Drifting Home
Page 1
DRIFTING HOME
PIERRE
BERTON
DRIFTING
HOME
A FAMILY’S VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
DOWN THE WILD YUKON RIVER
Douglas & McIntyre
VANCOUVER/TORONTO
Copyright © 1973 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.
First Douglas & McIntyre edition 2002
02 03 04 05 06 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), Toronto, Ontario.
Douglas & McIntyre
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 4s7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Berton, Pierre, 1920-
Drifting home
ISBN-print 1-55054-951-0
ISBN-ebook 978-1-926706-56-6
1. Berton, Pierre, 1920- 2. Yukon Territory—Description and travel.
3. Yukon River (Yukon and Alaska)—Description and travel.
4. Yukon Territory—History—1895-* I. Title.
FC40I7.3.B47 2002 917-19’1043 c2002-910644-3
FI091.B47 2002
Cover design by Val Speidel
Cover photo by Paul Souders/Getty Images
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Printed on acid-free paper
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Ministry of Tourism, Small Business and Culture, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities.
CONTENTS
DAY ONE
DAY TWO
DAY THREE
DAY FOUR
DAY FIVE
DAY SIX
DAY SEVEN
DAY EIGHT
DAY NINE
DAY TEN
DAY ELEVEN
DAY TWELVE
LAST DAY
DAY ONE
We begin at the beginning, at Lake Bennett where the Yukon river rises and where, on a perfect June day in 1898, seven thousand hand-made boats of every conceivable structure and design set off under sail, paddle and sweep for the Klondike goldfields on an adventure which my family and I hope to recapture.
We have come up from Skagway on the Alaskan coast by narrow-gauge railway through the White Pass where the horses died by the thousands and where you can still see the authentic trail of ‘98, no more than the ghost of a footpath now, hammered into the clay and shale by the tramp of metal shoes and hobnailed boots seventy-four years before. Ahead of us lie six hundred miles of Yukon river system, including four lakes, a canyon, two sets of rapids, sixteen ghost settlements and, at the end of the voyage, my old home town of Dawson. I am going back to my roots; my children are going back with me.
We are standing on the Bennett station platform, looking for our baggage and peering between the coaches out at the choppy lake. I have seen the lake when the wind is asleep and the colour is a brilliant green and the surface so polished that the encircling mountains sweep down to the shoreline to join their mirror image. But now a stiff breeze has darkened the water.
The only visible reminder of the goldrush days is the little church that stands on a promontory at the head of the lake, a simple structure of unpeeled logs, with no floor and scarcely any history because the stampede rolled past it before it could be completed. This deserted log building is probably the most photographed religious structure in Canada: thousands of tourists have taken their cameras to the rocks above the church, carefully placing the spire against the backdrop of lake and mountains. Until today I thought there had never been a service held in the Bennett church. Now, however, a railway official tells my wife, Janet, that there has been a wedding just two days before-a wedding that went on all night, with two hundred guests camped out in the rain to the music of a rock group. “They had to stand up on the train all the way back to Skagway and they was pretty wet from the rain but that music never stopped playing. It was some wedding. You’ll never ever see a wedding like it.” The idea of the wedding charms and fascinates Janet; she would like to climb the hill and look over the church but there is no time. She must locate the boxes of provisions we shipped from the East several weeks ago.
There are several hundred people at the Bennett railway station on this August noon hour but only a few are able to see the church or the lake. The station has been cunningly situated so that the tracks lie between the scenery and the lunchroom. Two trains, one from Skagway, Alaska, and the other from Whitehorse, Yukon, effectively block the view. The tourists emerging from lunch must either walk around the trains or clamber illegally between the cars as they unbutton their camera cases and discuss the luncheon they have just finished. Was it moosemeat? they ask themselves. The waitresses have refused to confirm or deny that rumour. So it must have been moosemeat!
I have eaten at the Bennett lunchroom more than a dozen times over the past half-century and always there has been this rumour about moosemeat. In fact I used to tell the tourists they were eating moosemeat and half-believed it myself, even though I have eaten enough good moosemeat to know the difference between the real thing and beef cooked black and soaked in gravy. But the rumour persists and the staff encourages it. Why not? It is a harmless fancy.
Far down on the wooden platform, Janet spots a hillock of familiar cardboard boxes and sighs with relief. There are nineteen of them and they represent a triumph of logistics. That pile includes eleven boxes of food, each containing a day’s rations and carefully marked from DAY ONE to DAY ELEVEN in block letters. For weeks, it seems to me, our dining room and kitchen floors were covered with these boxes and their contents as Janet and Pamela, my second daughter, pored over the daily menus and worked and reworked the lists of paraphernalia that would be needed for the trip: cooking utensils, asbestos mitts, tongs, knives, J-cloths, spices, condiments.
“I know we’ve left something out,” Janet would say in her cheerful manner. “I just know it,” and then she would shrug and say “Oh, well, can’t be helped” and Pamela, who is so much like her, would shrug with her. “It won’t be the end of the world, Mom,” Pamela would say.
