Drifting Home (18 page)

Back in the bush we come upon an oblong clearing large enough to take our tents. It turns out to be the remains of another old road, half obliterated by grasses and sedges but with the ruts still faintly visible. It curves back into the trees and vanishes. How many roads like this lie hidden in the willows and the alders of the Yukon's shoreline, I wonder. Where do they lead? Who came this way and why? Something else catches my eye in the underbrush: the remains of one of the very handcarts used to trundle the cordwood up the gangplank. How I longed to hear that welcome sound of wood clattering into the furnace well during those long days on the mud flats of Dominion creek! I can remember Jim, the big genial boss of the pipeline crew, chuckling and saying to me during that second summer: “Never mind, Pete; it won't be too long now. Pretty soon, you'll be sitting on the deck of that steamboat with a big cigar in your mouth, heading up the river and watching the scenery go by.” And then he'd hand me a forty-pound wooden mall and I'd climb up the stepladder and take a few more whacks at the piling we were driving to bedrock to support the pipe that brought down the water that tore up the valley for the dredge the company built. Thus for me the steamboat became the symbol of my future freedom.

It is Skip's birthday eve and in honour of it he is drinking rum and making a salad out of two heads of fresh lettuce from the kitchen garden at Stewart. This is the fourth birthday we have celebrated on the river and there is one more to come. The day we reach Dawson, Peter will turn 17, the same age I was when I went to work on Dominion creek. Much taller than I was then, almost as tall as I am now, he is six foot two and no longer a boy. I realized how swiftly he was growing up last year on the Chilkoot when he and Pamela and I accompanied a group of parks experts making an historical and environmental study of the trail. It was a long hard hike between Sheep Camp and Long lake and in many ways it paralleled the conditions under which my father had climbed the Pass, for he, too, went over it in summer after most of the snow had melted and he had to crawl on hands and knees, as we did, up that forty-five degree incline over a rubble of man-sized boulders, underlaid with shifting shale. We climbed directly into the clouds. A soft mist shrouded us, turning the nearest hikers into shadows, and making the rocks as slippery as if they were sheathed in ice. By the time we reached the summit we were soaked in sweat under our rainwear and totally played out. From this point we could look down the long incline leading to the frozen surface of Crater lake–the very slopes down which my father and his partners sledded their four tons of goods in relays over a period of a week. “I'm sure glad we don't have to do
that
,” said Peter, and I agreed. As we moved on he began, for the first time, to ask questions about the grandfather he had never known and in whose footsteps he was following. Pamela had fallen back with some of the others so Peter and I trudged on together, gasping with fatigue and always aware of the ghostly figure who had preceded us. By the time we came to the end of the day's trek we had each reached our physical limit but of the two, it was clearly the boy who was the fresher. Somebody at the campsite had a flask of brandy and he offered it to us. I passed it to Peter and he took a long grateful gulp and blinked his eyes hard for it was the first raw liquor he had ever swallowed. “Boy, did I need that!” he said, and I thought of the time in the Regina Hotel in Dawson, on the night I arrived for my third summer in the mining camp, when my father had automatically ordered not one, but two hot whiskeys, thus including me, without a word, in the circle of adults at the bar.

“This night Ross and Skip celebrated Skip's birthday,” Patsie reports in the logbook. “They were ‘tooned,' as Peggy Anne would say. However a merry time was had by all.” We sit around the fire once again, singing songs grown familiar from use, reciting Service, drinking hot coffee with rum in it, and all of us getting a little tuned. Peter is included in the adult circle and when he passes his cup across for seconds I remember that evening in the old Regina and refill it for him.

