Drifting Home

by Pierre Berton

  “And there was Tubby, with a ghastly smile on his face and the blood hardly dry on his chest and a piece of dead tree still sticking through him. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘it took you guys a long time to find the Lost Cabin.’”

  Peggy Anne is beside herself. “Is it true? I mean is it real? Did it really happen?”

  “Well, they claim it did.”

  “But … but,” her brow furrows. “If it really happened, how did you find out about it–if, like, everyone was dead?”

  “Can’t say, Peggy Anne; I’m only telling the story the way I heard it.”

  “Did you ever see that cabin?” The odd thing about Peggy Anne is that even when she is serious and feeling weird inside from the story, she can’t help smiling.

  “Not me. Would I be here if I’d seen it?”

  “Sing the song again, Dad,” Patsie asks.

  “Well, there are several verses. I’ll sing the last one.”

  Oh, each man has his cabin … and each man has his dream

  And for each man there’s a hillside and a flume beside a stream

  And each man seeks his cabin to his last expiring breath

  And he finds it on the hillside slopes of death … death … death

  On the bleak and lonely hillside slopes of death.

  Now there is absolute silence around the fire.

  “I’ll give twenty dollars to anyone who’ll sleep in the old graveyard tonight,” I say, wickedly.

  No one takes me up on the dare. Instead, one by one, they drift off to their tents except for Peggy Anne, who slips into ours.

  “It’s a hell of a story,” Patsie writes in the log, as she describes the events of the day. “Dad had to stare out into space as if he wasn’t looking at anyone else because he’d break into laughter.”

  There is no point in telling any of them, even Patsie, that years ago I made the story up for a radio play and later turned it into a folk ballad for a Toronto revue where it was sung to the accompaniment of a guitar by a promising young performer named Robert Goulet. Nobody in the Yukon has ever heard of the Lost Cabin.

  DAY NINE

  The day is made for drifting. High above us on the right bank as we push off into the channel we can see the spectacular wall of rock–a sheer cliff of columnar basalt, jet black, rising four hundred and fifty feet to a poplar-topped plateau. This rampart runs from the Pelly’s mouth all the way to Twin Falls, some eighteen miles downriver – a great palisade, looking as if it were fashioned by some monstrous hand. On the opposite side the eroded banks rise six feet from island-dotted waters.

  Paul suggests that the family stick together and so the three rubber boats and the canoe move into the centre of the channel and are then lashed into one great floating island, rotating slowly in the broad Yukon. From beneath us there comes a familiar rasping sound, which puzzles the children. I explain that it is the silt-laden waters of the Yukon, enriched by the new sand of the Pelly, scouring the sides of the boats like soft sandpaper. This abrasive whisper is one of the sounds of my boyhood and I remember my father explaining it to me as we drifted back home to Dawson one evening in the old Bluenose.

  The phrase “one big happy family” pops into my mind. At this moment, the cliché describes us exactly as we float through the wilderness. Some of us are reading; others are talking and watching the scenery unwind; the Wows are starting a poker game to Paul’s competitive delight; Perri, who has been playing with her doll, sets it aside to comb Cheri’s hair; Skip is playing the harmonica; Peggy Anne is drawing pictures and so is Patsie, finishing a sketch of Fort Selkirk in the log book; Penny is weaving a macramé headband for her mother. Both Penny and Pamela make their own Christmas presents–lampshades of tissue paper, scarves of Batik work, dolls and dolls’ clothes for the little girls, crocheted and knitted things. Is this part of the so-called new “youth culture,” I wonder, or–thinking of my father and his loom–is it, too, in the blood? He picked up the idea of weaving from my Aunt Florrie, my mother’s eccentric sister who came from Toronto to live near us in Victoria. She had been an art student like Patsie, and had studied painting on the left bank in Paris. She had a small hand loom on which she used to weave brightly coloured belts and headbands and this caught my father’s curiosity. While her interest was artistic, his was scientific. He began with a small loom but soon graduated to more complicated devices. Nothing would satisfy him but that he design and build his own loom, inventing and adding refinements. On this creation he produced, from designs carefully laid out on graph paper, the most beautiful fabrics. Once he wove cloth for a tweed suit for my sister, tailored it himself, and carved all the buttons by hand. He became, of course, an active member of the Weavers Guild for he never entered upon any enterprise without going into it fully. I had thought that the loom was lost but now I learn from Pamela, who is also a weaver, that it is still in the basement of Lucy’s home in Vancouver. Pamela says it is in good condition, and that she is having it shipped east where she intends to use it. She adds, not without a sense of challenge, that it is perhaps the most complex loom she has encountered. It must be in the blood, I think.

  Suddenly, Janet lets out a cry: “Bears! Over on the right!” There are two of them, half-way up the hill, looking for berries. In the binoculars I examine the broad face masks and the heavy shoulders: they are grizzlies. It is odd that I should have been more afraid of wolves in my childhood than of the great grizzlies who are much more dangerous. I knew one man who was killed and partly eaten by a grizzly; and on Saltspring Island in British Columbia I met my mother’s friend, the famous Jim Christie, who fought a grizzly to the death and was himself so badly mauled he was given up for dead. You could still see the scars on his forehead where the animal had pulled his scalp down over his face before breaking his limbs.

