DAY FIVE

Skip has come up with a system for getting away earlier. As soon as he shouts “rise and shine,” each of us will immediately pack up our kit and take it down to the boats. Then the empty tents can be struck by one work party while another prepares breakfast.

“Rise and shine!” Skip cries. It is seven and the sun is out. There are groans from the boys’ tent but almost immediately the small figure of Perri appears. She is dollar bright and fully dressed, right down to her life belt. Off she goes, dragging her kitbag down the bank, following Skip’s plan to the letter. She cannot lift the bag so she half pushes and half pulls it through the moss.

“Perri, what makes that bag of yours so heavy?”

“It’s the cheese, Dad.”

My God, the cheese! We have forgotten about the extra cheesel Janet packed some perishables, including two great wheels of cheddar, in the children’s bags rather than send them weeks ahead to Bennett. One cheese has been retrieved and partly eaten but we have forgotten the other and Perri has been packing it around for four days without complaint.

“I’ll take the cheese, Perri.”

“Okay, Dad.”

Now, for the first time, she is able to lift her own kitbag.

“Everything I wear smells of cheese,” she says as she trots off. It is a statement of fact, not a complaint.

The others are slowly rising and shining and thanks to the new system we cut forty minutes off our departure time. This morning we will not use the motors. We will lie lazily in the boats and let the current take us down the Thirtymile.

Every river has a personality of its own, but the Yukon has more than most because its character changes as it grows, broadening and maturing on its long journey to the sea. The Mackenzie is a majestic river but a monotonous one. It flows directly to the Arctic, almost in a straight line, with scarcely a curve and rarely a twist, moving resolutely on beside the long line of the accompanying mountains. It is much the same with the St. Lawrence and the Saskatchewan. But the Yukon is more human. It has many moments of uncertainty and some of frivolity. It skitters back and forth, hesitates, changes its mind, charges forward, then retreats. On the Yukon there is rarely a dull moment: new vistas and fresh terrains open up behind every curve. This is because the river has embarked on a long and wearying quest. The Mackenzie rises in the hinterland and sets out in a direct line for the Arctic, sensing exactly where its goal must be, but the Yukon does not appear to know. It rises within fifteen miles of the Pacific but its search for that same ocean takes it in the opposite direction. Like a prospector seeking hidden gold it explores the land, swinging this way and that, pushing its way through obstacles, circumnavigating others, following false scents and lost trails, growing from infancy to youth to maturity to old age. Here, between Laberge and the Teslin, it is like a child, the water crystal clear, pure to drink and blue as Peggy Anne’s eyes. It wriggles about like a child in delight. Later, when the first of the great tributaries pours in, it will begin to broaden and then, with the alluvial muds of the Pelly and the White joining it, will lose the colour of its youth, and become wider, almost fleshy, the great islands and sandbars giving it texture. By the time it reaches Dawson it is in the first flush of its early maturity, a noble river, flowing confidently past the town, giving only passing notice to the little Klondike, which foams out of the hills to greet it. But it has a long way to go yet. On its huge arc through Alaska it must force a narrow passage through the Ramparts and then spread out, miles wide, over the Yukon flats. Here the Arctic beckons and the river noses north across the Circle, only to discover that its instincts are wrong and that it must retreat south and west, growing broader as others join it, until at Norton Sound it divides into numberless, nameless channels to mingle at last with the cold sea.

It is a new sensation to drift with the current. After the cough and sputter of the engines, this soft and leisurely progress down the river is utterly relaxing. There is no sound except our voices and the hissing of the water. We can converse easily and call from boat to boat. In the wider parts of the river we can hear our echo against the high banks. As we drift, the boats describe great circles so that we see the river and the scenery from various angles.

Craggy rocks, plumed with evergreens, rise from the water. Around the next corner, the river passes under clay banks, three hundred feet high. Mixed in with the dark spruces are the bleached trunks of birches and the olive greens of aspen poplars, many of them notched by the teeth of beaver. At times we seem to be plunging directly through the dark forest, the river no more than sixty feet wide and shaded by the trees; at others the channel broadens into flat meadows; then again, the high, eroded banks return, pocked by swallows’ nests and marked by mud slides. We will come upon these clay cliffs again and again as we drift north.

