Drifting Home (3 page)
P
atsie has been assigned the task of keeping the log, partly because she is an uninhibited writer with an original though gaudy turn of phrase, partly because she is studying art and can illustrate her account of the river journey, and partly because she usually finishes any job she undertakes. On this Sunday morning, with the sun filtering through the clouds and the mountains around us still half-clothed in mist, she sits cross-legged on the bank with the logbook resting on her blue jeans. She is 19, but with her pixie face and puckish grin and darting black eyes she looks younger.
Patsie's features are rarely in repose but now as she concentrates on the log, the impish look is replaced by something else, hauntingly familiar. Where have I seen it before? In an old photograph album? When the hair is swept back, as it is now, and the grin vanishes, I suddenly see my mother reflected in Patsie's face-not the grand old lady, stiff-backed and white-haired, whom the children called “grandmamma” -but the girl of earlier photographs, so solemn with those immense black eyes and so lovely, with the jet hair pulled back in a tight coil to complete the perfect oval of the face. Patsie's hair is light brown and she has freckles and a snub nose, but the resemblance is there for a fleeting instant ⦠uncanny ⦠almost as if my mother's youthful ghost had entered her. This was how she must have looked to my father when, twelve years after he climbed the Chilkoot, he first met her at a party at Granville, the mining camp on the Indian river. He had already turned forty and was a thoroughgoing bachelor, but in a year or so all that was to change and, looking now at Patsie, I can see how beautiful my mother must have been to him. Then Patsie looks up from her logbook, her nose wrinkles, the familiar grin lights up her features, the black eyes come alive and the face in the photograph album disappears.
In the log, Patsie is describing Skagway, which we had left the previous morning on our journey through the White Pass to Bennett: “The sidewalks on the main street were all board and every building was like Shaw's old hardware [in Kleinburg]. It was a neat old place; many a derelict building with broken window or boarded-up door stood majestically-reminiscent of the glory they used to hold. I walked a while through the streets that were deserted-the wind blowing and whistling through my hair ⦠a hollow building, a cracked window spied me from above ⦠the wild grasses and flowers and weeds inhabited the streets where was once the adventure and splendour of the rough souls who stayed here. ⦔
We are slow getting ready this morning. Tents have to be taken down, dunnage bags packed, sleeping bags rolled, breakfast dishes washed, garbage buried, latrines filled in and all the baggage and provisions re-packed in the boats. We all don our rain gear: the lake is choppy this morning and when we enter the next lake, Tagish, we expect to face heavy weather. The boats are so heavily loaded that they cannot ride high in the water and even the smaller waves often break over the bows.
I catch young Paul lugging his dunnage bag down to the boats. This is strictly against doctor's orders and he knows it. It is hard to realize that less than six weeks ago, Paul underwent heart surgery in the Sick Children's Hospital, Toronto. Nobody, I think, expected that he would make this trip, especially the members of the surgical team who worked over him for several hours late in June. Nobody except Paul. This family excursion probably means more to him than to anybody else except me because he has reached an age when the presence of the family has become important to him. The time will come in his later teens when the family may become too oppressive and he will want to escape for a while, but this year he is more insistent than any of the others on family outings and family rituals; Sunday dinners and summer picnics have become a passion with him. “The family is breaking up,” he keeps saying sadly, for the children are growing older. This will probably be the last time our family finds itself together for a whole fortnight and this, too, has been one of the reasons for our river journey. On the Yukon, no one can intrude upon us; no one can reach us by wire, telephone or mail. We may drift for days without encountering another human being. We will be alone on the water and in the wilderness with each other's company and for Paul, especially, this is important.
It was late in June-the plans all made, the outfitter contracted for, the travel arrangements completed, the food shipped north-when Paul realized something was wrong. His heart felt funny, he said; within a week, for the second time in his life, he was on the operating table.
The doctor told us before the operation that he did not believe Paul could make the river trip. Any surgery required a convalescent period of eight weeks and this wasn't just any surgery. This was one of the most difficult of all operations, exhausting for the doctors as well as for the patient. The suggestion that he be taken almost directly from the hospital to a rubber raft and sent plunging down the wild Yukon was unthinkable. But the doctor reckoned without Paul.