DAY ELEVEN

T
his will be our last full day on the river and our last night in camp. Because Dawson is less than seventy miles away, we can again enjoy the luxury of drifting for most of the day. The river is a skein of channels and it is not possible for us to float together as we did before. We go our separate ways, some boats choosing one channel, some another; we vanish from each other's sight behind low islands, meet up briefly on the downstream side and separate again. Between the islands the river is sometimes so shallow that the boats scrape the bottom and we have to use our paddles as poles. The Wows, deep in their poker game in The Pig, become so immersed in the play that they allow the boat to drift into a shallow channel and are soon stuck fast on a sandbar, to the great amusement of the rest of us. We watch their struggles through the binoculars as they remove shoes, roll up jeans, climb over the side and try to push the sluggish Pig back into deeper waters. It is a long struggle and no one is going to let the Wows forget it.

Reading my father's brief diary notes, written in pencil in July, 1899, I am struck by incidents and remarks that parallel our excursion. He, too, had been stuck briefly on a sandbar near here. He, too, had broken his journey at Fort Selkirk. On those cramped pages he managed to note the same natural phenomena that have caught my eye: the little sandpipers scuttling along the beaches at Marsh lake; the endless strip of white volcanic ash that extends for miles downstream from Lake Laberge; and the great terraces that vanish once you pass Selkirk. There is one great difference: the cabins and the roads and the placer diggings were less than a year old when he passed this way. And he wrote of meeting other boats all the way down the river and of visiting other camps of goldseekers, many of whom he had known in New Brunswick.

On the right bank somebody spots a small black bear, who is so terrified at the sight of us that he defecates as he scrambles up the hillside. “It made us feel kind of awful.” Patsie writes in the log. There is plenty of time for lunch, which means we can dispense with sandwiches and enjoy a hot meal on a sandbar. Pamela has made a big pot of chili, which she heats up on the driftwood fire as we sit in the sunlight watching the river hissing past. How grey it has turned! How measured its pace! Grey, like my father when I saw him on that third and final trip back north to work in the mining camp on Dominion–a shrunken man, moving like a snail down the boardwalk of Fifth Avenue on his way to work, his thinning hair almost white.

He was in his seventieth year and just before I arrived a young doctor had given him some bad advice–or at least that is how it seems to me when I look back on it. He had felt some pains in his chest. The doctor had told him he was suffering from angina pectoris and that he would have to take things easier. Perhaps the doctor did not understand that to my father, a frustrated scientist, the words of a man of science were beyond doubt. He took him literally. Because the doctor had said he must not exert himself, he sold the boat he loved and never again ventured out onto the river. He gave up his walks in the hills. Never again was he to stride up the Old Alaska Commercial Company trail that led to the benchland above, or to follow the white gravel road out to the Bonanza diggings. All this he denied himself. His search for wildflowers ended. When he walked, he walked so slowly that sometimes it seemed as if he was scarcely moving. The doctor had told him that too much exertion would weaken him further; from that moment on, my father was always conscious of the presence of that troubled heart. Nowadays, I suspect, the prescription would not be so drastic: he would be told to exercise moderately and I doubt he would be banned from the river; but in those days doctors knew less about the heart, or at least this one did. Physically, the diagnosis was no doubt accurate; psychologically, it was disastrous. From the moment the doctor gave it, my father was a changed man. When I arrived in Dawson in May I was shocked by his appearance.

This was to be his last summer in the Yukon. My sister was due to arrive the following month to look after him and it was decided that in the fall we would take the steamboat back up the river for the last time together. My father was convinced that he lived under sentence of death.

For me that third season on Dominion creek was not as gruelling as the two before. We had good bunkhouses, better food, hot showers and a nine-hour day. Now I was working with men closer to my own age, though I was still the youngest on the job. More important, I had grown older and physically tougher and the work did not wholly exhaust me. In the evenings, instead of tumbling into bed, I played poker with my fellow workers and even put out a camp newspaper, pinned up once a week on the bulletin board. Sometimes, a bunch of us would walk down to the old roadhouse at Paris-a roadhouse that had been in operation since the goldrush days-and drink bootleg rum with the proprietor, George Fraser, who had lived there since 1898 and would die there without ever venturing so far as Dawson. (“Dawson's too much for me,” he used to say. “Too many bright lights.”) Once, to celebrate the longest day of the year, I stayed out all night, got roaring drunk and walked ten miles back to camp just in time to stagger down to work without breakfast. It did not faze me; it seemed that as my father lost energy I gained–almost as if nature had allotted us a finite amount to be divided up according to our years.

