Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  THIS IS MY turn-around point, the farthest I’ll get this trip. It doesn’t feel like the top of a journey, the natural finish to a slow climb north. It feels more like the bottom door. From here the real north fans out—dry plains and mountains, huge, high ground I long to get at. I sniff it like a horse.

  All day I trudge in the hills around the town. At night I lie in my bag with the flashlight on my chest reading Arctic Dreams, which I carried the whole kayak trip and up the Inside Passage, saving till now. To read it here is wonderful. I dream about polar bears wandering solitary on the ice, white on white, in a land without markers, without horizon, moving on padded feet, their snaky heads low under the big shoulder humps. Do they smell the seal under the ice? Are they following a swimming animal beneath them, waiting for a break in the ice? The female hunts with her cubs, and I picture her lying by a breathing hole, waiting all day for a seal to surface as her cubs roll and thump around her. While she waits, she’s on the lookout for males. Male polar bears can be three times her size, and predatory.

  I saw a photograph once, a female squatting against a block of ice, her head rolled back, nursing her cub in her arms. Polar bear skeletons resemble ours.

  Lopez writes in the smallest detail about big mammals and weather and insulation. I devour his words because these details of keeping warm and dry are all I think about.

  I hiked on Grey Mountain yesterday and felt my body working, the urban brain atrophied and the body woken up, large and demanding. I felt the blood come into the muscles in my legs, heat up my bones and skin, and carry me willingly all afternoon.

  I spent an hour last night with Bill, the fellow who runs the campground, talking and talking for the relief of it. Then another hour in the shower building with Caroline, a woman from Toronto living in the campground for the summer. I’m idiotic with delight to have made a couple of acquaintances.

  TODAY I WENT downtown and rented a car for a couple of days to drive to Atlin, the town the man in Juneau told me to see. I came off the Alaska Highway, sliding a hundred kilometres in the dust down a dead-end gravel road to this old gold-mining town on a lake, all closed up though it’s only six p.m. A three-topped mountain looms like a Buddha across the water, some humpy fir islands in between. A few ribbons of pavement lined with peeling frame buildings and dipping hydro lines roll down to the shore. Ditches are stuffed with foxtail, yarrow and wild rhubarb, tall as elk. Rusty chinks of machinery, tokens from the gold rush, sink in backyards.

  A couple of miles out of town I find a campground by Pine Creek, the creek that started the town, now running milky and fast through a steep gravel bed, the gold mostly emptied out. I set up close to a friendly family in the first site I see, a spot set on the bank above the poplars, the mountain filling up the view like a drive-in movie.

  AUGUST 4

  There’s a wind-stricken kind of poplar growing here in low groves. The tight bark is waxy and engorged, the trunks nearly branchless, and the crowns like thin arms thrown over their heads, aghast. Lodgepole pine is here as well, flourishing glossy cones like scarlet fingernails. Someone has put up hand-painted signs indicating WATER, with an arrow leading down to where the creek speeds by, in case we haven’t noticed.

  The postmistress, who is the volunteer housekeeper of the campground, comes around to clear cigarette butts out of the firepits and replace toilet paper in the outhouses. She asks whether I’ve seen any little bears, as though that would be delightful, and apologizes for not being able to invite me on a boat trip that afternoon as there aren’t enough seats. She explains that payment for camping goes by the honour system. I can leave my three dollars with any Atlin business.

  IT’S STILL DRIZZLING when a woman wearing a garbage bag walks purposefully by in the road. I call her into my campsite for tea. She’s Antoinette, a middle-aged, square-shaped sociologist from New Zealand visiting North America to investigate what makes communities healthy. She slept on Monarch Mountain last night in her garbage bag, hoping to see the sunrise. She’s been here a few days, sampling all she can. “It’s a pretty good place,” she beams.

  I leave the car in town and walk slowly around. Atlin Mountain, across the water, presides. My eyes turn to it again and again, as if taking a bearing. I feel my breathing slow. What must it be like to live in the gaze of something so beautiful?