He is the competitive member of the family, a boy who plays to win. He has a passion for games like
Risk, Careers
or
Monopoly
. There is a stubborn streak in him which makes him want to finish things he has started, no matter what the obstacles may be. The statistics of the Klondike stampede suggest that for every twenty men who decided to set out for the goldfields, only one actually made it. Paul would have been one of those who would make it, as my father was. My mother told me once that my father, thwarted on the Stikine and ready to attack the Chilkoot, was offered a chance to give up the struggle and return to a job he had long desired-a faculty post at Queen's University. The letter accepting his application was waiting for him at the Dyea post office before he scaled the Pass. It was a job for which he was perfectly suited, because he was a natural teacher; you could not talk to him for five minutes without learning something. Probably he should have taken the post and no doubt life would have been a great deal easier for him if he had. (He drifted about the Yukon for a dozen years, trying his hand at all sorts of odd employments; he was, by turn, carpenter, cook, miner, pick and shovel man, high school principal, and French instructor before he took a job with the government service.) But he had gone too far to turn back and so he put the letter in his pocket, forgot about it, climbed his Chilkoot and thus, by a conscious decision, changed the pattern of his life. Paul has some of his qualities. He literally willed himself better and was discharged a week ahead of schedule.
Some of our medical friends were horrified at the idea of Paul making the trip. What if his boat overturned? The shock could kill him. It was useless to explain that the healthiest of us would probably not survive if that happened. It is not just the numbing cold that makes a swim of any length impossible; it is also the current and the undertow. A stick flung in the water is sucked out of sight in an instant. We all faced an equal hazard.
But I wanted Paul to go and go he did with his own doctor's blessing. Keep him warm, he told us. Don't let him get wet or cold. And don't let him carry any heavy loads. So I warn Paul again, and he drops the bag and lopes off, muttering to himself. He is a boy who seems to find it impossible to walk anywhere.
It is a two-hour run under power to Carcross, the old Indian settlement on the spit of land that separates Bennett from Tagish lake. Already the three boats, with their twenty-five horsepower engines, have taken on personalities. Skip has names for them all. His is the fastest, named for a champion,
Miss Bardahl
. Cheri runs
The Sluice Box
, which the children have named
The Slush Box
. Each of these boats is fourteen feet long. The third is sixteen feet long and is called
The Pig
, and because it is much slower has already become an object of derision. Indeed, those who ride in The Pig are already being treated by the others as if they were members of an inferior social class. The loading of the boats then becomes a matter of more than logistics. Nobody wants to ride in The Pig, but each must take his turn. Every possible excuse to evade the draft is invented by those selected for The Pig. Since the boats must be equally balanced and since the weights of the passengers range from sixty to two hundred and twenty pounds and since certain people want to sit with certain other people, the arrangement in the boats requires the wisdom of a Solomon and the calculating powers of a small computer.
At last the cries of the enraged passengers in The Pig are stilled and we set off down the choppy lake, the bottom of each boat slapping hard against the waves. The Pig's motor keeps sputtering and failing. The other boats are forced to slow down and there are jeers from the non-Piggers and wails from the Piggers and threats by me to put the jeerers into The Pig if they continue their abuse. The Pig has definitely become a boat to which one is condemned rather than assigned. When we reach Carcross in the early afternoon it is still bringing up the rear.
It is here that the great herds of caribou once crossed between the lakes. In my boyhood, the fall migration used to take place within a few miles of Dawson, never following the exact pathway two years in a row, but always leaving behind a trampled swath, almost as if a steamroller had pushed its way through the forest. My father would take us out on the river in his boat and we would watch the caribou thundering out of the woods, clambering down the banks, plunging into the river and swimming to the far side. Sometimes he would steer the boat into the midst of them and sometimes, when we had visitors with us, he would station them on an island and then, using his boat as a cowboy uses a horse, round up a swimming band and drive them past the gaping guests. Then we would watch as the animals reached the far side, the does getting behind the fawns and pushing them up the slippery bank with their noses. Not all of them made it. One of the keenest memories of my childhood is the sweet, not entirely unpleasant stench of rotting carcasses that hung over the river in the early fall. But all that has changed. There are still caribou roaming the forests of the Yukon, but the great herds are gone and the animals no longer cross between the lakes at Caribou Crossing.
