Drifting Home Page 8

  As the expected chorus of protest arises from the Wows, I realize I have unconsciously adopted the special argot of our voyage. For reasons that have little logic behind them, the two little girls are known as the Deaners while the four boys: Robert, Peter, Berton and Paul, are called “Wows.” Both names come from Peter, a born mimic, who has for days been imitating people he knows whom he designates as Wows. The other boys have turned the word into adjective and verb as well as noun. Now they are all known as Wows and will be for the rest of the voyage and, when they meet up from time to time, perhaps for the rest of their lives. After all, most proud and closely knit institutions adopt a secret language and families are no exception.

  And so we drift off down the widening Yukon, the Deaners in one boat, the Wows in another. It is a glorious day. Beside me, Penny has taken out a bottle of shampoo and now she leans over the edge, dips her head in the cold water and begins to wash her long hair. Up front, in the canoe, Scotty has hung out his washing to dry. Beside me, the little Deaners are singing to each other. Paul, in The Pig, begins his regular chant about “rationale!” The nearest settlement, indeed the only one in five hundred miles, is seventy-seven miles downstream and it is more than possible that you could go seventy-seven miles in every direction and hear no other human voices.

  “It’s just so peaceful and beautiful up here,” Patsie writes in the log. “There are sandy cliffs eroding down into the river, huge, weird-shaped mountains, and aspen overtaking black spruce.”

  Is it here, or farther upstream, I wonder, that the big dam is talked about-the giant project that would turn all of the upper river into one gigantic reservoir? Laberge would vanish into the mother lake and so would the Thirtymile. Below the dam, this great river would be reduced to a trickle. Mud flats, dried-up channels, hedgerows of drowned trees-all these by-products of civilization and progress, which I have seen to my horror in British Columbia, would be the legacy of the power interests. Worse, history itself would be obliterated as it has already been obliterated by the great dredges that tore up the valleys of the Klondike watershed.

  And this is a curious thing. After a certain interval, junk becomes treasure. In the Middle East that transformation took several thousand years; in the Yukon, not much more than half a century. Skip Burns is already searching the forests for pink insulators, which can be seen occasionally clinging to the tops of the trees, marking the route of the old telegraph line between Whitehorse and Dawson. In less than a decade, these have become prizes. In my boyhood, we were surrounded by junk, much of which would be priceless today. Across from Billy Biggs’ blacksmith shop on Third Avenue stood the old Red Feather Saloon, boarded up and jammed to the ceiling with all manner of strange odds and ends. Hidden beneath the heaps of gold pans and picks was an ancient piano, which nobody bothered with until my friend Bob Darch, the ragtime entertainer, came through town in the Fifties, rummaged beneath the rubble and discovered it was a rare five-pedal Cornish, one of only three ever built. He bought it cheaply, cleaned it up, made it part of his night club act and turned down an offer of three thousand dollars for it. When my father was building his boat in the abandoned hotel on Front Street, my sister and I, rummaging through the accumulated waste at the rear, came upon a thick package of old letters tied with a pink ribbon. They turned out to be love letters, written in 1898 by a prospector on the creeks and sent to a dancehall soubrette in Dawson. We read a few of them–two small children giggling among the cobwebs and sawdust-then threw them away. What would I not give to have them now! In 1954, on Sourdough Gulch, a pup of Bonanza, Colin Low of the National Film Board while making a documentary about the stampede found in a disused cabin a book titled The Politics of Labour by Phillips Thompson. Phillips Thompson was my maternal grandfather and the book was autographed and inscribed to my father on the occasion of his marriage to my mother. He had been working on the steam points that summer, thawing ground for the dredge, and, since he had no money, he and my mother had spent their honeymoon in a tent on Sourdough Gulch. No doubt he had lent the book to a neighbour and did not get it back. When Colin found it, the book had been lying on the cabin floor, untouched, for forty-four years. But then, in my boyhood, every cabin contained such curiosities, and there were thousands of cabins and thousands of picks and thousands of wheelbarrows and thousands of shovels, all scattered about on the floors of the famous creeks–bric-a-brac of every kind, some of it worthless and some of it no doubt priceless, littering the countryside. The individual miners had taken all the gold they could find and departed and, because high freight rates made it impossible to take very much with them, they had left almost everything behind–tinned food, beds and mattresses, books and magazines, letters and documents, pictures and photographs, mining equipment of every description and even musical instruments. To be sure, they had ripped open the ground, slashed down the trees, sullied the clear streams and scarred the landscape. But this pollution was as nothing compared to the ravages that followed when the great dredges were built. Then came the brush-cutting crews, stripping the land of every scrap of green growth and, following them, the bulldozers, knocking down the cabins and after the bulldozers the hydraulic monitors whose jets of water could cut a man in two; and after the nozzles had torn off the rich topsoil and sent it rushing down the creeks towards the river, the thawing crews arrived to turn each valley into a sea of mud–a hideous scar from rimrock to rim-rock, but so pliable that the dredge could bite into it and retrieve what gold was left by the miners. Thus almost all evidence of the historic stampede was obliterated from Bonanza and Eldorado, Last Chance and Gold Bottom, Gold Run, Hunker, Dominion, Sulphur and Quartz creeks. Only in the high benchland and in the dead little towns along the old roads can you find the occasional cabin that dates back before the century. Was all this ruin worth the gold that was left? Or would the relics of the stampede have been more valuable in the long run? The curious thing is that the dredges themselves, having been rendered obsolete when the gold finally ran out a decade ago, have themselves become archaeology. The biggest of them all, which lies half sunken in the baked mud of Bonanza like some trapped dinosaur, has become a prime tourist attraction. Visitors pour out to gaze up at it, towering several storeys above their heads. Children clamber up the links of its giant securing chains – each link as tall as a school-age boy. Its stacker, which once spewed out a steady shower of gravel dross, hangs over the road like a brooding presence. And its buckets, which once bit deep into the bedrock and ripped up the land, have been dismantled and used as road markers. The dredge has become history and if admission were charged to view it, might eventually bring in as much gold from the pockets of the curious as it once dug out of the old creeks.

