Drifting Home (12 page)

In the old days the steamboats on the downstream run used to slip through this channel and over the ledge of rock in a few moments, but the struggle upriver, especially in low water, was a different matter. It took hours to winch the boat through, a tedious experience for the captain though a genuine adventure for the passengers. Sometimes, struggling against the ten-mile current, the boat scarcely seemed to be making any headway and we would spend the day out on the deck, with the boat caught in the racing waters and the rocks towering on either side.

For me, as a boy of five, the rapids were as wonderful an experience as the Chute the Chute. We catapulted through at locomotive speed, my father steering with the paddle and my mother clutching both her children grimly for fear we might topple into the foam. Then, as soon as we were into the calm, I asked my father if we could go back and do it again.

Now, as we drift past more seams of coal, the rapids come into view. Here the river is caught between two cliffs, its passage apparently barred by a wall of broken rock. Through this barrier, the water has torn five narrow channels or “fingers.” The rock itself is a conglomerate, composed of various small shales, forced together like bricks by the pressure of time. These four rocky pinnacles, jagged and misshapen, are rendered more grotesque by trees and shrubs that grow out in several directions. Between and around these flower pot islands, the water races savagely. We can see the foam and the spray and hear the river roaring as we approach. To the right, above the steamboat channel, is the remains of the old winching house, long in disuse.

“Whaddya say we take a chance on the fun channel on the left?” Skip suggests. “The water's high enough and it's not really all that dangerous.”

In the interests of adventure, we agree to ignore the safe channel and attempt the risky one.

“We'll try it without motors,” Skip says. “Keep well closed up.”

Robert and Penny are with me in The Slush Box, both making pictures, Penny with the movie camera and Robert taking color stills for a magazine article. They take the stern seat, next to the motor, so they can photograph all of our boat and Skip's boat ahead and then swivel around to show The Pig following behind.

We drift faster and faster towards the frothing channel that squeezes between the two pinnacles of rock on the left. A moment later we are into it, the boat bucking, the spray lashing our faces. I paddle fiercely but I can't hold our boat on course. The current is driving us straight at the great rock on our left.

Patsie, in the lead boat, describes in the log what happens next:

“We started floating down, manoeuvring our craft with paddles, Skip and me in the front. Skip realizes it's not as easy as he thinks. A second of panic flashes across his face, tension mounts, we drop the paddles and he hollers: ‘
USE THE MOTORS
!'
Arg!
We thought we were ‘cruisin' for a bruisin',' as we swiftly but definitely began to near the huge, gouged rocks, jutting from the centre of the rapids. Mummy, I'm sure, thought it was her last stand, her face racked with fear….”

In our boat, Robert hears Skip's cry, drops his camera and begins pulling on the cord. More panic! The motor coughs, then dies. The lead boat now has its motor going and has veered off the approaching rocks but we are headed directly for them. The Pig is under power, too, and is swinging over to the right. Just before we strike the rock Robert yanks again on the motor and it sputters to life. He brings The Slush Box hard to starboard and we slip past the jagged edges and under the overhang. And all this time Penny, calmly filming the entire scene, does not take her eyes from the viewfinder.

A few minutes later we are in smoother water and everybody is laughing with relief and shouting from boat to boat. Now nothing will do but that we go back and make the run again under power on the excuse that Robert has not got his pictures. And when that is done (I think again of the Chute the Chute at Hastings Park), we explore the steamboat channel, remarkably tame by comparison. Then we head off towards Rink Rapids, three miles farther downstream.

It is blistering hot. On our left is a little slough, the kind I remember from my childhood, a tree-lined backwater, calm as a farm pond, stretching between two sandy islands. We beach the boats and several of our party fling off their clothes and leap into the water. Thus refreshed we move on through Rink Rapids, which give us no trouble at all, and pause for lunch at a sandy spit. Some Indian children come down from the forest behind and watch us solemnly and silently and then, as we push off again, vanish into the bush.