Now the two of them walk down the platform to survey the stack of provisions. Much of it has been bruised in three thousand miles of travel. Some of the boxes have been damaged; the string is gone; the cardboard is battered and torn. One or two have sprung open. “It could have been worse,” Janet says. She counts the boxes carefully, checking them against her list. One seems to be lost but neither she nor Pamela can be sure. Did they send an extra box at the last moment? Or was it two extra boxes? Those last days became a little hectic. “Oh, well,” Janet says, shrugging once more, “if something goes missing we can always blame it on the lost box.”
In addition to the provisions on the platform, a small mountain of personal luggage-twenty-two separate pieces-has to be hoisted out of the baggage car; when these are stacked next to the nineteen boxes of provisions, they make an awesome pile. How can all this gear and provender -and fourteen people-be packed into three rubber rafts?
That is Skip Burns’ problem and he contemplates it with his usual good humour. Skip is the Skagway outfitter who will take us down the river. At the moment, he and his two helpers are pumping up the rafts. He is a lean and raw-boned American in his late twenties, with a Klondike mustache, a shock of red hair, a southern accent, and a brand new bride, Cheri, who works as one of the helpers.
“Just two days ago. Right up there.”
“In the church? That was you?”
“That was us-it was some wedding. Wasn’t it, Cheri?”
Cheri smiles. She is 23, with blue eyes and freckles, and she reminds me of those Yukon saplings that grow along the edges of the creeks; I met her last year when she was working as a packer for Skip on the Chilkoot Pass. While we gasped under our twenty-five pound packs she shouldered sixty and tripped over the mountains like a schoolgirl.
“Going to be a tight fit,” Skip says, as we begin to load the rafts. He has not realized what big eaters we are. He ordinarily supplies the food for his regular river safaris-much of it freeze-dried, light to pack and quick to prepare. But we are a hungry lot and we want to enjoy the meals as well as the scenery, so we have contracted with Skip to supply all that is needed except food. Those cartons contain everything from double smoked hams to Ontario cheeses–enough to last at least fourteen people for eleven days-a total of 462 meals. No wonder Skip scratches his head as the rafts sink lower and lower into the water.
“I’m going to have to take on a freight canoe at Whitehorse-that’s all there is to it,” Skip tells me. “That means we’re going to need an extra pilot.”
The three rubber rafts - I think of them now as boats, for they have high sides and pointed prows-are riding very low. Skip turns to a buddy of his, who has come up on the train with us from Skagway. His name is Ross Miller and he is heading for Atlin where he will join his father, a noted glaciologist, doing experimental summer work on the vast Mendenhall Glacier. When Skip made his first river trip down the Yukon some years ago-a kind of dry run for his outfitting business-Ross was one of a group of Alaskan Boy Scouts he took with him.
Ross is standing off to one side, waiting for the train to move on. He is wearing tweed knickers and low Oxfords, scarcely the proper attire for a river journey. I watch as Skip walks over to him. The two talk together for a few moments, occasionally looking across at us and at the pile of provisions. Then Ross walks over to the baggage car, finds his gear and slings it into one of the boats. He has known us for a few hours only and to him we seem to be pretty much of a closed corporation. But he is an old friend of Skip and Cheri and Skip’s other pilot, Scotty Jeffers, and he cannot resist another journey down the river. Now we are fifteen: four guides, two parents, five daughters, two sons, a nephew and a boyfriend. Eight of them share the same grandfather, who, three-quarters of a century ago, at the age of 27, followed this water highway for more than six hundred miles.
My father must have known that his chances of finding any gold were slight. But in the spring of 1898 everybody was going to the Klondike, as everybody goes off to war. Half of New Brunswick seemed to be heading northwest, taking advantage of a railway freight war to cross the continent cheaply. There were five hundred and fifty men on the train with him and most of them had never seen a mountain before. Neither had he and he was entranced. “The scenery was magnificent,” he wrote to his mother in Saint John, from the Oriental Hotel in Vancouver. “Mountains rising from all sides sheer up, apparently, from the track and towering above our heads as if to fall and crush us. In one place we circled around the base of a mountain in the sharpest and longest curve (for the sharpness of it) that I ever saw. The train doubled on itself, the engine being out of sight the whole time around the base of the mountain. We actually went around three-quarters of a circle before resuming our general direction. I stayed on the platform all day scarcely taking time for my meals and nearly froze to death for it was very cold.”