Beneath our boats we can hear the water seething and hissing. Peggy Anne says that it looks like water boiling in a kettle. Somewhere below, the grayling are lurking but the boys, who have several rods out, have had no luck yet. Peter is casting expertly from Miss Bardahl and now he feels a tug on his line. Enormous excitement! A moment later he lands a fat, foot-long grayling, detaches it neatly from the hook and waves it aloft for the others to see.

It is not surprising that Peter should catch the first fish for he understands and enjoys mechanical techniques. At home he has a workbench and a set of tools. Like my father, but unlike me, he can do anything with his hands. My father had once been a carpenter’s apprentice and I can remember him patiently trying to teach me how to make a mortice-and-tenon joint and how to dovetail drawers with a chisel but I was no good at that. If he was disappointed, he did not show it. He was forever building things. Once, when we camped at Rock Creek in the Klondike valley, he built a scale model of a Roman catapult, for my sister and me, explaining, of course, the history and uses of the weapon. After the D.A.A.A. theatre showed Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers, and every kid in town became a duellist, he made me a beautiful wooden sword with a guard fashioned from a Hills Brothers coffee tin. When we children grew too old to occupy cribs in our parents’ bedroom, he added an extra room to our house. I can still see him working away with plane and chisel and finishing off the porch railing with a little fretwork.

The most magnificent and satisfying thing he built was a boat. It was a proper boat–not a scow of the kind constructed on the lakes in 1898, but a handsome twenty-six foot motor-boat, with a round bottom and a forward storage cuddy. He rented an abandoned hotel on Front Street and every weekend and most evenings for about a year he laboured in this makeshift workshop on his boat. We children would bring him down his lunch and sit around watching him bend each rib to the required curvature by soaking it in water and forcing it into a pattern between two confining rows of nails. When it was finished, he called it The Bluenose, after the famous schooner, and painted the prow a bright blue.

The four or five summers that followed must have been the happiest in my parents’ life. We lived on the river. Almost every day, when he finished work, we would pack a picnic and set out for one of the Yukon’s many islands. In July we would pitch a permanent tent on one of these islands and camp there, my father commuting to work by boat. Thus I came to know the river in all its moods. As the water dropped in the summer, divided islands would be joined by spits of sand in which warm ponds would be left behind for bathing. Between the larger islands were sloughs, some of them shallow enough to wade across, so that you could sometimes move from island to island, wading and walking. There were fish in some of the smaller tributaries, in Swede creek, for instance, and in the famous Indian river–dark, beautiful streams near whose mouths one could find limpid pools.

Drifting down the Thirtymile it all comes back to me: the familiar Yukon hills, their erosion creases choked with evergreens; the little pup creeks gurgling down through the thick forests; the bank swallows pouring from their cliffside caves and filling the air with chatter; the great bluffs around which the river courses and eddies, so that the water, in some places, is going in two directions at once. This is the river of my childhood and of my dreams, for it has often returned, grotesquely distorted, to haunt my adult sleep.

The temperature has risen to 75, the sun is baking our skin, and the fishermen are busy. By lunchtime we have four grayling. By the time lunch is over, we have eight, caught near the bank between bites of sandwiches. In the afternoon, there are other excitements. The lead boat spies four cow moose, grazing in the swampy mouth of a small creek. They look up from their foraging, their shovel snouts dripping weeds, inspect us curiously with their great, soft eyes and then lope leisurely away as the river sweeps us past. Then, in the space of a few minutes, we spot no fewer than three bald eagles in the sky. On the eroding left bank stands a lone cabin, tottering on the very lip, about to plunge into the river; a former steamboat refuelling station. After that we sweep around the great U.S. Bend, where the river forms a tight “S” between high, brooding cliffs.

An hour later we come upon an Indian camp and smoke rack. We beach the boats and walk up to greet a family of four. Long strips of moosemeat hang from the outer rack, drying in the sun, while on the inner rack halves of salmon are turning dark red over a wood fire. We buy a smoked salmon for two dollars and continue on our way. Behind us, we can see the blue smoke drifting out of the forest and mingling with the blue of the sky–the only evidence of human life we have seen all day.

