Drifting Home (20 page)

The wooden sidewalks of the old town beckon. We leave John Gould and set off on a tour of exploration and of re-discovery. The Red Feather Saloon is kitty-corner from the motel and across the street, Billy Biggs' blacksmith shop is long disused but still standing. I can remember when it rang to the sound of hammer and anvil, the sparks flying out from the dark interior, while we boys sat for hours watching the horses from the neighbouring livery stable being shod. Most of Third Avenue seems to have retreated into the weeds. The flower gardens, once Dawson's pride, have almost all disappeared. If the town is to be restored it must be done quickly. The old gun shop, certainly the most photographed building in the Yukon, is literally falling apart and has had to be propped up with poles on the outside and steel beams within. It will take some doing to preserve it in one piece.

Walking past these buildings I cannot help but think of my father, fading gently away in the last six years of his life in Vancouver. It was as if his real existence ended after he left the Yukon. Slowly he began to lose interest in the things that used to excite him: mathematics, the classics, his garden, the Royal Astronomical Society, contract bridge, and finally, even his loom. He took to reading cheap detective novels, one after another, while the
Scientific American
lay untouched in the magazine rack. It was if he were holding a waiting brief for death. “It's not likely you'll be seeing me again,” he'd say, every time I said goodbye to him at the end of my various army leaves. Yet he hung on, growing weaker but never desperately ill, until the very end of the war. When I came back from overseas in the summer of 1945 he was bedridden and it was clear that his life was struggling towards its close. We took turns sitting up with him at night, my mother, my sister and I, sleeping on a little cot in his room – for he could no longer look after himself. For some of this time, especially in the nights, he was half-delirious. Once I heard him call out in anguish: “Matchsticks! Matchsticks!” I could not fathom what he meant. “Matchsticks! Match-sticks!” my father cried again and then looking up, from my pillow, I saw him gazing down at his legs, the blankets flung aside. They were indeed as thin as matchsticks, these withered limbs, once as thick as tree trunks, that had carried him over mountains and across the Yukon hills and which, when he was 46 years old, had outmarched those of soldiers half his age.

But still he did not die, though he clearly expected to. Night after night he used to gather his family around him for the deathbed scene which, with his love of ritual and his knowledge of history, he wanted so badly to enact. That was how men died in books. That was how kings died. But this neat, romantic ending–this final satisfaction–was to be denied him.

“It's an awful thing to have to say,” my mother said to me when I returned from overseas, “but, oh God, I wish he would die! Is that so terrible? To wish that for him?”

It was not terrible, for we all wished him to be out of his pain–pain that even morphine could not relieve. When my month's overseas leave ended he was still alive. Although the war was over the army did not acknowledge that fact and I was shipped off to the prairies to learn jungle warfare in order to fight an enemy who no longer existed. And there, in August, I got a wire from my mother urging me to come home because my father had been taken to the hospital. I was given compassionate leave and caught the next train to the coast.

In the
CPR
station in Vancouver I bought a morning paper and read it while waiting for the streetcar. As I passed the classified advertising section, a name caught my eye. It was my father's. It headed the obituary column and, reading the details in the agate type, I felt only an immense wave of relief that it was over.

“It was his heart that kept him alive,” my mother told me when I reached home. “It's ironic, isn't it? Everything else went, apparently–his circulation … everything. It's all in the autopsy. It was his heart that wouldn't stop beating. The one thing he thought would kill him turned out to be the strongest part of him.”

