Drifting Home (14 page)

A sign erected by the army points towards the woods where the soldiers' cemetery has been restored. Here, bordering the pathway, are the wildflowers of my childhood: the sweet scented roses, the small purple gentians, the yellow daisy known as arnica and the evergreen leaves and bright red berries of the Yukon holly or kinni-kinnick. In the grass by a deserted cabin I find what must surely be the very last Yukon crocus of the season, really a pasque flower or anemone, known and loved throughout the territory because it is first to bloom in the spring, often poking its purple head through a melting snowdrift. These flowers and others I know from my father, who collected and mounted two hundred and fifty of them, each identified by its Latin name. I can remember him taking me by the hand through the forest and leaning down into the beds of moss to point out the pink twin-flower, with its tiny double blossoms, or the shooting star, which always lived up to its name. In all of his letters to his mother, beginning at Wrangell on the Alaskan panhandle and continuing through the Chilkoot and the river stops to Dawson, he described the flora along the way and enclosed samples of ferns, grasses and bloom. He was an avid gardener and I can still see my mother on the porch, long after midnight, with the sun burning down from the sky, calling for him to stop his weeding and come in to bed. After we moved to Victoria, when time hung more heavily on his hands and he had searched the Men Wanted columns in vain, he would work for hours in his new garden, constructing small ponds, building stone steps through the rockery, erecting trellises for his roses, grafting new branches onto old trees and weeding the vegetables which were so necessary for a family living on a tiny pension. I did not then share his love of gardening; weeding, for me, was an onerous chore. And yet when I got a home of my own I found myself planting the garden I once swore I would never have–a garden that grew and multiplied, as his had. Before I realized it, I was weeding away furiously each summer, late in the evening as he had done, and poring over seed catalogues each winter, planning new additions to my garden. It must be the blood, I tell myself; in spite of what they say about the influence of environment, the blood, too, is strong.

Paul is tiring, so we do not get as far as the graveyard but turn back to camp. He is tired as much from laughing as he is from the walk. He has been laughing almost continuously since we left the last cabin at some secret joke of his own. He has a strange, internal sense of humour and one hears him, from time to time, repeating words and phrases under his breath that have no meaning to anyone else. His curiosities are philosophical and at night he tries to grapple with concepts that have baffled the greatest minds in history. Ever since he has been able to speak he has tried to imagine what the universe would be like if the stars, the moon, the sun, and all the planets were removed. What, he asks himself, is nothingness? Before the stars spangled the sky, what was there? These are exactly the same questions I asked myself at his age when I lay on the porch of our Dawson home on the warmer summer evenings trying to imagine space without stars. It is enough to make one dizzy and it used to make me very dizzy. It makes Paul dizzy, too. In physique he resembles his maternal grandfather; but this restless kind of abstract curiosity comes from his other grandfather, who went regularly to meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society in Victoria and read Jeans, Eddington and Haldane, and worked algebra problems in the evening for fun and grappled with the subject of the fourth and fifth dimension. Paul will not become a mathematician, like my father, though he may become a philosopher but it is more likely he will become a writer, like his cousin Berton. The signs are there and so, too, is the blood.

Some of the family have gone swimming in the slough that runs into the river below Selkirk. The water is cold but the sun is so hot it does not matter. The grasses and the shrubbery around the tents are draped in clothing laid out to dry. I go for a walk in the woods and come upon an old wagon trail that leads me around behind the village and into a clearing. Here I find a little church standing all by itself in the forest; it must be the Roman Catholic Mission. I enter and find it in perfect condition, with pews and decorated altar, as if ready for Mass, and the faint scent of incense in the air. The Yukon, in my day, was divided neatly between Catholics and Anglicans but the twain rarely met socially. Even in a town as small as Dawson with a population of about eight hundred, where everybody knew everybody else, we did not really know the Catholic kids. We rarely played with them and seldom visited their homes because they went to a different church and a different school. It was the same with the adults. The people my parents knew were those who shared their pew at St. Paul's. My mother was a regular churchgoer who sang each Sunday morning in the choir. My father went less regularly but when he did he revelled in the ritual for he was high church; he crossed himself when the Deity was mentioned and genuflected before entering the pew, actions that made him more than slightly suspect in a community which considered such manifestations suspiciously close to Popery.

