Drifting Home (2 page)

My father must have known that his chances of finding any gold were slight. But in the spring of 1898 everybody was going to the Klondike, as everybody goes off to war. Half of New Brunswick seemed to be heading northwest, taking advantage of a railway freight war to cross the continent cheaply. There were five hundred and fifty men on the train with him and most of them had never seen a mountain before. Neither had he and he was entranced. “The scenery was magnificent,” he wrote to his mother in Saint John, from the Oriental Hotel in Vancouver. “Mountains rising from all sides sheer up, apparently, from the track and towering above our heads as if to fall and crush us. In one place we circled around the base of a mountain in the sharpest and longest curve (for the sharpness of it) that I ever saw. The train doubled on itself, the engine being out of sight the whole time around the base of the mountain. We actually went around three-quarters of a circle before resuming our general direction. I stayed on the platform all day scarcely taking time for my meals and nearly froze to death for it was very cold.”

How like him
, I thought, when I came across that letter in my mother's effects. The bitterest cold could not have deterred that infinitely curious man from examining the wonders that he always saw around him. What was commonplace to his fellows was miraculous to him. He had to know how things worked and he was forever examining objects, natural or man-made, to see what made them tick and then explaining them to others. That trip through the mountains “was well worth the money twice over,” he wrote. He could not get over it and in his long letter to his mother described everything he saw in meticulous detail: the Selkirk Loop, “one of the most curious sights on the journey;” a perpendicular pinnacle of naked granite that towered above him “almost blending with the pale blue of the sky and gleaming in the sun-a spectacle of inconceivable grandeur”; the famous timber bridge over Stoney Mountain creek, then the highest on the continent. While his fellow goldseekers were inside, playing cards, he was on the platform, shivering away, carefully counting the tunnels (twenty) and the snowsheds (fifty-three) and noting everything for his mother: the miners at work along the sandbars of the Fraser; the curious pulley that took men across the river in a basket; and the uncanny effect created when the train emerged from a tunnel so that “sometimes it would look like Dante's Inferno with the smoke issuing from the mouth and hiding the exit.” (He knew his Dante as he knew his Virgil and his Homer and his Shakespeare.) It was a journey he never forgot and it often came back to him. Words, he said, could not describe the beauty and magnificence of it. He had almost half a century left to live and it would be spent among mountains like these, far from the Atlantic's shore, but in all those years he would repeat that journey only twice. He believed he was going to the Yukon for a two-year stay but those two years lengthened into forty. The decision to join the stampede changed the current of his life, as it changed that of so many others.

“It's weird,” Peter says. “I mean, to think that he was on this lake. I wonder if he ever figured us kids would be doing it?”

We have pushed off from the shore and are chugging into the wind, heading for a patch of bright sky in the distance between the mountains and beyond the clouds. A light rain is clouding the Prussian blue waters. The slabs of the mountainsides reach into the dark sky, forming with the ruffled surface of the lake a kind of tunnel through which we must travel.

We are all thinking of that June day in 1898 when the ice broke and that strangest of all armadas set off down this same corridor. The sun was shining and the prospectors in the boats were singing with joy to be moving at last after the long winter of packing and boat building. What a sight it must have been! Round boats and square boats, tiny canoes, huge scows-everything from catamarans to kayaks, heavily loaded as we are loaded, and drifting before the breeze past these shores. Twenty thousand men moving north; hundreds of shacks, cabins, tents and warehouses speckling these hillsides; and the smell of sawdust everywhere. No film can ever reproduce that spectacle. No one is alive today who remembers it and all we have are a few photographs and the written descriptions of those who were there. In a few hours it was over. The great wave of boats became a trickle. And in the intervening years nature has retrieved her lake: the hills, once stripped of timber by the boat builders, are wooded again; except for the station and the log church, the shores are empty. In the new growth, if you search diligently, you can find a few relics of the goldrush. Below the church there are stone foundations and back in the woods, poking up through a carpet of kinni-kinnick, the whitened bones of scores of cattle, butchered here and sold to the goldseekers; and beside the rapids that connect Lake Lindeman with Lake Bennett a gravestone with the name of Matthews still discernible-that same Tom Matthews who, after twice losing everything in those foaming waters, shot himself in despair.

