until we had exhausted the list and ourselves and were sticky from cotton candy and dizzy from being whirled about in things that jiggled and buzzed and bumped and lit up. The memory of that magic afternoon with the lights flashing and the music playing and the air heady with incense of frying onions has never left me and ever since I have had a passion for such places–for amusement parks and world’s fairs and Disneylands and exhibitions and sideshows. Like my father, who was 61 at the time and loved every moment of that day (he explained the principle of centrifugal force as we whirled about on the flying swings), I have never been able to get enough of the buzzing and the flashing and the jiggling, perhaps because I had to wait so many years to enjoy it.

  Here on the Yukon all these by-products of civilization seem far away, in time and in geography. We have seen no human sign since we left the Indian family on the Thirty-mile. On we go, round the great bends of the river, each marked on the steamboat charts: Vanmeter Bend and Keno Bend, Glacier Gulch Bend and Big Eddy. On we go past Fife creek and the famous Cassiar Bar, where in the days before the goldrush, the early prospectors made wages panning flour gold, whose lightness brought it down the creeks into the river proper.

  In his diary on July 14, 1898 my father recorded that his party had stopped at Cassiar Bar to look at the operations there and “saw plenty of large but light colours in the pan” before they moved on for dinner at the police post at the mouth of the Big Salmon river. We, too, will have dinner at Big Salmon. We reach the river’s mouth and there, on the far side, we spy the cabins of the deserted village. And still we have seen no people.

  Nothing moves on the river these days. Nothing moves on the banks except the moose, bear and lynx. The cabins grow up out of the grass and the grasses grow up over the cabins, for the roofs are constructed of fertile sod. Within, we find evidence of the past at Big Salmon–old mattresses, brass bedsteads, home-made tables and chairs, and in the trading post, what is left of counter and cupboards. Great salmon racks stand outside near the bank and on these we hang out our clothes to dry.

  We have spent some seven hours on the river, an average run, and we are becoming more organized. One crew is at work putting up the tents. Another is cleaning and gutting the grayling for breakfast. A third is bringing up the food and utensils and making a fire. Pamela is preparing a pot of split pea soup using the hambone from a previous meal. And we have the smoked salmon as an unexpected hors d’oeuvre.

  Patsie has been given the permanent job of locating and establishing a latrine at each campsite, a task to which she brings both enthusiasm and artistry. Now she comes running down the old path–a path worn smooth for more than fifty years by Indian feet–to announce that she has built the best latrine yet, not too far away and yet secluded, downwind, and, for the first time, with a real log to sit on. She is so proud of her handiwork that a bunch of us accompany her into the woods to inspect the wonderful latrine and offer her congratulations.

  We do not linger after dinner. It has been a long and satisfying day and everybody is ready for bed. Only Patsie is still up, drying her damp nightie over the fire. Some of us are already asleep when suddenly we hear her excited shout:

  “The Northern Lights, you guys! The Northern Lights!”

  We tumble out of the tents and there they are, “literally dancing and playing music,” as Patsie describes them in the log–long streaks and curtains of violet and emerald, swirling and shifting across the heavens and making the night almost as bright as the day–giant abstract neon signs, as my father once explained to me, jiggling and flashing and whirling about like a giant carnival in the velvet of the sky.

  DAY SIX

  Today we cut another half hour from our departure time in spite of the fact that we have fresh grayling for breakfast. It is perhaps the most delicious fish I know but then I have eaten only grayling freshly caught from swift-flowing, ice cold waters. When I was a boy of eight I once consumed eight grayling at a single sitting at a fishing camp on Rock creek, a Klondike tributary. That was the year my sister Lucy caught the largest grayling taken that season from Yukon waters and got her photograph in the Toronto Globe. I remember it very well: the small child with the chubby knees holding up the big fish, her large brown eyes, which were her mother’s and are now her son’s, squinting slightly beneath her bangs as she looked into the sun. My Aunt Maude was not amused: “Teaching the child to torture animals!” she said with a snort–or so I heard later.

  I am not a fisherman. I have caught only one grayling in my life and that was under very odd circumstances during the Goldrush Festival in Dawson in 1962. The town was full of newspaper cronies, all of whom had brought along fishing tackle. They treated me as an expert and asked where the best spots were. I had no idea what to tell them until I remembered that fishing camp on Rock creek and so I promised that I would lead them to a place where they could catch grayling. I found Rock creek easily enough, but there was no evidence of any fishing camp; one twist of the stream looked very much like another. Where was the bank from which my little sister had caught that enormous fish? Where was the site of George Jeckell’s lodge, which my f
amily used to visit on certain summer weekends and where my father had once constructed for us that marvellous Roman catapult? Of these there was no sign. Unmarked by man’s presence, the creek raced over its gravel bed between clumps of willows and it was as if no fisherman had ever waded in its waters. I decided I must make good on my pledge and, selecting a likely-looking curve, announced that this was the spot for grayling. The assembly gave me the honour of the first cast. I managed somehow to fling my line out into the water without snagging it on a willow and, to my absolute astonishment, felt an answering tug. A moment later I had a grayling wriggling on the moss. The effect was perhaps the most dramatic and satisfying that I have ever known. I could feel waves of admiration radiating from my audience. I declined to fish further, having made my point, but the others cast all afternoon without being rewarded by so much as a bite. Then as we prepared to leave, an old timer came loping by and gazed on us as if we were demented. “What’re you doing fishing here?” he asked. “Hasn’t been a grayling caught in this area for more than twenty-five years.” Well, yes, there had been, we told him. Just one.

  The boats are packed and everyone is clamouring to sit with everyone else in any boat except The Pig. I split the party into evenly weighted groups: “Mom can ride up with Pamela and Patsie this time. I’ll take The Slush Box with Penny and the two Deaners. The Wows can all go in The Pig.”