Johnny Johns greets us from the wharf as Miss Bardahl noses in. He is a Tagish Indian who has lived with history-born in the year of the goldrush, his kinfolk packers on the Chilkoot Trail. Johnny knew all the key figures in the stampede; George Carmack, who found the gold on Bonanza creek, a former packer, married to a Tagish Indian; Jim Mason, his brother-in-law, known as Skookum Jim because of the immense loads he carried over the Pass; another relative, Tagish Charley, who also took part in the famous discovery; and Kate Carmack, the wife Carmack deserted after he struck it rich. All except Carmack are buried here at Carcross and Johnny Johns tells us about the day when Tagish Charley got drunk and fell off the bridge here and was drowned in the lake, a victim of his own success because, being treated as a white man, he was allowed to drink in public. As for Johnny, he raises packhorses and makes a good living from it; at seventy-four he looks twenty years younger and it is clear that he will not fall off any bridges.
We are standing talking to Johnny in the shadow of the old
Tutshi
, the sternwheel steamer that once took tourists down the lake to a little settlement with the haunting name of Ben-My-Chree. In its day, Ben-My-Chree was known as the prettiest spot in the Yukon, for the soil was rich and the flower gardens there became the talk of the Territory. But now Ben-My-Chree, like most other settlements, is deserted and the
Tutshi
sits on the beach in relatively good condition and under the protection of the Territorial Government, her paint still gleaming white, her smoke-stack bright yellow, her paddlewheel the traditional scarlet, her pilot-house outlined in the familiar fretwork-a memorial to another time before the automobile and the airplane changed the pattern of travel in the North.
“Hey, you hear about Ben-My-Chree?” Johnny asks.
“What about Ben-My-Chree?”
“Some fella from the Outside bought it up.”
“Bought it? All of it?”
“Whole place. Big wheel in the tourist business in Vancouver, so I hear.”
“What for?”
“I don't know for sure. Maybe for tourist resort. He was up this way years ago, I hear tell. Maybe for sentimental reasons.”
“Maybe he'll put the old
Tutshi
back into the water.”
“Maybe. Be nice.”
“Hey-that's
neat
,” says Patsie.
“It's only neat if he fixed it up like it was before-or leaves it alone,” says Pamela. “If he louses it up with hot dog stands or chicken stands, then it won't be so neat.”
We stroll up to Matthew Watson's store to pick up a few provisions and I walk across to his home and talk to his mother, who knew my family in Dawson, where her father was the fire marshal. I remember him well, a sturdy man who wore a big fireman's hat and was the envy of every boy in school. I remember the firehall, and his men sliding down the pole when the siren sounded and the harness automatically dropped onto the horses. And I can remember the steam pumper, shining in the sun, full of chemical foam, rattling down the streets, pulled by the snorting animals. Steam pumpers were obsolete almost everywhere in Canada in those days except in Dawson. We used to buy a chocolate marshmallow bar called
Jus' Kids
, I remember, from which you could collect a set of cards about the Good Old Days, drawn by Jimmy Frise. One of these cards contained a drawing of a steam pumper, just like the one in Dawson, pulled by a spanking team of white horses and I could not for the life of me understand why such a commonplace spectacle should be included as part of the Good Old Days, which were, presumably, long past.
I say goodbye to Mrs. Watson, and join the children who have, as Patsie writes in the log, “gone to the pub to see the decrepit, swearing parrot.” The parrot is very old; he was old in 1898 when he was brought here, which means he is probably twice as old as Johnny Johns. He is also very famous-so famous that when he dies, as he will in a few months, Canadian Press will carry his obituary. He is too decrepit to swear at us this morning, so, after buying a case of Yukon beer, we leave him and head for the boats.