Above us, about a foot beneath the topsoil of the bank, erosion has uncovered a white smear, identified romantically on the steamboat charts as Sam McGee's Ashes. This is a layer of volcanic ash, perhaps a foot deep, which runs for many miles through the great valley of the Yukon. Centuries ago, this whole section of the Territory was smothered in ash from what must have been an awesome volcanic explosion. We have been following this line of ash since early the previous morning; its length and thickness indicates the immensity of the eruption that produced it. Other evidence of volcanic activity can be found throughout the northwest: the pitted little black stones mingling with the whiter gravel on the river bars; the hot springs at Takhini and on the Liard and the Toad rivers; the smokey soil at Whitehorse, which makes cultivation so difficult; the telltale cone shapes of some of the mountains; the ash-like consistency of the White river, and in Alaska the famous Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and the festering volcanoes that glow redly from the islands of the Aleutian chain. Ages ago, when the river was young and these great valleys did not exist, this must have been an unstable land, forever tilting, heaving and rumbling; for that, of course, is how the gold first came, boiling up molten from the earth's bowels only to be ground into nuggets and dust by the abrasive action of blowing sand, shifting ice and running water. It is these same successive tiltings that have produced the wonder of the Yukon Valley, where the benchland drops off in successive steps so that looking up at the hills through half-closed eyes, one seems to be gazing on a series of gigantic terraces.

Yukon Crossing is only a few miles downriver and we intend to look it over. It is Skip Burns' habit to stop and if possible to camp at every historic site along the route. A true romantic, he first visited Alaska with the United States Coast Guard, took his discharge in Skagway, and never left the North. He is enthralled by the history of the Yukon and though he has been down the river numberless times it is always for him a new adventure. He would like to have lived in the Victorian Age of exploration and he bitterly regrets having been born too late to take part in the gold-rush. He sees these little ghost towns not as huddles of ruined cabins but as living communities. He would like to open a roadhouse for travellers at Fort Selkirk, the biggest ghost town of all, and run it in the style of 1898, with bunk beds and a bar serving hootchinoo and red eye and Forty Rod. Another of Skip's dreams is to run a steamboat on the river. Such coarse manifestations of civilization as the garbage dump at Whitehorse and the bridge at Carmacks enrage him and he lives in terror that the money to restore some of the relics of the days of ‘98 may be raised too late to be of any practical use.

One of these relics is the old roadhouse at Yukon Crossing, so named because it was here that the winter road from Dawson crossed the frozen river. We have reached the halfway point: Whitehorse is 236 miles behind us, Dawson 224 miles ahead. It was in this crumbling inn, then a handsome two-storey log building, that my mother stayed in 1910 on a winter trip back from the Outside. Here the stage stopped for a change of horses and the half-frozen passengers, forced to sit in the open sleigh for the entire journey, tumbled out of the open sleigh for a hot meal and a sleep. My mother has described the mountains of steaming clothing hanging above the pot-bellied stove to dry and the conditions of the journey itself, and our elder children, who heard her tell the story more than once when she was alive, are entranced by this little bit of family history. “It was actually one of the neatest old places we've seen and I wish I could have stayed longer to paint there,” Patsie writes in the log. “There was a huge piney wood mountain in the back of the old crumbling lodge, and the lodge was really run down and sunken into the ground.” Pamela, who has an eye for such things, finds some original strips of wallpaper still hanging in one of the rooms and gives them to Patsie who attaches them in the proper place in the logbook with Scotch tape. Peggy Anne finds a little slough behind the settlement and, when nobody is looking, goes in for a quick swim. On the bank, Berton comes across a pair of rubber boots, new and exactly his size, which he appropriates. He has forgotten to bring any along and his feet have been perpetually wet.

We expect to make Fort Selkirk by evening, and are planning to spend two nights there to give everybody a free day to relax, clean up and explore the most interesting of the old river towns. At Selkirk, I inform the assembly, we will organize a big campfire, at which everyone must perform. There is a chorus of spurious complaints:

“Aw, Dad, come
on!
Do we
have
to?”

But almost immediately there is a great deal of whispering and giggling and plotting as the party breaks up into individual theatrical groups. As we float off down the river again, I notice Cheri and Penny in our boat with their heads together and behind me, in The Pig, I see Patsie and the Deaners chuckling away in secret and I sense we are going to have a memorable campfire.