He had a passion for ritual and for the things that ritual stood for: the high church, the Empire, the Royal family, the army and the Conservative party. My mother accepted it all but took it less seriously. After we left the Yukon it used to amuse her to watch my father stiffen up when an officer passed us by on the street; indeed she would sometimes nudge me surreptitiously when that happened. Freed of the necessity to vote for the Conservatives in those Yukon days of political patronage, she began secretly to support the
CCF
and would take me to political meetings in Victoria. She was, after all, her father's daughter. He had been born and raised a Quaker who, after his conversion to Marxism, never again entered a church and who, time and again, ran for office on the socialist ticket in the certain knowledge that he would be defeated. A good deal of this must have rubbed off on his daughter. Once, when I was a boy of about six, I remember her tucking me in bed and I, thinking about the stars and what the universe was like without them, began to ask her questions about God. She answered as well as she could for a while and then she looked at me in an odd way and said: “You know, it is quite possible that there is no God. No God at all.” At those awful words the tears started from my eyes. She was clearly nonplussed but she did not retreat from her premise. Yet in all those years I never heard a religious or a political argument between my parents. They loved each other as much, I think, for what they considered each other's idiosyncracies as for the ideas they held in common.

And, of course, they had come through a good deal together; good times, adventurous times and bad times–the honeymoon days in the tent, the golden years on the river, and then the total disruption of their lives in the North and the harsher depression years in Victoria. Those early Thirties were not years of unadulterated gloom but they could not have been easy for my parents. With his accumulated pensions my father had less than a thousand dollars a year on which to support a growing family. Thus every single cent counted, and that was galling to a man who had never before given a thought to money, who had scarcely saved a penny and who had been used to purchasing on a whim those curious devices that took his fancy and were generally advertised in the back of the
Scientific American
–bridge chips, for instance, and a table that automatically shuffled cards. Now every expenditure had to be weighed. Day-old bread was purchased because stale bread was a nickel a loaf instead of six cents. Fruit and vegetables were bought at the last moment before Saturday night closing when the grocers sold them off cheaply because they wouldn't keep over the weekend. The wood for our fire we gathered from the beaches; my father constructed a dolly which we used to trundle down Transit Road to McNeill Bay and there he and I would saw the driftwood into stove lengths and haul it home along with the strips of kelp which he had discovered made a first-rate garden fertilizer.

A cent was a useful sum of money in those days; a nickel was enormous. Once my mother and I found eighteen cents on the sidewalk three blocks from our house and it was like coming upon a treasure–an event we talked about for years after. For eighteen cents you could buy a pound of stewing beef and several eggs. When the boys in Grade Eight produced a school newspaper by hectograph I could not buy a copy because it cost a nickel; my mother slowly shook her head and said that it was out of the question even though she knew what it meant to me. I wanted desperately to work on its production and, failing that, to own a copy and pore over it; I already had newspapers in my blood, as her father had.

For my own father, this stringency was confining and frustrating. I remember once he was explaining to me the principle of the hot air balloon. He had discovered somewhere, no doubt in the
Scientific American
, a description of how to make a model out of tissue paper. The problem was that we could not afford tissue paper. One day he beckoned me into the basement and unwrapped a roll of red tissue. He had made a pattern for the balloon sections and wanted me to help him cut them out. “No need to mention this to your mother,” he said, quietly. “She'd only worry about the money.”

