Drifting Home (6 page)

“Did you know somebody bought Ben-My-Chree?” I am asked.

“I heard about it at Carcross. Do you know who it was?”

“Sure. Fellow named Cy Porter. Used to be in the tourist business in Vancouver. Know him?”

Indeed, I do know him. His name, in my time, was Cyril Pridham, but he later took that of his foster parents who brought him up from childhood in one of the Gulf Islands. So … the man who bought Ben-My-Chree was my old friend, Hambone! He, too, had never been able to get the Yukon out of his blood. Well, Ben-My-Chree would be in good hands.

When we return to the boats, we find Berton already there. He is not hard to spot in his crimson jacket and his father's old artillery hat. He has his mother's dark brown eyes-his grandmother's eyes-and he has his maternal great grandfather's instincts. Like him, he is a Marxist and like him, he is going to be a journalist. Looking at Berton, I think again of my mother's father whom I knew only briefly as a small visiting child, and of whom I was always a little afraid, although he was the gentlest of men. He was very old and almost blind but he worked every day at his desk, dictating his pieces to my mother's younger sister-a writer who could never stop writing. In the evenings he would sing the old songs:
The International
and
The Red Flag
and
Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill
and many others, most of them political. It was in this atmosphere that my mother had been raised, a city atmosphere of intellectual and political discussion and much poverty. What a contrast it must have been for her when she stepped off the steamboat in 1908 and found herself in a Yukon mining camp. But she has already told that tale in a book of her own.

At last the boats are re-loaded and we are ready to leave. Scotty Jeffers has packed the big freight canoe with most of our provisions and we all sigh our relief, for that means there will be more room and the boats will ride higher when we reach Lake Laberge tomorrow.

An old Indian, who has been sitting in the shadow of the
Whitehorse
, gets to his feet and walks down to talk to us. He is a little drunk.

“Be careful of Lake Laberge,” he says. “Be careful of sudden squalls.”

The words are like an echo, ringing down the corridors of the decades. My mind goes back to a July day in 1926 and to this very spot in the lee of the old steamboats, rotting on the ways. (But the
Whitehorse
, bright with fresh paint, was then in the water.) Another boat loaded with provisions was tied to this bank, ready to push off down the river. It was called
The P and L
which stood for Pierre and Lucy. My father had named it for his children.

Down the bank to see us off came the Bishop of the Yukon, Isaac Stringer, dressed in traditional fashion, black gaiters and all. This was no comic bishop out of a Chaplin movie. This big man was as tough as a pilot biscuit-the same bishop who, starving on the Rat River Divide, had boiled and eaten his boots, thus saving his life. That, it is said, provided Chaplin with his most famous scene.

“Be careful of squalls on Lake Laberge,” I can hear the bishop saying and I remember wondering to myself exactly what a squall was. Was it like a squaw? I had only turned six and did not know all the words yet.

“We'll watch out, Bishop,” my father said.

“Keep close to the shore, Frank. If a squall comes up and you're out in the middle, you'll never make it. You know how fast they come up on Laberge.”

“We're going to creep around the shore, Bishop,” my father said. And then we got into the boat and waved goodbye to the Bishop Who Ate His Boots and went drifting with the current towards the lake.

Dusk is about to fall as our own rubber boats and freight canoe push off. We will not travel for long. But we want to get as far downstream from Whitehorse as possible, to escape the pollution it has brought to this section of the river. Raw sewage from the town pours directly into the Yukon and, as we round the corner, we see a mountain of steaming garbage clinging to the high bank and spilling into the water. The dump was not there when
The P and L
slipped down the river forty-six years ago and it was not there when the steamer
Whitehorse
brought me past these banks on the first day of a new war. If my children bring their children down the same river on some future odyssey, will the spreading chancre of civilization have turned the whole river into a sewer? Or will that generation, wiser than ours, find some way to preserve these waters for the children who follow?

