Drifting Home (17 page)

On the day he left, Bob Allen, his old Dawson colleague who had been superannuated at the same time, was waiting in his Model A Ford to take him down to the
CPR
dock to catch the boat to Vancouver. My father went into my mother's room, sat down beside her on the bed and quietly closed the door and I could hear them talking in low tones for some time until Bob Allen honked his horn. Then the door opened and my father came out and his eyes were red and I could see my mother crying softly into her pillow and I felt that I had never in my life been so miserable.

We helped him with his bags and climbed into the back seat of the car, my sister on one side and I on the other, with our father's arms around our waists. And as Bob drove slowly down Fort Street, my sister began to cry and I had to fight back the tears for, having turned fifteen and now being the man of the house, I was determined not to cry then or ever again. I can remember my father saying, over and over again: “They're good children, Bob; they're good children,” and Bob answering: “Yes, they
are
good children, Frank,” and then we were at the dock and he was going up the gangplank, waving back at us, and the boat was whistling and he was gone and nothing was ever quite the same again.

“I should never have let him go back,” my mother would say sometimes in the years that followed. “Why did I let him go back?” And often over the years I have wondered about cause and effect: how would things have turned out if she had persuaded him to stay in Victoria? On the river of life there are many unexpected twists. If my father had not crossed the Chilkoot and come down the Yukon but had returned instead to the sinecure of a professorship, he would not have met my mother and that particular family would not have existed. If he had not gone back to the Yukon, I most certainly would never have gone to university and thus would not have met my wife and then this family, eating curried chicken here by the fire, would not exist and there would be no Pamela gathering wild things in the forest on the banks of the ever-widening river.

DAY TEN

W
e are floating once again between the mountains–“the scraggy, sculptured, hardrock mountains,” as Patsie describes them–that rise on our right “like eternal bookends, barricading us from the beyond,” scarred by moving glaciers, long since melted, that have “bitten and gobbled through the mountainsides.”

Soon, on our left, we pass the old settlement of Selwyn (at the mouth of Selwyn creek), where my father and his party stopped in 1898. “Some of the boys,” he wrote to his mother at the time, “prospected the creek, which was staked to the source, but was suspected to be ‘salted.' Nobody had yet got to bedrock so no one could tell anything for sure about it.” My father did not wait to find out and his party did not bother to record their claims; there was no gold found on Selwyn creek, and no gold on any creek where my father drove in his stakes. But then he had not really come to the Yukon for gold, not that first time at any rate; he had come for adventure.

Yet there was a good deal of gold to be discovered along this stretch of the river. Cabins, marking the old settlements, can be seen every few miles and behind these cabins the remains of old roads run back into the forest to abandoned placer diggings.

We stop for lunch at Coffee creek, under the shattered remnants of a disused trading post and eat our sandwiches amid a tangle of briar roses and raspberry bushes. The berries are our dessert; they are here by the thousands waiting to be eaten, if not by us then by the bears.

But we see no bears on this section of the river, only the ghosts of other times. At Thistle creek, twenty-three miles downstream, there is an abandoned river barge and another two-storey roadhouse, where my mother stayed on that winter's journey back to Dawson after she had made up her mind to return to the Yukon and marry my father. I think of her sitting in that open sleigh between the two old men, swathed in coonskin and wondering whether she was doing the right thing in returning to this remote corner of Canada to marry this curiously attractive but absolutely penniless labourer who taught her French and read Greek and seemed to know so much about the stars and the wildflowers and who thought nothing of hiking into Dawson from Dominion creek–more than forty miles in below zero weather–just to spend an evening with her.