Another episode stands out even more distinctly. In the Caramelcrisp shop on Fort Street he had spotted a device that was new to him–the Silex coffeemakers that soon became standard at every lunch counter. The principle of the vacuum, on which they operated, fascinated him and so did the beauty of the bubbles, reflecting the red of the elements, rising in the glass bowls. The following day he took me down to see the wonderful coffeemakers in action and I can remember standing outside in the cold, looking in the windows, waiting for one of the Silexes to empty so we could see the process from the beginning. We waited for a long time until my father said: “You know, boy, I think it's worthwhile going inside and buying a cup of coffee just to watch that thing.” It gave me a good feeling because my father called me “boy” only when he felt close to me and it made me feel close to him, too. So we went inside the Caramelcrisp shop and he sipped his coffee very slowly, waiting for the scarlet bubbles to rise in the Silex and when they did, he explained again, carefully, the scientific principle on which the coffeemaker operated. And then he said: “I don't think there's any point telling your mother about that cup of coffee. You know how she is about money.”

He could not find work. Young men could not find work and he was approaching 65. Once, at Christmastime, he got a job for two weeks as a postman's helper. For months he advertised in the classified section, offering to teach French or mechanical drawing. He finally got one pupil in mechanical drawing. The first lesson was scheduled right in the middle of our first real summer holiday–a week at a cottage on Shawnigan lake. It meant that my father could not join us for the first half of this slim vacation because he was waiting for his new and only pupil to arrive. Yet for a growing boy there were compensations in having a father who was always home. We spent more time in each other's company than most boys were able to spend with their fathers, working on the beach gathering wood or in the garden or camping in bivouacs made of cedar boughs (we could not, of course, afford a tent) or hiking around the lower Island in the summer and sleeping out under the stars. It wasn't quite the same as the Yukon, where you could camp anywhere, but it was much easier than it has since become to find a piece of forest or a clearing in the woods or a spot beside a lake where civilization had not yet intruded.

In the little church in the woods there is no sound. I find that I am walking almost on tiptoe through the old pathway back to the settlement. Beneath my feet I can hear the crunch of the kinni-kinnick berries.

It is mid-afternoon before we finish lunch. Skip suggests we take a couple of the boats and run up the Pelly to visit the only working farm in the Yukon, operated by two brothers named Bradley. Not everybody wants to go; several are already snoring in the shade. But half a dozen of us pile into the boats and, an hour later, pull into a dock below a farmhouse to the unexpected sight of a barnyard with cattle and chickens scurrying about in the dirt and some two hundred acres of waving grain here in the heart of the wilderness.

In my day there were several farms in the Yukon. There was one on the flat benchland above Dawson, with great haystacks in which we children used to romp, and another a few miles upriver on the banks of a little slough called Sunnydale, where we went on picnics, and others on the low, tear-shaped islands downstream from town. Most of these produced hay and oats for the teamsters but some also grew wheat. Now these have all vanished. Though farming is practical in many places, the Yukon is still a territory obsessed by mining and the laws and customs favour the mining interests over everyone else. Yet this farm on the Pelly has been in continuous operation under various owners since 1902. The brothers Bradley have forty head of cattle and grow both oats and wheat successfully.

The farmers greet us and we walk up towards the main lodge through a dense tangle of Oriental and California poppies and tall blue delphiniums, which have sprung up on their own from seedpods dropped the previous fall–clear evidence of the land's fertility. In the old days, Dawson was a fantasy of bloom in the summer; the swampy soil was rich and the sunlight almost endless. Schizanthus and nasturtiums tumbled out of window boxes; monkshood, larkspur and calendulas popped up like weeds; delphiniums and poppies escaped into the grasses so that long after cabins had mouldered away, these flowers appeared freshly each season. We have seen them from time to time in the old river towns, the tall blue spikes marking the outlines of past settlements.

We go into the lodge and one of the brothers produces a jug of cold milk from the ice box, the first fresh milk we have seen since we left the Outside. We fall upon it like castaways. And then the brothers tell us about the oil men who are prospecting this valley without regard to farms.