  The bears hear us shouting and begin to race up the hill at an amazing speed. No animal that I know moves faster against gravity.

  “You might be able to get away from a grizzly going downhill,” says Skip, “but if you’re running uphill–no way, man, no way!”

  The sun grows hotter as we drift into the mid-afternoon. Most of us have sunburns and cracked lips from the reflection off the water. Paul is calling again for “rationale” and Janet passes out a light lunch that she and Pamela have made up. After the usual squabble about the size of the chocolate bars (“too small,” “not enough to keep a flea alive,” “need a microscope to find them,” etc. etc.), Paul suggests that we have a sing-song. Once again we break into the familiar Alouette. Then Skip sings his favourite: I Had a Dog Whose Name Was Blue and Patsie and I oblige with The Walloping Window Blind, which I have been teaching her en route. The singing diminishes and finally dies away–an echo lost in the silent hills–as, one by one, the choristers drop off to sleep, pillowing their heads on dunnage bags or sweaters or on the inflated sides of the rubber boats.

  Looking on this tranquil scene it occurs to me that this is probably the enduring vision that will return to warm me in later years. More than the memory of the last night’s camp-fire, more than the wild moments on the lakes and in the rapids, this sunlit spectacle of the entire family relaxing and drifting will stay etched in my mind. It is very difficult to relish such moments except in retrospect. Generally, when they occur, one does not think of them as particularly significant. Maugham once wrote that he had enjoyed many hours of real romance in various odd corners of the world but he had seldom realized at the instant they happened that they were romantic. Ever since reading those lines I have tried to see every day in terms of both the past and the future. One of the devices I use is to pretend, at any given instant, that I am an old man at the close of life thinking back to the days when I was in my prime and longing to relive them. Whenever I play this game the sky at once seems bluer and the grass greener. I am playing it now, lying back in the boat and looking over my family in the guise of an old man who has been given a brief reprieve to re-experience a moment from the past. I see my children, as I see the river,
in terms of both the past and the future–as the toddlers they once were and as the adults they will soon become. I think of them as grandparents with children of their own and I wonder again which one of them will be the first to return to the river and whether these successive voyages by the third and fourth generations may become a kind of family tradition (for I have inherited my father’s love of ritual). And I wonder again what the river itself will be like a generation hence.

  There is another way of looking at moments like this and that is to see them in terms of one’s own past. When I want to feel the sun grow warmer I compare whatever I may be doing at the moment with what I was doing at the age of 17 when I worked in a mining camp on Dominion creek, forty-odd miles from Dawson. This, too, is a way of making the sky bluer and the grass greener, for those three seasons on Dominion, especially the first one, were the most gruelling of my life. It was not so much the work, which was hard enough, but the fact that there was no respite. I laboured, ate and slept, then laboured again with nothing to look forward to until the end of the season. I hated the work. The first season I was a carpenter’s assistant, helping to build bunkhouses for the mining crew; the next two I toiled on the mud flats as part of the thawing crew. It was not creative and it was not productive; I was doing it solely for the money. Yet my classmates envied me because I had managed to get a summer job.

  I went to work on my seventeenth birthday, near a ghost town called Paris, so named because some hundreds of Frenchmen, or perhaps French Canadians, had camped there during the stampede. I knew of it because my father had once taught there in the early days. He spoke French, not because of his Huguenot heritage but because he had taken the trouble to learn the language on his own after he graduated as a civil engineer from the University of New Brunswick. Dominion creek was already familiar ground to him because it was the site of his first stampede in the fall of 1898, shortly after he arrived in Dawson. New ground was said to be opening up and he was one of those who rushed to stake it. “We had a tramp of 45 or 50 miles out and intended to stake it between August 31 and September 1,” he wrote to his younger brother Jack, “but on the 31st it poured cats & dogs. I was the only one of our party who had taken a waterproof oiled sheet with me. Wright & I were to stake together and witness each other’s stakes, so we were walking together & when the rain got heavy we stopped & rigged up the sheet like a lean-to on 4 stakes, built a fire in front & got underneath it till the rain let up a bit. … The night was very dark and we had to stake by the light of wax vestas. … When we got back from Dominion after staking, and a rotten trail it was, we went in to try and record; and after trying to get into the Recorder’s office for four days we found that that part of the creek on which we staked had never been opened up at all so had all our tramp for nothing. …”