The Administration Building, where he worked for a quarter of a century, still stands in Minto Park. It is a handsome structure, in a design which might be labelled frontier classical. Much of it has fallen into disrepair since the government offices were moved to Whitehorse but part of it has been converted into an historical museum. For me, as for my family, this is a place of endless fascination. Every kind of memento is to be found here, from bits of mining machinery to old scrapbooks. The Dawson that I knew and that my parents knew is preserved here in artifact and photograph. There are photographs of the town in its very first days as a tent community; photographs of the great days, when it was jammed with cabins and warehouses and a dozen steamboats and hundreds of small craft lined the river bank; photographs of Dawson as I knew her in her fading elegance with fretworked public buildings and cottages with wide verandahs. Here, for instance is a photograph of a house I often played in, that of the
RCMP
inspector; it stands to this day, across from the museum, but it is a total ruin. Here is a photograph of the Discovery Day parade in the 1920s, showing the long line of goldrush pioneers, my father among them, wearing the gold and purple sashes of the Yukon Order of Pioneers and heading off to Minto Park where Mr. Schwartz was preparing to dole out free soda pop. Here are photographs of all the old steamboats, and the railway trains that once ran out to Bonanza creek, and the great costume ball where my sister went dressed as Bo-Peep and I as Little Boy Blue. Here is the school we went to, now torn down and here is a photograph of the first airplane into Dawson, the
Queen of the Yukon
. Here is a photograph of a snowshoe party taken before World War One and at the far left of the group stands a slender woman in a fashionable long skirt and toque; I recognize those solemn, brown eyes which I see again in my own children and in her grandson Berton. Here she is, ten years later, in a photograph of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire; the face has a few lines on it, but the eyes are still large and solemn. And here, in an album showing all the children born in St. Mary's Hospital, is a photograph of an equally solemn little girl with those same brown eyes and I explain to Berton that this is his mother, pictured at the age of two. For him this whole experience is more moving than it is for my offspring, since he knew his grandmother much better than they did. She lived a few blocks away and used to tell him stories, all through his boyhood, about the strange town in the north where his mother was raised. For all of his life he has seen this town in his mind and he tells me now that in one way it is exactly as he imagined it–for my mother's descriptions were nothing if not graphic–and in another way it is oddly different. But then she was describing Dawson as it was almost half a century before.

I leave the children to pore through the albums and I walk out of the museum and across the hall to the disused wing of the Administration Building. Two boards nailed across the doorway block my entrance but, looking through into the big room beyond, I see what I have come to see. The ceiling has partly fallen in and the room is littered with debris. The lines have been blurred by dust and cobwebs. The big carts of mining files have long since been removed to Whitehorse and the doors of the old vaults hang open, but his desk is there, covered with rubble but intact, the desk at which he worked for twenty-five years. I can see him again … the vest … the armlets … the green eyeshade … and the two small children, riding on the carts into the vault and then taking him by the hand at closing time to lead him up the steep hill to home.

The rest of the family troop out of the museum and we all leave the building and walk across the little park with its white obelisk, marking the dead of World War One. I look towards the rear of the Administration Building and feel that something seems to be missing. What is it? The place seems strangely naked. Then a recurring dream comes back to me, a dream that I have had for many decades, a dream in which I am scampering and hiding between rows of tall wooden walls behind a familiar building I cannot identify. Now I realize that this is that building and those walls were high stacks of cordwood arranged in parallel lines and stretching out like fingers behind the back door of my father's office, where we children often played in the afternoons after school.

The park seems to have shrunk. It used to take me a long time to cross it, or so it seemed; now we reach its borders in a few paces. Part of it has been appropriated for a new hospital, designed in a style I call Territorial Modern. We are cutting across the lawn near Seventh Avenue when a man comes out from behind the building and shouts: “Hey! Where do you get off stepping all over my grass?” I am about to apologize when I notice that he is grinning at me and as he approaches I recognize him. He no longer has the horns or the tail but otherwise he has not changed greatly since that Sunday morning at Apple Jimmy‘s fruit stand. Like John Gould and Chester Henderson, Axel Nordling has remained in his home town. In fact he has now lived in Dawson longer than my father did; he can, however, escape each winter to the Mexican or the Hawaiian sun–the airplane has made that possible. We talk about the rest of the gang, many long departed, some still in the North. I will see a few of them at the Pioneer Dance tomorrow night. But I will not see Chester Henderson nor will I be able to buy another grizzly rug from him at his cabin along the Klondike. He was found there last year, dead by his own hand. He was incurably ill and it was not in his nature to allow himself to be a charge on any man.