He was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and I can still remember the day when I realized for the first time that he was mortal. It was on a Sunday just before my seventeenth birthday–the summer my mother and I returned to the Yukon, she to see my father for the first time since his departure and I to take the job he had arranged for me. We had all changed. My father seemed to have shrunk in stature for I had grown taller and he had grown greyer. My mother's hair had turned pure white; it had always been white, she told me in one of the many moments of intimacy we enjoyed when we were thrown together by my father's exile. She had been dyeing it since she was a young girl, but since dyed hair was not fashionable, she had kept it a secret; now she saw no reason to continue. My father had occupied those intervening years in a variety of ways; he had got himself a small canoe so he could once again enjoy the river and gather his wildflowers. In the winter, he would often go down to the office in his spare time and work, or occupy himself by grinding a concave mirror for a reflecting telescope, a meticulous task that took him more than two years. He showed me how he was doing it and explained the principle of focal length and the difference between a refracting and a reflecting telescope but I cannot say I understood it fully, even when he brought out the diagrams, carefully laid out on his familiar graph paper. The odd thing was that once the mirror was ground to the proper focal length and carefully polished and silvered, he set it aside and did not bother to construct a telescope around it. That was, after all, a mere assembly job; the real challenge had been met. It was the same with the stampede: he sought the gold as a kind of afterthought. In his letters to his mother and his brother, he had remarkably little to say about his search for gold, though he did stake a claim on Quigley Gulch without result. He wrote about the look of the country, the change of the seasons, the shift in temperature (which he noted daily in his pocket diary), the size of the mosquitoes and the exact details of log cabin construction. In one letter, he even included three scale drawings of the cabin he built on Quigley Gulch–a front and rear elevation and a floor plan. He described, in a passage of several paragraphs, the Yukon stove that heated the building and the principle on which it worked; but he had not much to say about the gold fever, which was making headlines in the newspapers Outside.

On this summer Sunday before my seventeenth birthday we set off, the three of us, on a picnic hike along the Klondike river. We had reached the deserted warehouses at Guggieville, named for the Guggenheim Mining Company, when suddenly my father sat down on a rock by the side of the road. I was full of energy and wanted to press on.

“Let's just wait a few minutes,” my father said.

“No–let's get going. Come on!”

“You have to understand that your father may be a little tired,” my mother said, quietly.

My father tired? I found that hard to comprehend. Only a few years before he and I had hiked for a hundred miles around the southern end of Vancouver Island, up through the Devil's Potholes in the Sooke river and through the reservoir reserve to Shawnigan lake and back by way of Cobble Hill, Brentwood and the Saanich peninsula. In those days it was I who had wanted to sit down and he who shouldered my pack when it became too heavy. Now our positions were reversed and it came as a shock. It was hard to realize that there were fifty years between us. He had never been a “pal” to me, in the worst sense of that phrase; he had been a father. But he had seemed no older than the fathers of the boys I knew; often he had seemed younger. But now, as he approached seventy, he showed that he was mortal and so we rested that day and took it easy on the road back to town. A few days later I turned seventeen and my mother baked my favourite coconut cake but before I could eat it my name appeared on the company employment sheet. I had just time to get my gear together and rush down to the livery stable to board a truck for Dominion creek, where the dredge crews would soon rip up all the cabins and the wheelbarrows and the tell-tale signs of the goldrush, including those original stakes which my father had helped pound in almost half a century before.

On our left, the mountains have vanished; we are passing open country, flecked with marshes. The mouth of the White river looms up-a great stream, choked, as its name implies, with glacial silt and probably volcanic ash from the Kluane range of mountains. The Yukon, which was once light green and then baby blue and later a rich brown, now turns greyer and the thickening waters become undrinkable. The mouth of the White is blocked by islands formed from the same silt, their wet and colourless flanks encumbered by the bleached trunks and branches of dead trees swept downstream in the high water and left in great heaps on the sandbars. These “snags,” as they are called, clog the river for miles below this point, the skeletal branches reaching far out over the water, a menace to small boats, some of which have been caught in their clutches and swamped.

My parents floated through this labyrinth at midnight on that trip down the river in 1926. Though the nights never grow dark in July, that particular evening was gusty with a threatening storm so that a kind of twilight settled on the land. We children, asleep in the bottom of the boat, were awakened with a start. I remember the scene only dimly but the sight of my father's face is still imprinted on my mind; I saw the same look on Skip's face when Scotty signalled with the oar that he was in trouble on Laberge. I looked up from my sleep and saw that we were passing directly beneath an enormous snag, the boney fingers brushing at our boat as we swept under it, my father desperately pushing at it with the paddle. It was a close call–something my parents talked about for many years.