  While I am pondering these paradoxes we have come into the lee of Dutch Bluff, an immense escarpment around which the river sweeps in a wide arc known as Fourth of July Bend, and there, at the far end of the arc, half submerged in the sand on our right, is the rusting outline of an old dredge. I did not know that there were any dredges working the Yukon river itself and I do not know the history of this one but I see that it is marked on the steamboat charts, which means that it has been here for a very long time, a prehistoric monster, all skeleton and no flesh. It was probably here in the days when our family drifted down the river and almost certainly was here when my father came down alone in the Bluenose. Dredges were commonplace pieces of machinery in those days.

  One of my regrets is that I did not go with him on that last voyage. My mother was not enthusiastic about the idea; she loved the river but also lived in terror that it would claim one of her children as it had claimed more than one of her friends. Our doctor had vanished into the river one summer during a canoe trip and only his dog was found. Later, the river took Harry Francis, the teamster who had been one of my father’s party on that original voyage in 1898. It is cold enough to paralyze you in a few moments and angry enough to suck you under forever should you tumble from your boat. My mother was afraid of that. On the family tr
ip in 1926 I had been frighteningly restless, continually jumping up and leaning over and putting my hands in the water against all orders until I was confined to a small space in the bow, behind a seat, from where I could not squirm out. I was older when my father made his proposal, but still she feared that without another person in the boat, my father, busy in the stern, would not be able to control me. He did not argue but he was determined to make the trip anyway and so it was decided that he would go on ahead of us, for he had a work deadline to meet. He would take his boat down the river and we would follow some time later by steamboat, after a stopover in Vancouver.