In mid-afternoon we reach the end of the Thirtymile and the mouth of the Teslin, or Hootalinqua. Here, in 1898, the boats that were built by the men who crossed the White and Chilkoot passes joined the boats of the men who came up the Spectral Trail from Ashcroft or up the Stikine or Skeena rivers and trekked overland to Teslin lake. Opposite the Teslin’s mouth, clinging to the left bank of the Yukon, are the old buildings of Hootalinqua Station, one of more than a dozen ghost settlements that dot the river between White-horse and Dawson, all of them tenantless since the highway put the steamboats out of business. We pull up the boats and explore the empty community. The old Mounted Police post is half hidden by the Yukon’s official flower, the crimson fireweed. The blooms reach up to the empty windows, almost touching the grasses that hang down from the crumbling roof.

On an island opposite Hootalinqua Post, an odd sight catches our eye. Above the willows and aspens we see a great smoke-stack. We nose into the beach and make our way into the woods. There, rising above us several storeys high, with willows poking through the holes in her deck, is an entire steamboat. She is very old, the paint long gone from her hull, but intact except for the paddlewheel, which lies in pieces beside her. She is called The Evelyn and a plaque on her hull proclaims that she is under the protection of the Territorial Government. There is a similar placard on the Hootalinqua police post and on every other ghost town along the river. It is about all the local government can do at the moment to draw attention to the fact that these are historic sites worthy of preservation. Unhappily, there is no money yet for restoration.

I have never heard of The Evelyn. She did not ply the river in my day. Later on I learn that she was purchased in 1922 by the White Pass company, which ran the steamboats and the trains, but having bought her they found they had no use for her. She has been here ever since, with the brambles growing round her and the willows growing through her and only her smoke-stack protruding from the new growth on an island that was once a bustling shipyard.

The day is wearing on and Big Salmon, where we expect to camp for the night, is another thirty-five miles downstream, so we turn on the motors and skip along with the current. Five miles farther on we spot more moose, grazing in the backwater at the foot of a steep slide of black clay. But I am not looking at the moose. My chart tells me that the hull of the original Klondike, which sank in the Thirty-mile but drifted to this point, lies just under the water at the base of the slide. As the others watch the moose, I spot her, like the shadow of a mammoth fish, outlined by a series of ripples. And now my mind goes back to a summer’s day in 1928 when the Klondike, fresh from the shipwrights, first puffed into Dawson. She was a freighter, with a big open deck and only a few cabins for passengers-the biggest steamboat on the river then, though not as big as those great Mississippi packets, the Susie, Sarah and Hannah, that plied these waters in the stampede days. Now, like the Susie, which rotted slowly away in the shipyard downriver from Dawson, the Klondike is only a hull-shaped ripple in the whispering river.

I think one of the reasons why the steamboats held such a fascination for me was that they represented, in a kind of second-hand way, the mysterious wonders of the Outside, which I only vaguely remembered from my visit at the age of five. Sometimes there would be as many as three stern-wheelers tied to the dock at one time: the Yukon from downriver, the Casca or the Whitehorse from upriver and a freighter, such as the Klondike. These boats, which brought fresh fruits, also brought people from far away places. Most of them were American tourists and we thought of them as a different race. “These aliens seem quite friendly,” my father heard one of them remark and the phrase tickled him so much that he repeated it many times over the years. We were always polite to the tourists. When they passed me on the streets I spoke to each one and was surprised when they did not always return my greeting. I had been told that on the Outside people did not say hello to every Tom, Dick or Harry they met on the street but I refused to believe that. My experience was limited to that single journey at the age of five, when we had gone straight to my grandparents’ home in Oakville, then a small town. I had no experience of the big city–I had only read about big cities in books–but with all my heart I longed to experience one.

Now, as the Yukon shoreline rolls by me and the river widens and the wooded islands grow more numerous, I think how strange it is that my own children, brought up on the edge of a big city, loathe and despise the metropolis. They seek to escape the asphalt and the highrise, the buzzing traffic and the flashing lights and so this wilderness experience is for them a kind of Elysium, as it is, indeed, for me. Yet when I was their age, enjoying the river almost daily, all the Elysian fields were asphalt. I longed for lights and advertising signs. I longed to ride a streetcar or a railway train. I longed for tall buildings and throngs of people. Most of all I longed for circuses, carnivals, amusement parks, radio and talking pictures, none of which I had ever experienced. Like Coca Cola, they were no more than images in magazines, totally unattainable.