Behind us, the little church grows smaller and disappears as we round a corner. The rain lessens and then ceases. Patches of blue appear between the clouds. We have come about as far as we expected on this first, short day and Skip is keeping his eyes open for a campsite. About fifteen miles down the lake he spots it-an abandoned sawmill on a small promontory, dwarfed by the rugged mountains.

How odd, I think, that the Yukon, historically the youngest part of Canada, should have become so quickly a land of artifacts. Rusting wheels, crumbling cabins, old roads blurred by new growth, the rotting carcasses of dredges and steamboats, gravestones, crosses, abandoned villages, ruined roadhouses-all this paraphernalia of the past is to be found strewn along the water highway between Lake Bennett and Dawson. We eat our minute steaks surrounded by broken machinery-cogs, gears, axles and flywheels half covered by shattered timbers, and, of course, the inevitable refuse of the Yukon: the mounds of glass telegraph insulators and ancient tin cans strewn through the bush. Sometimes I think the Yukon must be paved with tin cans. In my boyhood I remember roaming the hills above Dawson and seeing the tin cans, brown with age, forming a kind of mattress under the mosses and sedges. Great caches of tin cans could be found behind every cabin and even where the cabins had rotted away, these troves of old tins marked spots where men had once lived and worked. There were hundreds of cabins and thus hundreds of thousands of tin cans-bully beef, creamed corn, butter, devilled ham, lard, tomatoes, beans, beans, beans, preserved fruit, soup. Without the invention of the canning process, the Yukon could never have been settled.

The land, at first glance, seems untouched. The forests roll back endlessly from the lakeshore or rise sheer from the riverside, looking as they must have looked centuries ago, unmarked by saw or hatchet. But once you step out and move back into the tangle of bush, there are the tin cans, crumbling to rust and dust, slowly returning to the reddening earth. Sometimes you can see the ghost of a label, even on the oldest tins, seared into the oxidizing metal. On the Chilkoot Pass the previous year I picked up a lard pail so old that it crumbled between my fingers, but I could still read the block letters on its surface:
SWIFT'S
. It had lain there, just above that gravel ledge known as The Scales (where the way became so steep that the packers weighed every ounce and charged accordingly) for more than seventy years. An unspoken question formed in my mind:
Could this have belonged to my father
?

For he had come that way, climbing over those very rocks and resting at the summit, as we did, to gaze back down through the mists towards the seacoast. It was weird, as Peter put it, to think about that. Peter was with me on that Chilkoot trip, a boy just turned 16, and so was Pamela, who was 20, and it was during that brief, exacting journey that we first discussed taking the entire family down the river the following year. Skip, who was the outfitter for the Chilkoot party, encouraged the idea: “Listen,” he said. “If you bring your family I'll handle your tour personal. Man, you couldn't
keep
me away!”

That decided it. It would be a journey through time as well as through space, even more than the Chilkoot had been. On the Chilkoot one was always conscious of time because the trail was thick with memories of the past: old shoes, broken sleds, rotting harness, the bones of horses, the skeletons of boats, bits and pieces of clothing, rusting cable, discarded pack sacks, barrels, pails, pots and pans, and, of course, tin cans. But the Chilkoot was for me, as it was for my children, a new experience. I had never crossed it before and so my only companions from the past were the ghosts of the stampeders whose mark was everywhere. But the Yukon was the river of my childhood and of my youth-as familiar, almost, as the streets of my home town; and so a voyage down the river with my family would be more than a voyage into history: it would be a journey into my own past. I had first come down the river in a small poling boat at the age of six with my father, my mother and my younger sister. I had last come up it at the age of 19, on a sternwheel steamboat, when my father was nearing the end of his days. In between I had travelled it from Whitehorse to Dawson at least half a dozen times. On the Chilkoot trail, more than thirty years after that last river trip, standing on the summit of the famous Pass, and thinking back to the moment when my father had stood there, I felt a yearning to experience the river once again. Service, who caught the spirit of the Yukon better than any writer, called it a land that “beckons and beckons.” Dawson City, when I flew there in 1948 after a ten years' absence, looked so old and sad that I did not want to go back again. But I did go back in 1962 for the Goldrush Festival and in the summer of 1971, standing on the very lip of the divide that marks the Alaska-Yukon border, I felt the old pull.