  So on my seventeenth birthday, by sheer coincidence, I was going to work almost on the very spot where, thirty-nine years before, my father had tried to make his fortune. We were bunked in an old, two-storey log roadhouse that went back to the goldrush days and had few amenities. Often in the mornings, we broke a film of ice to get at the water in the wash-basins. We rose at six, scrubbed our faces, wolfed down an enormous breakfast and walked three miles to work, which began at seven. We worked a ten-hour day, walking back for lunch and supper and by the time supper was over we were all exhausted, or at least I was. There was little to do except to go to bed. My fellow workers were all much older than I was; some were well over 50 and a few were over 60. Almost all were recent immigrants. Sometimes we talked a little before bedtime; I remember the cook telling me that his uncle, who owned a haberdashery in Vienna, had been arrested because he put in his window a tie with a red band, which the authorities identified as a Nazi symbol. I did not know whether to believe him. There was a good deal of argument about the Nazis at the time, especially among the Germans and Austrians–anschluss was only a year away–but I paid little attention for I was too weary and the terrible tocsin of the morning triangle sounded at six, every single day, including Sundays and holidays. There were no days off-none. That was the dreadful thing about those summers. Every day was like every other day. Autumn seemed interminably far away. We were like prisoners in a concentration camp, hoping for release but not really expecting it. And so I worked my seventy hours, week after week, living for the day when the river would take me away to a different world. Sometimes I remember thinking about my future life (for at the time I had no idea what I was going to do with myself) and wondering whether it would always be like this or if a time might come when I would have a job that would allow me to rise at my leisure and drift down to the office or to take real holidays when I could lie on my back and gaze at the sky.

  Now, on the river, lying on my back and gazing at the sky, the moment seems sweeter from the contemplation of the past. The river, I notice, has changed again. We have long since passed the basalt wall and now seem to have entered some dark Norwegian fiord, where the mountains rise directly from the water enclosing us on both sides. It is time to start looking about for a camping spot. Because of the mountains and the lack of shoreline, this is not easy. We untie the boats, turn on the motors and speed off down the river, Skip and I in the lead, scanning the shore for a level spot. On our right, on the very edge of the bank, I see a big, tawny tomcat staring at us, only to realize that this wilderness is scarcely the place to encounter a domestic animal. It is, of course, a lynx. He seems to have been struck dumb at the sight of us and it occurs to me that he has probably never before seen a human being. We bring the boats into the shore for a better look and only then does he change from a statue into a moving animal, loping gracefully into the woods like an oversized alley cat.

  After several miles, we come upon a low, sandy cove. Here we find wild onions and high bush cranberries in profusion and small puffballs in clusters along the edge of a small swamp, all identified by Pamela, who has made herself an expert on edible wild foods. At home she has boiled up nettles and served them like spinach and made jam from the fruit of the May Apple. Now she bustles about picking the cranberries for she has figured a way to make up for our depleted supply of mixer. She boils the berries, drains off the fluid and blends it with vodka, producing what is known in more sophisticated circles as a Cranbreaker Cocktail. Meanwhile, I send the smaller children to gather hatsful of puffballs. These I fry in a mixture of oil and butter, adding Pamela’s wild onions for flavouring. We eat them as hors d’oeuvres and they are delicious, crisp like French fries on the outside and firm and hot in the centre.

  Watching Pamela searching for wild and edible things, I think of my father and his two hundred and fifty pressed and mounted flowers, gathered in the hills during his final years in the Yukon in the late thirties, when he had so little to do with his long evenings–no wife, no children and no really close friends.

  Why did he think he had to go back? I ask myself, as I have asked myself so many times in the past. The answer has nothing to do with the call of the wild or the spell of the North. Simply, he felt it to be his duty to his family.

  The call came in the middle of the Depression. The only other mining recorder in Dawson, his former office partner, suddenly died. Someone was wanted immediately–someone who knew the job; and that someone could only be my father. “Must have Berton,” the telegram to Ottawa read, with a copy to my father, who contemplated it with satisfaction. This man, who had been idle for three years and who was now past official retirement age, was being offered his old job back.

  Ever since his superannuation he had been bitter about losing his job. He was a war veteran, with two small children and, in his eyes, it was rotten treatment. That was the word he used again and again in his letters of complaint to Ottawa and in his conversations with utter strangers. He insisted on telling everyone the story and at considerable length. It began to embarrass me to hear it. “Is he at it again?” my mother used to say to me and I would nod. “I wish he’d forget it,” my mother would say. “I wish he’d forget it, too,”
I’d reply. For my father, who could be compelling on almost any other subject, was becoming a bore on this one.

  There was no argument, then, about his going back. That was assumed. He would go back to the Yukon but we would stay behind. It was too expensive to move again and besides, we children were settled into a new school, joining new social institutions, making new friends and discovering a new world. The Yukon, my father knew, was a wonderful place to raise children; it was not the best environment for teenagers.

  But why did he need to go at all? It is true that we had to skimp to make ends meet, but then so did many others and certainly we were not starving. Why wrench himself away from the family he loved–not just for a few months, but for years? Why condemn himself to a solitary existence in a backwater mining town? The answer was that he felt he could not turn down a Job, for in the thirties the concept of Job was holy. At school we were divided into those whose fathers had Jobs and those whose fathers were Jobless. To be offered a Job–especially a Job you knew you could do–and to turn it down for selfish reasons bordered on the heretical. It was his duty to support his family, even if it meant banishment from that family. It was not just the idea of more money–though money in those days was something everybody thought about and talked about–it was the knowledge that without money his children could not be properly educated. My father could not bear the thought that we might not be able to go to university, and yet that awful possibility had been in his mind since we left the Yukon. It did not occur to him that we might get along in life quite easily without a university career. More than anything else, I believe, that was his main reason for returning to the North.