  He had the Bluenose shipped to Whitehorse and from there made his way down the Yukon all alone, loving every minute of it. For the river in those days was very much alive. At Big Salmon and Hootalinqua and Yukon Crossing, at Fort Selkirk and Minto and Stewart City, there would be people on the bank to greet him. They would know him well and he would know them all, too. After thirty years he knew everyone in the Territory; many of them had filed mining claims in his recorder’s office in Dawson. The journey down the river would be for him a journey of renewal, allowing him to live again the days of the stampede and the days of the family trip and to greet acquaintances and old friends whom he had not seen in decades. In between the larger communities were single cabins and here it was obligatory to stop; a man living for months in the wilderness was starved for company and for news and it was an act of cruelty to ignore him. I can remember seeing them tearing down from their cabins at the sight of our boat and waving wildly and shouting their heads off, fearful that we might pass them by; and then, when we landed, pressing food and drink upon us and urging us to stay the night and pleading, almost with tears in their eyes, for us to tarry a little longer, and running after us down the bank as we left, crying “Please don’t go yet! Not yet!” So for my father a journey down the river would be like a stroll down a familiar street and I wish I could have gone with him, although I do not blame my mother since she acted out of love.

  While my father navigated the river we stayed in Vancouver at Sylvia Court on English Bay, visiting old Yukon friends. I was still dazzled by the wonders of the Outside world: the Bapco Paint sign on the Granville Street bridge, with a mechanical man painting in different colours; a new confection called a Popsicle; the Chute-the-Chute at Hastings Amusement Park; a movie called Skippy starring Jackie Cooper; and a sing-song at the beach sponsored by the Vancouver Sun where a strapping girl my own age wrestled me to the sand and asked a curious question: “Has your father got a job?” Of course my father had a job. Didn’t everyone’s? I was vaguely aware of the Depression; men came almost daily to the back door of my aunt’s home in Toronto begging for food; but that had nothing to do with me. It was unthinkable that my father should have no job.

  But when he brought the Bluenose into Dawson, he found that he, too, was jobless and his world was shattered. The civil service was cutting back; he was being “superannuated,” as they called it, before his time on a pension of forty-eight dollars a month. That meant goodbye to the Yukon, goodbye to the Bluenose, goodbye to the dog, goodbye to the lazy days on the river, goodbye to the picnics in the hills, goodbye to friends of long standing and goodbye to the good life. Suddenly, every penny counted; we could not afford to bring more than a few prized possessions out of the country with us to our new home in Victoria. When we left at the end of the summer, we left the house we had lived in just as the miners left their cabins, almost fully furnished, new addition and all. My father got seven hundred dollars for that house, which was about what he had paid for it a decade before. There is never a housing shortage in a ghost town.

  We have drifted past Hogan’s Rock and Wolf Bar and Five Mile Bend and Seven Mile Bend and now, on our right, the log roofs of another dead community can be seen above the blazing fireweed. This is Little Salmon Station at the mouth of the river of the same name, a native village emptied many years before by the scourge of influenza. Flu to an Indian is as serious as smallpox to a white man. When I returned to the Yukon for that bittersweet summer of 1932, I found that half of my half-breed schoolmates had died of influenza. It was the only communicable disease we knew in the isolation of the North. I did not catch measles, scarlet fever, chicken pox or mumps until I left the Yukon. But for the half-breed children, who made up half the population of our school, influenza was far deadlier than these childhood ailments. All of them had white fathers and Indian mothers. In the winter they lived at St. Paul’s Anglican Hostel in Dawson; in the summer they returned to the bush. The previous fall I had been playing with a boy named David Watt on a raft we made in the slough that ran behind the Hostel. When I returned, he was gone. I could not comprehend it; I had had my share of flu and I had not thought of Dave Watt as being any different from me, but it had killed him.

  In Little Salmon, the graves are as numerous as the cabins. Indeed, they are like small cabins–a village of spirit houses with sloping roofs, glass windows and curtains, containing dead flowers and teapots and plates for the use of the deceased. That is the way the Yukon Indians bury their dead–or, at least, it is the way they used to.

  In the grasses, Patsie finds a pair of sunglasses, which helps make up for the sweater she left behind at the last stop. “You lose some, you gain some,” she philosophizes in the log. Peter calls her Sarah Scrounger but no one is surprised any longer to discover such things along the river. At one spot Janet came upon a package of pipe cleaners and tried to use them to tie up the plastic bags but they were so old the wire inside had rusted away.