Soon we have to turn the motors on, since we have a fair distance to cover if we are to reach Selkirk by sundown and there are many sights still ahead on this changeable river. First, we must cross the Minto Flats, where the Yukon splays out into a broad labyrinth of islands–more than thirty of them in a two-mile stretch–just upriver from Hardluck Slough. The name of the first Governor General to visit the North is commemorated throughout the Yukon. Besides the Flats, there is a Minto Hill, a Minto Bluff and a ghost town named Minto Station; and in Dawson the little park with the World War One obelisk at its centre is called Minto Park. In my childhood, a quarter-century after the vice-regal visit, they were still talking about the event, for the Governor General was a stand-in for royalty and in those days royalty inspired more awe than it does today. Certainly my father was every inch a royalist. He often talked about the time in Banff when he photographed the Prince of Wales making his first post-war visit. He had the photograph to prove it, a treasured possession. He used an autographic camera, which meant that you could actually write on the photograph through a little door at the back, using a special stylus; and on this photograph, he had printed, in his neat draughtsman's hand:
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS AT BANFF
. My father, of course, developed and printed his own pictures and sometimes in the summertime he would demonstrate the principle of photographic paper by placing a leaf upon a sheet and leaving it out in the sun until the paper darkened, leaving behind the white silhouette with the veins showing lightly. I still have many of the photographs he took with that camera and when I take them out and look at them I can usually remember what was happening on the day they were made. There is a photograph of my sister and me playing on a gravel beach beside the Yukon, and another of my mother in her parka on a winter outing, with her husky dog, Grey Cloud, in the middle of the frozen river. There is a photograph of our house taken after my father added the new room, the whole building all but smothered in the canary vine he planted each spring. (I remember he used to measure carefully the monthly rate of the vine's growth.) And there is a photograph of me playing with my own husky, Spark, a present on my sixth birthday. My mother wanted me to give him the more romantic name of Rosy Dawn but I preferred to call him after the horse in
Barney Google
. The strip arrived once a month in a fat parcel of funnies which my grandfather insisted on sending to me over the weak protests of my parents, who thought they were bad for growing boys. It was only years later that I discovered that my father was a devotee of the funnies, too, and that his favorite character was Alley Oop.

And so we enter the regally named Minto Flats, which are marked on the steamboat charts with the warning: “Subject To Change.” In sections like this, where the river widens, the channels are never quite the same from year to year. It was like that above Dawson where we used to camp in the summers. Islands would vanish, reappear, change shape, grow larger, diminish or join onto others, all depending on the vagaries of the weather, the current and the season. Familiar spots, where we had once camped on the sand could not always be found the following season. Pools in which we paddled dried up or overflowed. On the charts, the steamboat channel is shown running straight down the middle of the Minto Flats, but it could not have been easy for the pilots to follow.

We stop briefly at Minto Station–more crumbling cabins, including a telegraph post–and I think of Service's line in his verse about the telegraph operator:
Oh, God, it's hell to be alone, alone, alone!
In our trip down the river in 1926 we had stopped at more than one of these solitary telegraph stations whose operators were always fanatically overjoyed to see us. They were all a little eccentric, I thought, and in retrospect, fitted Service's description:
I will not wash my face/I will not brush my hair/I “pig' about the place/ There's nobody to care
. There are no longer any telegraph posts along the Yukon; they have been replaced by radar stations on the highway.

We chug on past Minto Station, past the old stage road which can be seen running through the woods on the top of the bank on our right, past Beef Cache and Devil's Crossing and the site of another abandoned woodcamp, until we approach Hell's Gate Slough and the remarkable rock pallisade that crowns the bank for five miles on our left, broken by a dark fissure bearing the not very original name of Hell's Gate. Selkirk is only ten miles downstream and we reach it around eight o'clock. The sun's low rays turn the long line of buildings on the bank into silhouettes so that the ravages of time are hidden and the town seems to be breathing. But this is illusion. There are no sounds of bells from the church, no howls of husky dogs to answer the steamboat's whistle, no crowds of people jamming the bank, as there used to be when a boat steamed into view. Whenever I think of Selkirk I think of those crowds: the Indian women in their bright skirts and kerchiefs, waving from the bank, the children scrambling about in the dust, the clergymen and priests hurrying down from the missions, the traders standing in the doorways, the police in their dress scarlet posing for the tourists and the dogs, dozens of them, scampering about and howling. Selkirk looks beautifully preserved, especially in the half light of this August evening, but the silence of the graveyard hangs over it.