In the fall of 1931, when my father had accumulated enough holiday time and my mother had finished the novel she was writing on the kitchen table (my father typing it out for her each night on the old Remington), the voyage to the Outside at last took shape. We would go to Toronto, live in my Aunt Florrie’s house on Huntley Street, visit my mother’s parents in Oakville and she would place her novel with a publisher and we would all be rich and would go to circuses and carnivals all day. It did not quite work out that way and yet in retrospect that winter seems to me to have been one long carnival. I saw sights I had never seen before and spectacles that I did not know existed and I developed, belatedly but permanently, a childish delight in things that whirr and buzz and flash and rotate and jiggle. For that is how I saw the Outside: a whirring, buzzing carnival of light.

In the tomb of the Yukon winter, when the smoke rose in perpendicular columns from the chimneys and a chill fog hung like a shroud over the valley, Dawson was as dark and silent as the forests that bore down upon it. Noon was twilight for the six sunless weeks of December and January. The only automobile that dared to venture forth was the one owned by Archie Fournier, who brought around the milk–when there was milk–in beer bottles stopped with old corks, and who cranked his Model T at every house as the steam poured from the radiator. Even the police kept their horses in the stables when the temperature dropped to 40 below so that virtually nothing moved in Dawson and certainly nothing buzzed or flashed except in the week before Christmas when a few mechanical toys went on display in the window of Mme. Tremblay’s store.

Outside, everything was different, right down to the milk bottles. I saw my first neon sign in Juneau. It was as exciting to my father as it was to me, for he, too, had never seen one. Of course he knew exactly how it worked and explained it in detail, comparing it to the Northern Lights. We stood under it and watched it wink redly in the night. EATS, is what it said, as it flashed on and off. EATSEATS … EATS. Marvelous!

In Toronto there were bigger and better signs–enormous ones advertising various chocolates hanging over Bloor Street. Willards had a gigantic sun made up of hundreds of coloured lights that sent its rays shooting out in every direction; Neilson’s had another, showing three shooting stars made up of crimson neon, that darted above our heads. Everything was new to me: milkshakes I had never known made on machines that rotated and buzzed, fizzy drinks called “phosphates,” fireworks, cent candy, searchlights, tandem streetcars, roller skates, songs I had never heard before, comics I had never read, talkies I had never seen.

Dawson, in those days, seemed light years behind the world. People still danced the two-step and the one-step in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall. Fashions and popular songs were years old. Until 1926, my mother wore her hair in a bun at the top, like Mrs. Katzenjammer in the funnies, and sang such songs as “After the Ball is Over” and “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.” Movies reached Dawson only after every other theatre on the continent was done with them. We saw Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1929. And there were no talkies.

We were allowed to see movies only rarely and then it was a rule that we must be accompanied by our parents. Once, when the Wolf Cubs were taken on a surprise treat to see a cowboy film, I had to phone home for permission to go. It was given to me, but after the cartoons were finished I noticed my father slip into a seat a few rows behind us. I found it embarrassing at the time but years later I came to understand the reason for it. Dawson’s public and commercial buildings were forever burning down and he was deathly afraid of fire in the movie house, and rightly so, for a few years later the D.A.A.A. theatre was destroyed by flames. So there he sat, watching Rex Bell knock down no fewer than seven desperadoes.

“Were there cartoons?” he asked me, after it was over.

“You missed them. There were two: Oswald the Rabbit in Panicky Pancakes and Mississippi Mud.”

“Oh, damn; did I? I’d much rather have seen them than the cowboys.”

For anything that was animated fascinated him. He explained to me how cartoons were made and demonstrated the technique by flipping the pages of a book on which he had drawn a bouncing ball. In Toronto, we saw a lot of cartoons and talking pictures and plays and concerts as well.

“The boy is here for an education,” he told the principal of Rosedale Public School, “and so I intend to take him out of school whenever necessary. He has a bit of catching up to do.”

The principal looked startled but nodded agreement. There was not a great deal he could do since my father had obviously made up his mind. My father was there for an education, too. He signed up for three courses in mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto and went to lectures every day for the sheer enjoyment of it, not in the least bothered by the fact that he was three times the age of his fellow students. “Those fellows are smart as whips,” he’d say. “It takes some doing to keep up with them.”