  Carmacks is forty-two miles downstream. To reach it in time to gas up before nightfall, we must use our motors. A few miles above the settlement we spot, high on the right bank, the old coal mine that George Carmack discovered and worked in the days before he made the famous gold find on Bonanza creek. The only coal in Dawson used to come from this mine and soft, dirty coal it was. We have plenty of time to contemplate the mine because, at this point, The Pig runs out of gas. We hook all the boats together and take turns using one motor at a time. And so we chug slowly into the settlement, singing Alouette at the top of our voices.

  Above us is the bridge built to carry the new highway across the river. Because of this obstacle no steamboat can navigate the river between Whitehorse and Dawson; a myopic government has allowed the bridge engineers to design a low span without hinge or swing. This is deplorable because the day is surely coming when it will again be practical to run a steamboat excursion on this waterway: there is nothing in the world to match it and the search for new adventures and sensations in a leisure society has only begun. It is difficult to describe the special quality of a Yukon steamboat journey. For one thing, there are the sounds, all of them unique and now obsolete: the steady slap of the paddlewheel against the churning waters; the chuff-chuff of the engine itself, like a great beast panting in its sleep; the regular rumble of each hand cart loaded with birchwood being flung into the belly of the boat as the boiler gang heaved it into the furnaces; and the sharp toot of the whistle greeting the lonely men, waving from the forested banks. From the deck, to use a phrase of my mother’s, the long scroll of the forest unrolled hour after hour, seen from a different vantage point than from a canoe. The passengers were three storeys above the water and thus had a kind of bird’s eye view of the surrounding landscape. It was always an unhurried trip, the schedule depending upon the moods of the river itself. In midsummer, it was sometimes possible to make the downstream journey from Whitehorse in two days; in the late fall, the struggle upstream could take a week. One was never sure of the schedule and so one never worried; one accepted delays with a certain fatalism and indeed a certain gratitude. Because of its appetite for cordwood the steamboat stopped every few hours at woodcamps located along the river and then we all got off, stretched our legs, picked wild flowers, lay in the sun, and waited for the whistle to sound. Not all of this ritual can be repeated since modern boats would undoubtedly use diesel fuel; yet I can foresee the day
when some entrepreneur will want to reproduce those old-style journeys. When he does there will be plenty of willing customers–but not until the bridge at Carmacks is replaced by something more flexible.

  We bring the boats into a little beach on our left just beyond the bridge. Skip and his crew head into the settlement to arrange for gasoline and some of the others walk up the dusty road to the local tavern for a cold beer. My nephew finds a pay telephone to relay his latest dispatch to his newspaper. There is not a great deal to see at Carmacks. The town is named for the discoverer of the Klondike’s gold, who ran a small trading post on this spot before the stampede. But the settlement that grew up around it, the last remaining centre of civilization between Whitehorse and Dawson, has long since turned its back on the river. Today it faces the new artery of the territory: the highway. Once it was a typical river town: cabins, church, mission house, trading post, school, all constructed of logs, laid out in a neat row on the high bank. Now it is a hodge podge: tavern, gas station, motel, snack bar, grocery store. Carmacks has become a truck stop.

  When we return to the boats, the sun, blood red, is low on the horizon. Beside us, three Indians are pulling in their net, silhouetted against the glittering waters. The three big salmon they have trapped are as crimson as the sunset.

  I find the Odyssey of these Yukon river salmon almost miraculous. For the entire length of the river, they force their way upstream, battling the stiff current, seeking out the exact spot where they were born so that before they die they may reproduce their likeness. In the smaller streams of British Columbia the mystery of the salmon’s homecoming is baffling enough, but here it is eerie. These great fish, wriggling in the nets, have been swimming against the full force of the river for two thousand miles, obsessed as no other fish or beast or fowl is obsessed by a craving to return home. So strong is this instinct that they stop at nothing to reach their goal, leaping over obstacles, fighting rapids and shallows and eating nothing until, battered and exhausted, they find that one particular stream where they were raised. That is why the salmon must be netted along the Yukon, or scooped up in a fishwheel, driven by the current; they will not pause to take a fly. Before the white man, the Indian culture was a product of the salmon run and today, sensibly, the law prevents anybody but Indians from taking them. We buy a freshly frozen salmon at the Carmacks store and load it into the freight canoe along with the new supply of gasoline. Then just before we push off, one of the Indians walks over to us.