How like him, I thought, when I came across that letter in my mother’s effects. The bitterest cold could not have deterred that infinitely curious man from examining the wonders that he always saw around him. What was commonplace to his fellows was miraculous to him. He had to know how things worked and he was forever examining objects, natural or man-made, to see what made them tick and then explaining them to others. That trip through the mountains “was well worth the money twice over,” he wrote. He could not get over it and in his long letter to his mother described everything he saw in meticulous detail: the Selkirk Loop, “one of the most curious sights on the journey;” a perpendicular pinnacle of naked granite that towered above him “almost blending with the pale blue of the sky and gleaming in the sun-a spectacle of inconceivable grandeur”; the famous timber bridge over Stoney Mountain creek, then the highest on the continent. While his fellow goldseekers were inside, playing cards, he was on the platform, shivering away, carefully counting the tunnels (twenty) and the snowsheds (fifty-three) and noting everything for his mother: the miners at work along the sandbars of the Fraser; the curious pulley that took men across the river in a basket; and the uncanny effect created when the train emerged from a tunnel so that “sometimes it would look like Dante’s Inferno with the smoke issuing from the mouth and hiding the exit.” (He knew his Dante as he knew his Virgil and his Homer and his Shakespeare.) It was a journey he never forgot and it often came back to him. Words, he said, could not describe the beauty and magnificence of it. He had almost half a century left to live and it would be spent among mountains like these, far from the Atlantic’s shore, but in all those years he would repeat that journey only twice. He believed he was going to the Yukon for a two-year stay but those two years lengthened into forty. The decision to join the stampede changed the current of his life, as it changed that of so many others.
“It’s weird,” Peter says. “I mean, to think that he was on this lake. I wonder if he ever figured us kids would be doing it?”
We have pushed off from the shore and are chugging into the wind, heading for a patch of bright sky in the distance between the mountains and beyond the clouds. A light rain is clouding the Prussian blue waters. The slabs of the mountainsides reach into the dark sky, forming with the ruffled surface of the lake a kind of tunnel through which we must travel.
We are all thinking of that June day in 1898 when the ice broke and that strangest of all armadas set off down this same corridor. The sun was shining and the prospectors in the boats were singing with joy to be moving at last after the long winter of packing and boat building. What a sight it must have been! Round boats and square boats, tiny canoes, huge scows-everything from catamarans to kayaks, heavily loaded as we are loaded, and drifting before the breeze past these shores. Twenty thousand men moving north; hundreds of shacks, cabins, tents and warehouses speckling these hillsides; and the smell of sawdust everywhere. No film can ever reproduce that spectacle. No one is alive today who remembers it and all we have are a few photographs and the written descriptions of those who were there. In a few hours it was over. The great wave of boats became a trickle. And in the intervening years nature has retrieved her lake: the hills, once stripped of timber by the boat builders, are wooded again; except for the station and the log church, the shores are empty. In the new growth, if you search diligently, you can find a few relics of the goldrush. Below the church there are stone foundations and back in the woods, poking up through a carpet of kinni-kinnick, the whitened bones of scores of cattle, butchered here and sold to the goldseekers; and beside the rapids that connect Lake Lindeman with Lake Bennett a gravestone with the name of Matthews still discernible-that same Tom Matthews who, after twice losing everything in those foaming waters, shot himself in despair.
Behind us, the little church grows smaller and disappears as we round a corner. The rain lessens and then ceases. Patches of blue appear between the clouds. We have come about as far as we expected on this first, short day and Skip is keeping his eyes open for a campsite. About fifteen miles down the lake he spots it-an abandoned sawmill on a small promontory, dwarfed by the rugged mountains.
How odd, I think, that the Yukon, historically the youngest part of Canada, should have become so quickly a land of artifacts. Rusting wheels, crumbling cabins, old roads blurred by new growth, the rotting carcasses of dredges and steamboats, g
ravestones, crosses, abandoned villages, ruined roadhouses-all this paraphernalia of the past is to be found strewn along the water highway between Lake Bennett and Dawson. We eat our minute steaks surrounded by broken machinery-cogs, gears, axles and flywheels half covered by shattered timbers, and, of course, the inevitable refuse of the Yukon: the mounds of glass telegraph insulators and ancient tin cans strewn through the bush. Sometimes I think the Yukon must be paved with tin cans. In my boyhood I remember roaming the hills above Dawson and seeing the tin cans, brown with age, forming a kind of mattress under the mosses and sedges. Great caches of tin cans could be found behind every cabin and even where the cabins had rotted away, these troves of old tins marked spots where men had once lived and worked. There were hundreds of cabins and thus hundreds of thousands of tin cans-bully beef, creamed corn, butter, devilled ham, lard, tomatoes, beans, beans, beans, preserved fruit, soup. Without the invention of the canning process, the Yukon could never have been settled.
The land, at first glance, seems untouched. The forests roll back endlessly from the lakeshore or rise sheer from the riverside, looking as they must have looked centuries ago, unmarked by saw or hatchet. But once you step out and move back into the tangle of bush, there are the tin cans, crumbling to rust and dust, slowly returning to the reddening earth. Sometimes you can see the ghost of a label, even on the oldest tins, seared into the oxidizing metal. On the Chilkoot Pass the previous year I picked up a lard pail so old that it crumbled between my fingers, but I could still read the block letters on its surface: SWIFT’S. It had lain there, just above that gravel ledge known as The Scales (where the way became so steep that the packers weighed every ounce and charged accordingly) for more than seventy years. An unspoken question formed in my mind: Could this have belonged to my father?