We leave Axel and walk up the little road which used to bear the name of Joseph Ladue's partner, Arthur Harper, and down whose steep slopes I used to coast in the small wagon my father bought me for my seventh birthday. How gentle that slope seems now! How narrow the roadway! At the top, on Eighth Avenue and just under the hill, is the little cabin where Robert Service wrote his second volume of verse. Across from it is a tiny cottage now identified as part of the Robert Service Motel. The canary vine, which used to smother it at this time of year, no longer grows here but the briar roses are still blooming near the front door and the birches and cottonwoods which always lined the borders of the front yard seem scarcely to have changed. I realize, with a start, that these are not the same trees but the offspring of those I knew as a child. And there is the verandah on which I slept and contemplated, each summer, the mystery of the stars; and there is the addition my father built when the family began to grow up. And there, propping it up like flying buttresses, are the long poles used everywhere in Dawson to support decaying buildings.

There is no one living in the house. We borrow a key and enter through the kitchen. To me it seems oddly distorted, like a house revisited in a dream. The rooms seem tiny, built for dwarves. Can this really be the spacious hallway of my boyhood? I can hardly turn around in it. Did four of us actually sleep in this cubicle of a bedroom? Did this diminutive yard I see from the little kitchen window actually hold the gigantic garden of memory? Nothing has changed yet everything has changed. The familiar furniture, my father's books, the circular dining room table, the dentist's chair in the den, the lamp he made as a present for my mother, the copies of the
Scientific American
, his fur coat and hat hanging next to his walking stick in the hall, my sister's dolls, my own mechanical toys, the Haynes Brothers piano, the old Remington on which my mother's novel was written–all these are gone. The house is a shell from which the spirit has flown and, like the road outside and the garden below and the town itself, half hidden by the invading wilderness, it seems to have shrunk, like an old man withering away on his deathbed, his sinews atrophied and his limbs as thin as matchsticks.

LAST DAY

W
e are standing in a group on the top of the Midnight Dome high above the town. It is August 17, the Discovery Day of old, now celebrated on the previous weekend in the fashion of most Canadian holidays “so that the town can enjoy a three-day drunk” as one native put it to me. But the Yukon Order of Pioneers will celebrate it with an Old Time Dance tonight and we will all go.

We have come up on Skip's minibus to this highest point above the town to enjoy a picnic and see the Yukon and Klondike valleys spread out below us and look at the view, which is one of the most magnificent in all the Yukon. We have come up past Thomas Gulch, where I once thought myself lost, and past the Moosehide Trail, where, fifty years ago this month, my mother and I ate toffee rolls, and past the cemeteries which stretch out on the hillside–hundreds and hundreds of graves, with half the names obliterated and great trees poking up through the mounds – and past the old farms where we used to play in the hay, long since given over again to the wild, and up above the treeline to this windswept peak overlooking both the rivers and the famous gold creeks and the community of Dawson.

From this distance one gets the illusion of gazing back in time. The town below us looks almost new. The streets crisscrossing one another at neat, geometric angles give it the appearance of a modern suburb; one cannot see the crumbling sidewalks or the intruding weeds, while the blank spaces appear as parks and the buildings, from above, do not seem to be falling down.

Out on the grey breast of the Yukon, Captain Dick Stevenson's little sternwheeler,
Yukon Lou
, takes its quota of tourists downriver to the empty Indian village of Moosehide and across to the old shipyard where the
Susie
and the
Schwatka
and the
Julia
B. have laid their bones. What saddens me, excites the visitors. They have never seen a steamboat before and these decaying sternwheelers are the stuff of history. If Dick Stevenson has his way, a new boat, perhaps as big as the
Julia B
., may soon be cruising the river. Every year more and more Outsiders pour into Dawson, which in its old age–and perhaps because of its old age–has again become a mecca.