DAY FOUR

I
wake to the unwelcome sound of rain pelting against the nylon tent. We have forgotten to fasten the flap and the foot of my sleeping bag is soaking wet. It is well past seven but no one is stirring. Perri, I am sure, is awake for she is a morning person, chipper as a squirrel at the earliest hour. On this trip, she has usually been the first to rise, the first to dress and the first to pop out of her tent but there is no sign of her this morning.

Reluctantly, I pull on my clothes, rain gear and rubber boots and poke my head out. The forest is sopping. Pools of water drown the grasses under my feet as I slop over to the riverbank. Last night's campfire is a blackened mush. Many of the new cartons that Janet picked up in Whitehorse are already damp under sodden tarpaulins. We have two choices: we can stay huddled in the tents and wait out the rain or have a swift breakfast and push off toward the patch of open sky that lies in the direction of Lake Laberge. I choose the second course. We will try to outrun the rain.

I search about for a large tree, chip off the wet outer bark and make a fire out of the drier inner pieces, recalling the old days at Thetis lake with Hambone. This morning one match is not enough: it takes a tinful of gasoline to get a blaze going. My plan is to feed everybody in the tents, so that they can keep dry as long as possible. Last night we ate most of a fine country ham. Breakfast will be hot ham sandwiches and cocoa. Perri turns up, wearing her rain hat, plastic coat and rubber boots, and volunteers to help. Skip and his crew start to load the boats. When everybody is fed, the tents come down in a rush; then in a burst of energy we pack up and set off under full power, fleeing from the rain. By the time we reach Laberge we are out of it.

As we enter the mirror-smooth lake we can see the ruins of the old Mounted Police post on our left. The rain is following us, a dark smear against the forest, but here the waters are smiling in the sun. Around us, rocky cliffs and steep hills rise from the shoreline, and to the west and southeast we can see lines of snowcapped mountains, but as we move farther down the lake, the hills grow smaller. We scud across the glassy surface, each boat nicely trimmed and up on its step, like a seaplane's float. It will take us only a few hours to make the thirty-one mile run. It took
The P and L
the better part of a week.

The crossing of this lake and the sudden plunge through the Five Finger Rapids are the two memories that stand out from that childhood voyage. My father had made a sail for our boat but the wind did not rise and we had to cling to the shoreline while he rowed the full length of Laberge. The exercise did not bother him. He was 56 but as powerful as a grizzly and this was the first holiday he had taken since the end of the Great War. The previous winter had been a lonely one, for the rest of us had been Outside, visiting my mother's parents in Ontario. No doubt that was the reason he bought up the equipment of a departing dentist and began to fill and pull teeth: it was a way of putting in time. Where he learned the technique I do not know; perhaps he got it out of a book. At any rate, for several years after that my mouth was filled with plaster of Paris, as he experimented with making moulds for false teeth.

My father could not go East with us. As a government mining recorder he was given two weeks' holiday a year but in those days it took two weeks to reach Ontario. The Yukon was a kind of prison for men on salary. There were no airplanes; the first one did not reach Dawson until 1927. It took several days to reach Whitehorse by steamboat, another day by train to Skagway, then several more days down the coast to Vancouver and another four days by train to Toronto. In the winter, the only escape was by open sleigh–an exhausting five-day journey to Whitehorse in temperatures that often dropped to 40 below. Because of this, the government allowed its employees to accumulate their holidays over a period of years but my father had not yet saved up enough to make the Outside journey worthwhile. It would be another seven years before he was able to spend a full winter away from Dawson. For more than ten years he did not have a day off except for those three weeks on the river. He worked a five and one-half day week, week in and week out; when he met us in Whitehorse he had not seen us since the previous fall.