  Atlin is the most northerly town in British Columbia, set on its biggest natural lake, eighty miles long, a slender dragon of icy glacial melt. The mountains to the west roll away to the coast, to the top of the panhandle, to Alaska and the famous White Pass where thousands of people dragged furniture and horses over the mountains to get to the goldfields. A south wind prevails, blowing over an icefield and keeping the lake too stirred up most days for small craft. Over a summer there’ll be a few kayaks, but it’s mostly float planes, roaring in and out of town on pontoons, wobbling up into the wind and tipping delicately out of sight, barely clearing the snowcaps.

  I’ve asked about the light this far north. At spring solstice, six weeks ago, there was no true night, just a few hours of shadowy twilight. In the winter the sun makes a weak arc in the south, the town lying in royal blue shadow by three in the afternoon before plunging into an eighteen-hour night.

  I TRY A ROAD at the Tlingit end of town, which leads through cottonwood trees rearing back in an amazed, wind-bent stance, past the Tlingit cemetery to the beach. It’s a rough place with low, stiff pines back of the shore and high jumbles of volcanic-looking rock on the beach, big enough to climb and dashed with bright orange and gold lichen. In pocked, brittle rock I find tiny frothy flowers.

  Back in town, in front of the café, there’s an old clock covered in iron curlicues, stopped at twenty past four. When I go inside, there are just a few tables under a high tin ceiling. Frank Studer, in overalls, brings me a mug of coffee and a can of evaporated milk. In a while his wife, Carol, a lanky woman with long hands and a man’s wristwatch, sets down a plate of thick toast and sits at my table, pulling a hand-rolled cigarette out of her blouse pocket. I stay a couple of hours. People come and go. Carol gets them fish hooks or gummi bears—she knows everyone—and the conversation rolls along, open to all comers, gaining and losing contributers.

  I go into the yard with Carol to take the weather. She shows me how she works out the cloud cover, squinting and sighting with her fingers above the mountaintop. Every two fingers is a thousand feet.

  I TAKE THE CAR east of town to the cemetery, on a high ridge away from the road. The deceased have a supreme view of Atlin Mountain floating over the lake, the town a scrabble of buildings in front. To the south, Pine Creek slips in and out of the gorges like a strand of silver wire.

  I walk around, looking at the graves. Some are refined and wistful, a slim painted tablet snugged next to a little pine or aspen. Most of the town seems to favour a variety of thick cement pad the size of a door, laid on the ground like a flower bed, set with plastic flower arrangements or chips of gleaming white stone resembling broken teeth. In this climate the plastic flowers have lost their spunk. The wreaths have rotted down to the Styrofoam, and the flowers have bleached to pale chartreuse or pink and strayed out of line, giving the graves a cheerful air of junk art. Frost heaves have wobbled most of the pads, arching them like old mattresses, a few so pitched you could fall into them. One or two of the graves are very inventive. What I took to be a water ski jammed in the ground is an airplane propeller.

  I’M TRYING to figure out why it feels so good here. Listening tonight to Elizabeth the postmistress talk to Antoinette the sociologist helped. Not all little places are “healthy,” as Antoinette calls it, but a small place can sustain a good thing if it’s lucky enough to get a good thing going. Elizabeth doesn’t believe people here have any superiority over people in other places, but she reckons they know one another in a different way. They are visible to one another. They know each other’s habits, they have the details of behaviour. If a moose that has been frequenting the slough one winter is no longer
seen, they know who likely shot it. They know who’s got the flu and who hasn’t been in for mail. This intimacy can be claustrophobic, but the thing about it is, nobody gets too out of hand. People are cranky or generous, but nobody’s really wild. There’s a kind of invisible lasso around behaviour because people can see one another and in some way are accountable to one another. Elizabeth summed it up in her practical way: “When I see some children up to something they shouldn’t be doing, I go up and tell them. And I tell their mothers too.”

  I find out all I can, as if details would bring me in.