My mother was waiting for us on the dock at Vancouver that fall and I saw the sudden look of alarm in her face as my father slowly made his way down the gangplank.

“The suitcases,” he was saying, “has somebody got the suitcases?”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'll handle that.”

“Yes,” said my mother, giving me a strange look, “you handle everything.”

Forty-one years had passed since he first came through the same city as a young man. “It is not much of a place, about 20,000 inhabitants,” he had written to his mother from Vancouver. “There are a few fine buildings and the principal streets are paved with asphalt. Most sidewalks are wood with some flagstones. There are a great many Chinese. …” Dawson in those days was a much bigger town than Vancouver and some of its buildings were more imposing but in the intervening forty-one years Vancouver had grown twenty-fold while Dawson had shrunk by the same multiple. It occurs to me now, as we float down the silent river, that I am one of the few Canadians raised in a community where growth was not the norm, where real estate dropped instead of rising, where completely furnished houses could be snapped up for a trifle, and where the town, instead of expanding into suburbs and spilling over its own limits, shrank in upon itself–the satellite settlements across the two rivers shrivelling and withering until they were no more, and the edges of the old city blurring as the sidewalks on the outskirts atrophied and fell into disuse and the buildings wasted away and the invading willows and alders crept like a disease over the abandoned lawns and gardens. As a child I had thought all towns were like that. I was so used to boarded-up buildings tottering in the permafrost and to empty cabins collapsing in the bushes that it did not strike me that this was decay until I returned to Dawson many years later and saw it with new eyes. To a boy raised in a ghost town, the Boom is something that belongs to the past and not to the future.

We intend to make camp at the last of the historic settlements on the river route to Dawson. This is the pre-goldrush trading post of Ogilvie, on an island opposite the mouth of the Sixtymile river–so named by the early traders because it was sixty miles upstream from the original Yukon river trading post at Fort Reliance. Among the earliest traders was a New Yorker of French-Canadian stock, a veteran of the river since 1882 named Joseph Ladue. One of the log buildings now fallen into disrepair on this island must have been his original post.

There are a good many vacant cabins at Ogilvie; we find them clustered in two groups separated by a shallow slough that partially divides the island. We move the boats into the shelter of the slough and, in a light rain, make camp in the very heart of the old settlement.

Here, again, is where history was made. It was from this spot that Robert Henderson was grubstaked by Ladue in the mid-Nineties to prospect the Indian river country. Ladue felt there was gold somewhere on the headwaters of the Indian–on Quartz or Sulphur or Dominion creeks–and of course events proved him right. Having probed the Indian, Henderson turned his attention to the neighbouring watershed of the Klondike. It was, then, from this very beach that Chester Henderson's grandfather pushed off in the summer of 1896 with fresh supplies from Ladue's trading post for his memorable meeting with George Carmack–a meeting that led to the strike that touched off the great mass movement known as the Klondike stampede. As we climb out of the boats I can visualize the two men standing here: Henderson, gaunt, lean and rugged, stepping into his poling boat and Ladue, swarthy and enthusiastic, waving him off and telling him not to worry about his bill. In those days a prospector's credit was unlimited.

My father stopped here briefly in August, 1898, just two years later. He and some of his party had decided to take the canoe, a tent, and a fortnight's provisions and have a look at Dawson “to find out what is to be found out,” as he put it, before deciding whether to prospect the Stewart or come on downriver with all the gear. “We passed on our way Sixty-mile Post opposite Sixtymile river, where the trader had quite a garden. Potatoes in flower, cabbages, lettuce, turnips, beans, radishes and beets. He had lost a good deal in the spring by the freshet and the ice carrying away part of his crop but the remainder was doing well. In fact the climate here has been very much misrepresented. A finer summer climate one could not wish to see.” These last words were meant to reassure his mother, who believed him to be swallowed up in a land of perpetual snow.