I do not think he minded not having holidays, since there were compensations. He walked home a block and a half for lunch. He was finished work at 4:30. He never experienced the tensions or frustrations of city life. He never needed a car. Living in Dawson during the short, intense summers was like living in a summer camp. In June, July and August, the river was his highway and the Klondike valley his fishing ground. The winters could be viciously cold but he made the most of them; it amused him to fashion a scarf pin out of mercury, which freezes at 40 below, and see how long it would last. And when he walked home from work in the pitch darkness, he could examine the stars, which were an eternal fascination to him. In the
Scientific American
, which he saved for winter reading and absorbed thoroughly, there were monthly maps of the heavens and these he committed to memory. He and I would study the star maps and he would teach me the names of the constellations of Orion and Andromeda and the Pleiades and the Little Bear and show me how to find the North Star by using the pointers of the Big Dipper. And then we would go out into the snow and gaze up into the night and pick out the pinpoints of the real stars, shining more brightly than they do in the cities because the air was free from smog and the stars were the only lights that shone around us.

More than most men today, my father had time for his family. Often on the way home from school, my sister and I would go into his office and wait for him to finish, watching him as he worked at his desk, the armlets keeping his cuffs high, a green eye-shade on his forehead. Then we would be allowed to ride on the carts as the great books of mining files were rolled back into the vault at closing time and we would take his hand and walk with him up the steep roadway that led to our home.

This river trip was one of the great events of his life. He rarely reminisced about the stampede; it was so much a part of the background of the town that it was taken for granted. But in the years that followed, he and my mother constantly looked back on those sunlit days when we rowed around Laberge and drifted down the river. My sister and I still talk about it whenever we meet. We were very young at the time; I had just turned six and she was not yet five, but certain moments of that journey are forever imprinted on our minds.
Remember how they took the bread to bed with them to make it rise? Remember how he scooped an oven out of the
bank? Remember how we shot the rapids and Mamma wanted to get out? Remember the day on Lake Laberge when we caught the big fish?

It all comes back again–that sudden tug on the rolling line.
It can't be a fish; you must have snagged the bottom … No, by George, it
is
a fish and it's a whopper … Damn, I've got no net … have to use a knife … Don't look, children …
; My mother raised a large black umbrella and popped us beneath it, but I peeked out and in one forbidden instant witnessed a thrilling spectacle: a fish that seemed as big as a shark, lashing about in the boat, and my father, hunting knife in hand, standing astride the seat and stabbing it to death. It was big enough to serve us all for three full meals. There are fewer fish in Lake Laberge today; pollution from Whitehorse has taken its toll.

Now the present intrudes upon the past. When we are about two-thirds of the way down the lake the weather abruptly changes. The sun vanishes. A stiff wind springs out of nowhere. The waters turn choppy. A kind of darkness settles over Laberge.

The boats are strung out for about a mile. Far to the rear I can see The Pig making heavy weather, the rising waves already breaking across her bow. Scotty Jeffers, in the freight canoe, has been running beside us but now he drops back. Skip's lead boat still rides high, but as the going gets rougher and the waves higher, it becomes more difficult to manoeuvre. We feel a cold spray on our faces and then the spray grows heavier and buckets of water begin to wash over us. The wind continues to rise, the waves to heighten, and the boats are now slap-slapping against the hardness of the water, like wagons bumping over a rocky road. This is the dreaded Lake Laberge squall, which I have been hearing about since childhood but have never experienced. I remember the entry in my father's diary for July 9, 1898: “Bad wind across lake sprung up & we had hard time to make camping ground.”

Peter, who loves engines, has been at the tiller with Skip beside him. Suddenly Skip's face changes. He seizes the tiller from Peter and swings the boat around. “Scotty's in trouble,” he says.

As the boat turns, I look back and see the raised paddle that is our signal for distress. I feel a strange sensation in my stomach. The freight canoe, which holds all of our provisions and most of our kit and equipment, has fallen far behind and is clearly about to sink. Indeed, it appears to have gone under, for all we can see through the waves and the spray is the figure of Scotty in his orange rain jacket standing, apparently, upon the water and waving his oar.

The other boats are turning too, but we are the first to reach the canoe. It is already half full of water and the waves are breaking over the side, threatening to swamp it. The engine has failed and Scotty is pumping furiously.

“It's coming in faster than I can get it out,” he tells Skip.