That was near the mouth of the Stewart river, which flows in from the right. Stewart City, or what remains of it, is situated on an island. I cannot recognize it now. In the old days this was a thriving settlement, when the steamer
Keno
pushed barges of silver ore down the Stewart from the mines at Keno Hill, transferring them to the larger boats on the Yukon. Stewart had a Northern Commercial Company store, a post office, a telegraph station, servicing facilities and the usual gaggle of trappers' cabins. Now the river has eaten away half the island and little evidence of the old town remains. The buildings that have survived have been moved well back from the crumbling bank. Stewart's population is down to four–a trapper and his family who run a small store and gasoline cache.

Patsie, the vegetarian and animal lover, is appalled by the sight of furs for sale in the store: “It makes me sick to see them all lined up on the counter,” she scribbles angrily into the logbook. I think, a little guiltily, of the superb silver tip grizzly rug in my den at home. I bought it ten years before from my old Dawson schoolmate, Chester Henderson, the grandson of that same Robert Henderson who, with George Carmack, is credited with starting the goldrush. Chester, one of the calmest men I know, was living then all alone in a little cabin on the Klondike, working as a guide for hunting parties. He did not seem to me to have changed much since he took the role of Santa Claus in the school Christmas play in the twenties–a proud, easy-going man, totally independent and, like so many Northerners, quite unflappable. I wonder if I should brave Patsie's wrath this time and get another skin from him.

Behind the store we discover a small museum in front of which stands a remarkable display: the skulls of two moose, locked forever in mortal combat, their huge antlers so inextricably tangled that the battling animals could not withdraw and so died slowly of starvation, staring into each other's eyes. Inside, the shelves are jammed with artifacts found along the Stewart river, all dating back to the goldrush days: dozens of oil lamps of every fashion, gold scales of varying dimension, vintage gramophones, scores of coloured insulators, early tin cans with the labels still affixed and readable, apothecary bottles and spice jars, row upon row–again, an agglomeration of junk that has suddenly become significant.

It is quite possible that some of this discarded packaging might have been left behind by my father's party in the summer of 1898, for they camped on this very spot for several days, taking stock of the situation. Should they travel up the Stewart and look for prospects? (Jack London had spent the previous winter there.) Or should they press on to Dawson? “We put up our tent and unloaded our boats and put out our stuff to dry and hung our bacon,” my father reported to his mother. The party had about four tons of goods, enough to last each of them for about a year, but they had not been able to examine the condition of the more perishable provisions since leaving the Stikine. “We found some of our bags badly mouldered. The outside of the flour bags, which were on the bottom as they would be the least damaged by water, were very mouldy from being wet and having no free access to the air. The rest of the things were all right except the tea of which we lost 6 or 8 lbs. out of a 50 lb. chest. We had six 40 lb. bags of oatmeal of which we lost a bag. Several other things were damp but not hurt at all but we dried them out in the sun. After drying everything, we cached the lot.”

As usual, he described that cache in meticulous detail. There are several of them standing at Stewart today–little platforms, and sometimes little log cabins, built on stilts, designed to keep away the dogs and wild animals. Like the igloo and the grain elevator, these are unique pieces of Canadian architecture.

But we cannot linger, for we must make camp. A few miles downstream we spy a likely spot. Something long and white lies half hidden in the woods not far from the shoreline; it looks at first like the vertebrae of some prehistoric monster but as we approach it takes on a more familiar contour. It is an old steamboat gangplank lying on its side with shrubs and wildflowers growing through its planking. It takes me back to those days when we used to stand on the shore at places very like this, beside the long piles of cordwood, and watch the deckhands of the
Casca
or the
Whitehorse
running nimbly up the gangplank with their handcarts piled high with birchwood. At the top of the plank each man would pull down on the handles of his cart, pivot expertly in a ninety-degree turn and race down into the bowels of the hold to drop his load with a mighty clatter before returning for another. Now this old gangplank serves our cooks as a workbench on which to spread out food and utensils.