He took me out of school whenever something came up that he thought I ought to see. We went to the Passion Play in the Royal Alex and As You Like It at Hart House and a wonderful marionette show at Eaton’s and the Ice Carnival in the new Maple Leaf Gardens; and we listened to the Hart House String Quartet and saw some new paintings by people called The Group of Seven. We visited Ottawa for the opening of Parliament where George Black, the Member for the Yukon and new Speaker of the House, actually winked at my father as the procession went by. There, in his brother’s home, I first tasted French fried potatoes and, more important than Parliament, saw a film called Union Station, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Joan Crawford, both of whom actually talked. My father often picked the movies we would see by finding out what the accompanying cartoons were. We saw the first Silly Symphony ever made, Skeleton Dance, at the Uptown, and the second, The Old Clockmaker, at the Hollywood, where the feature was The SmilingLieutenant, starring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert. And if I remember all these details after forty years, while forgetting other, more important world events and my own schoolwork, it is because they made an enormous impression on a small boy, who had been cooped up for all of his eleven years in a northern mining town.

My mother did not find a publisher for her novel. Oddly, she had not chosen to write about the Yukon, which everyone thought exotic but which she thought commonplace, but about Ontario farm life, which everyone thought commonplace but she thought exotic. She was twenty years away from the North before it occurred to her to tell her own story, which was much more romantic and exciting than anything she tried to make up. We did, however, get to a carnival. When the Sunnyside Amusement Park opened up in the spring my father took my sister and me to the lakeshore and there, for several hours, we rode on every device until we had exhausted the list and ourselves and were sticky from cotton candy and dizzy from being whirled about in things that jiggled and buzzed and bumped and lit up. The memory of that magic afternoon with the lights flashing and the music playing and the air heady with incense of frying onions has never left me and ever since I have had a passion for such places–for amusement parks and world’s fairs and Disneylands and exhibitions and sideshows. Like my father, who was 61 at the time and loved every moment of that day (he explained the principle of centrifugal force as we whirled about on the flying swings), I have never been able to get enough of the buzzing and the flashing and the jiggling, perhaps because I had to wait so many years to enjoy it.

Here on the Yukon all these by-products of civilization seem far away, in time and in geography. We have seen no human sign since we left the Indian family on the Thirty-mile. On we go, round the great bends of the river, each marked on the steamboat charts: Vanmeter Bend and Keno Bend, Glacier Gulch Bend and Big Eddy. On we go past Fife creek and the famous Cassiar Bar, where in the days before the goldrush, the early prospectors made wages panning flour gold, whose lightness brought it down the creeks into the river proper.

In his diary on July 14, 1898 my father recorded that his party had stopped at Cassiar Bar to look at the operations there and “saw plenty of large but light colours in the pan” before they moved on for dinner at the police post at the mouth of the Big Salmon river. We, too, will have dinner at Big Salmon. We reach the river’s mouth and there, on the far side, we spy the cabins of the deserted village. And still we have seen no people.

Nothing moves on the river these days. Nothing moves on the banks except the moose, bear and lynx. The cabins grow up out of the grass and the grasses grow up over the cabins, for the roofs are constructed of fertile sod. Within, we find evidence of the past at Big Salmon–old mattresses, brass bedsteads, home-made tables and chairs, and in the trading post, what is left of counter and cupboards. Great salmon racks stand outside near the bank and on these we hang out our clothes to dry.

We have spent some seven hours on the river, an average run, and we are becoming more organized. One crew is at work putting up the tents. Another is cleaning and gutting the grayling for breakfast. A third is bringing up the food and utensils and making a fire. Pamela is preparing a pot of split pea soup using the hambone from a previous meal. And we have the smoked salmon as an unexpected hors d’oeuvre.

Patsie has been given the permanent job of locating and establishing a latrine at each campsite, a task to which she brings both enthusiasm and artistry. Now she comes running down the old path–a path worn smooth for more than fifty years by Indian feet–to announce that she has built the best latrine yet, not too far away and yet secluded, downwind, and, for the first time, with a real log to sit on. She is so proud of her handiwork that a bunch of us accompany her into the woods to inspect the wonderful latrine and offer her congratulations.

We do not linger after dinner. It has been a long and satisfying day and everybody is ready for bed. Only Patsie is still up, drying her damp nightie over the fire. Some of us are already asleep when suddenly we hear her excited shout:

“The Northern Lights, you guys! The Northern Lights!”

We tumble out of the tents and there they are, “literally dancing and playing music,” as Patsie describes them in the log–long streaks and curtains of violet and emerald, swirling and shifting across the heavens and making the night almost as bright as the day–giant abstract neon signs, as my father once explained to me, jiggling and flashing and whirling about like a giant carnival in the velvet of the sky.