  The town’s shrunk to five hundred from five thousand a century ago, when the rush was on. There’s not much work and people make do. South of town the road strays into a grotto of watercress and peters out. Being at the end of a hundred-kilometre road decides many aspects of town life. There’s a tendency to stay put. The essentials are covered. There are two grocery stores, the vegetables limp and dwindled by week’s end, replenished Wednesday mornings when the truck lumbers in. The gas station handles minor repairs and keeps a float of change for the laundromat. There’s a liquor store, a thrift shop in the church hall Friday afternoons, a library in the courthouse twice a week. There’s an elementary school on the way to the campground. Teenagers have to board in Whitehorse through the week to go to high school. There’s a Red Cross station, a couple of RCMP officers, a landing field for small planes, a yard full of heavy equipment and snowploughs. The mail truck makes a run to Whitehorse three mornings a week, any weather, and takes passengers. Plumbing is unusual. People draw their water from the lake and drink it the way it comes. Everybody keeps a garden, the season swift and clamorous. Some branch out from their own garden and plant for the town—pansies in window boxes outside The Trading Post, sweet peas around the nursing station. Town chores tend to be taken care of that way, by volunteer.

  AUGUST 5

  I’m alone in the campground this morning, foggy air wafting off the creek, a penetrating damp. No sound but the speeding water and squirrels knocking down cones. I traced that water yesterday, taking the road to Surprise Lake, where Pine Creek starts. Signs of mining showed on the way, glimpses down the turnoffs of valleys mounded with gravel where the creek was ransacked. Old machinery stands idle like big animals put out to pasture. Surprise Lake is buried in mountains about twenty kilometres back of Atlin. I got out and stood on the bridge where the creek tips out of the lake. It leaves with plenty of flow, spreading its hand and running through bright grass, then closes, narrow and fast, bending around boulders, a winding green snake. Driving back, following it, I saw where it vanishes, choked out in a mountain of gravel. These creek beds were tossed like burgled houses, watercourses literally moved to get the gold. But this one re-emerges further down, chuckling, shape-changing, carrying on to Atlin Lake.

  I WRAP UP my dirty tent, thank the campground for shelter, and chug the three miles into town. I’m heading for Whitehorse later on to return the car. A couple of days is all I can afford. I’ve been thinking about Bill, back in the campground. He saw me pulling out the other morning and asked when I’d be back. I like him. A wry, lost soul.

  In town, it’s overcast and still. The cloud cover has rubbed off over the lake and shows the mountain’s base like a monolith, lobbed off. A man and his granddaughter in the laundromat give me a cup of detergent. While my clothes are going around, I have a cup of coffee with Carol Studer. I pack up my laundry, then drive away stunned and quiet, Mount Atlin receding in my rear-view.

  And tonight I find a lover, with a body smooth as stone.

  AUGUST 6

  I’ve stopped sending postcards and letters. All of me is here. All of me is withdrawn to here.

  Seven

  BILL

  AUGUST 12

  I haven’t written for a week. I couldn’t. Now I’m sitting in Skagway at sea level waiting for the ferry. The Yukon’s gone, over the mountains behind me, two hours’ drive. A hundred years’ drive.

  What a town, Skagway. Even the name. A tourist town with an atrocious history, the mountains shoving it into the sea.

  I want to tell about Bill, make a whole story out of the bits he gave me in six days, write about him as a way to hold on to him.

  IN THE SEVENTIES Bill Armstrong ran heavy equipment in the north, built roads in raw places in B.C. and the Yukon. He spoke about it the other day, the way people mention a time in their lives when they had everything going for them.

  He asked me what I was doing in 1973. I thought, making clothes for my two-year-old. Cooking dinner.

  He said, “That’s the year I was powering up.”

  Seventeen years ago. He’s young to have his salad days behind him. That’s the appeal of him, I think. This handsome, grieving man who thinks the best is long past.

  That would have been before he married a teacher in Whitehorse and bought a house in a subdivision, before he had the two babies who are just little girls now. I didn’t meet them. They came to see him once at the camp, but he was out. They left him a milkshake from Dairy Queen and a note. Probably in 1973 he had the verve for everything he was about to do. When I met him he was separated from his wife and managing the campground outside Whitehorse, a thirty-six-year-old geriatric.

  He’s gone, of course. He was leaving today, right after I did, for a job in Carmacks, he said.