My father stood there, at the Chilkoot's summit, on June 22, 1898, and scribbled part of a letter in pencil to his mother in Saint John. He had been counting the carcasses of horses that lay on the route between Sheep Camp and The Scales and he had counted no fewer than 38, ten of them in one heap. The main rush had gone by a month before, but my father's party was late because it had lost time trying to take the Stikine river route to the goldfields. It was an abortive trip, yet there is no sense of disappointment or frustration in my father's letters, only wonder and curiosity. His party had been marooned for two and a half days in a sandstorm on the Stikine, a storm that ruined much of their fresh food. They had struggled on upriver, towing their boat along the edge of the ice and meeting with the inevitable accidents along the way. (“It gave way under me once and I went in up to the hips but as the ice looked very shaky I had taken the precaution to take one of the poles with me and dropped on it. I got out in a hurry and crawled on hands and knees away from the bad spot. … We had pretty hard tugging and awfully slow progress from this on….”)

As it turned out, all this toil was in vain because the country north of Glenora was a heaving swamp and the packers wanted eight hundred dollars a ton to move goods to Teslin lake at the head of the Yukon. None of them could afford that and so they had to choose between backpacking the whole way-a delay of two months–or attempting the Chilkoot. One of the party was sent back to the seacoast to assess the possibilities of the Pass, where an overhead tramway was said to be in full operation. While waiting for his return, my father tramped the hills between Glenora and Telegraph creek, noting all manner of odd things-a species of western toad breeding in the pond and sending out spawn in long strings, flowers in wild profusion, many of which he was able to identify by their Latin names: a new species of ranunculus and of lobelia at six hundred feet, false Solomon Seal, a columbine with orange-red flowers that was new to him, monkshood and blue lupins of the kind he had grown himself, “a stonecrop very like the one you call Love-in-a-Tangle,” and several varieties of orchids, which he carefully pressed and enclosed in his letters to his mother together with samples of the enormous northern mosquitoes (also pressed) and a detailed description of the uniforms of the North West Mounted Police, of whom he had read, but had never seen. When he reached Telegraph creek, my father hitched a ride back to Glenora by steamboat, paying for his passage by stoking coal. By that time his party had decided to attempt the Chilkoot. They bought a Peterborough canoe for twenty-seven dollars, added it to their several tons of supplies, and retraced their steps. At the summit of the Pass, when he next wrote his mother, they were all engaged in the arduous task of sledding their equipment in stages down the long mountain slopes towards the lakes. It took them a week to move everything to Mud lake, where the snow ended. Here, where firewood was so scarce that a few sticks cost three dollars (the price in those days of a tailor-made suit) they hired horses to move their supplies to Bennett and here, for one hundred dollars, they had to buy a second boat.

Late on July 2 he and his New Brunswick partners sailed their two craft with all their possessions down this same lake and past this very spot at which we are camped. For all we know they may well have stopped here: his diary records that they made fifteen miles that first evening and this is a logical camping place-the ground dark with the remnants of many fires. We sit around our own embers, the adults drinking rum out of coffee mugs, speculating on all this. Today is the birthday of two of the children: Penny, who has turned 24, and Paul, who has turned 14. The date is August 5, 1972-almost another anniversary because it was on August 4, 1898 that my father reached Dawson, “the miners' mecca” as he called it in a letter home.

Peter's question comes back to me: Did he ever think his grandchildren would follow after him, seventy-four years later?

I doubt that he did, for he had no wife at the time, no prospects, no money and no plans to make the Yukon his home. But I cannot help wondering if his grandchildren will someday bring their own children down the river, on some future journey into time and space.