  THE ROBERT SERVICE CAMPGROUND is on a narrow strip of runty pines and bitten grass between the highway and the Yukon River, a mile south of Whitehorse. It’s strictly walk-in sites; you can’t bring a vehicle in. It caters to backpackers, solitary Germans and Japanese who disappear into the mountains first thing in the morning and sit scribbling at their picnic tables in the long evening, or come and go over weeks, dropping in to shower between long expeditions on the rivers or in the mountains, glamorously dirty and sunburned, rapt and uncommunicative.

  There’s a cinder-block bathhouse with toilets and orange Formica counters on two sides and coin-operated showers. The coin slot on the women’s side sticks. I took over helping out for a few days, mucking the floors.

  The office is a log cabin in a stray of pine trees with a rail porch and a few steps people like to congregate on. When I went in two weeks ago, straight off the bus from Haines, there was a crowd inside hanging around a clutter of brochures on the wall. There was an ordinary enamel fridge, stocked with beer, a Coleman stove set on a low stand, a table under the window with a registry scribbler and pencil, a metal cash box, open, and some empty coffee cups. The registry table had a wooden chair behind it and, blocking it, an old, stuffed armchair. A limp green drape covered the opening to the space in back. Behind the curtain, I found out, was a mattress on the floor and some balled-up blankets where Bill slept. That was the first of August, and Bill had been there—signing people in, answering questions, chopping firewood, swabbing the shower building, collecting garbage, loading the pop machine, opening the gate at seven in the morning and closing it at mid-night—since the end of May.

  He is a handsome man by any taste, with good eyes and the taut build that intolerable tension will give you. He met me kindly and signed me in, and I went on my way for a couple of days.

  I DON’T KNOW many details of his life. Now I want them. He grew up in a town on the Prairies. He doesn’t keep in touch with his parents or talk about them. When he was drunk once, he mentioned a brother in Toronto who plays in a symphony orchestra.

  My construction is there was some wound to his confidence early on, some grievous wound, and Bill cleared out to the north like a lot of people and took up driving heavy machines, where he acquired a reputation and some pride. I wish I’d asked him about the road-building life, the lore of the heavy equipment operator. I’d like to know. In the cities, I imagine the crews aren’t close; everybody disperses at night and goes home. But in the Yukon, or the top of B.C., where they build in wilderness, ploughing up rock and stumps in pristine timberland, crews camp together for weeks. There must be a culture, standards of excellence—how steep a pile
of earth you can coax the tractor up without stalling, how small an axis you can whirl a hundred-tonne machine on. Is it like Harley-Davidson rallies? Or more like combat, breaking jungle trail with tanks? I bet he was good.

  By the time I ran into him, the family briar patch had caught up with him or his luck had run out. He’s in trouble. Sober, he has a knack for knowing what a person needs. He reads it and pulls it out of himself for you. People like to be around him, admire him—I saw that—though he never shows off, never wants to be the star. He’s like a prizefighter, retired; not bitter, just not finding anything else to use up his time.

  Drunk, he is dangerous.

  He hustled me into the pickup the other night. It already feels so lost to me, so long gone. He was dead drunk, and put the pedal on the boards to catch the last of the sunset out on the highway, sliding in the gravel and coming to a stop so hard that I bounced into the windshield. Another time, leading some late-arriving Germans to a campsite in the dark, three sheets to the wind, he began goose-stepping and croaking the German national anthem. I watched him spend all afternoon cutting up a metal shopping cart into ragged campfire grills he threw away next day. He took out an old canoe and overturned it, spraining his ankle and leaving the boat to get lost downstream.

  He let himself be robbed.

  There was a kid in camp, a spooked, wild kid, who hung around the office. Bill let him stay for free in return for some chores the kid mostly didn’t do. Bill lent him the keys three nights ago to get into the storeroom and didn’t reclaim them before we went to bed. Before light, Bill went out to drive somebody to the airport. I was sleeping in Bill’s cubby with him by then, and a few minutes after he left I heard a crash and scuffling in the office. I went naked to the doorway and saw the kid coming through the window. I stood there while he dropped to the floor, mumbled that he’d forgotten something, grabbed the cash box and ran out the door. I wrapped a caftan around me and went after him. A motorcycle roared up at the end of the road, and I saw the kid on the back of the bike behind another man, moving off, the box up under his arm. The door of the pop machine stood open, the coins gone, the keys hanging in the lock.