Drifting Home

by Pierre Berton

  “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

  This 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.

  There is no sign of that garden now, except for some vagrant delphiniums springing out of the grass. The encroaching forest has long since obliterated any sign of a clearing in the woods. As for the buildings, they, too, are rapidly returning to the soil. “The guy’s house had fallen in,” Patsie writes in the log. “But it was really neat seeing his old two-holer and his wallpaper and neat old imported door. There were remnants of milk cartons and other old supplies. … The other cabins were also falling apart and an eerie feeling prevailed. There was a lot of little things, so it seemed as if Ladue suddenly took up and left when the next boat came through. There were harnesses, sacks of sawdust, mattresses, Jehovah’s Witnesses books, files and good tools, cans of spices that still smelled the same, pots and pans, washboard, paper [news] and a chair. …”

  These, of course, would not have been left behind by Ladue. He turned his post over to others and set off for the Klondike’s mouth as soon as he heard of the gold strike. He did not dig for gold like the others. Instead he laid out a townsite and set up a sawmill, for Ladue, the trader, knew that the real gold would be garnered by a man shrewd enough to have the only supply of sluice-box planking in the Yukon. His Ogilvie post thrived for many years after the stampede and some of the newspapers here are dated as recently as December, 1930. “Babe Ruth thinks he’s worth $85,000 a year …” one of the stories begins. That, I remember, was the last winter I ever spent in the Yukon.

  It is my turn to do the cooking. The menu for Day Eleven says clam chowder and so I go to work with tinned clams, condensed milk and all the left-over bacon. Meanwhile, Pamela and Patsie are determined to bake a birthday cake for Skip. They fashion an oven of sorts out of an old gasoline tin found in one of the cabins and place a flat pan of Brownie mix inside it. This goes at the edge of the fire and everybody hopes for the best. The result is passable if somewhat crumbly, and slightly burned on the bottom. After we devour the chowder, they present the cake to Skip with a candle made of wood sticking in the middle. “He had to blow like hell to get it out,” Patsie comments in the log. Meanwhile Ross Miller, who has known Skip since that first Boy Scout trip down the Yukon, is preparing a presentation. I have only just realized that Ross is 18 years old; with his dark beard and his voluminous knowledge of glacial science, gained from his father, he seems more like 26. His gift to Skip is a plaque fashioned from a tin can lid, on which he has engraved with his hunting knife, the following citation:

  FOR UNDYING PERSEVERANCE

  IN THE FACE OF UNRELENTING BERTONS

  THE GRIN-AND-BEAR-IT HAPPY-HONEYMOON

  NEVER-AGAIN AWARD PRESENTED TO

  ROBERT RIVERRUNNER

  Aug. 15, 1972 Wowgilvie Yukon Territory

  Ross ties the medal to Peggy Anne’s pyjama belt and hangs it around Skip’s neck as we all applaud and sing Happy Birthday.

  The time has come to start throwing things away. Janet and Pamela have a tendency to save everything–from tins of bacon fat to half-empty packets of Betty Crocker mix. The gastronomic story of our river trip is to be found in the leftovers and the disposal of the dead weight brings its own nostalgia. Look at those biscuits: remember how wet we got in the lakes? Remember Dad’s puffballs? Remember the fake moosemeat at Bennett? Remember when Peter caught the first grayling? We really wowed out over that one! Don’t throw away the beans–they were real good!

  It is hard to believe that the great adventure, which we have been planning for most of the year, is almost at an end. It seems only hours ago that we were setting out from Lake Bennett, marvelling at the mountains. But the river, we realize, moves more swiftly than we thought and home is only a few miles past the next bend.

  DAY TWELVE

  Patsie describes our last morning in the log: “We planned to get to Dawson by noon, so we had a ‘quick’ breakfast of coffee and Penny’s famous perverse mucilage [Patsie’s name for the Swiss health cereal, Bierscher Muesli] and used up the remaining (!! arg !) dried fruit. Then Big Pierre starts chucking out all the extra food supplies that weren’t needed. … P.S. Dad called Betty Crocker a witch and burned all the Twinkle mixes and other useless things in the fire and Mum was running round and grabbing and snatching things to save as Dad cursed her for being squirrel-like.”

  At last we are packed. The boats push off down the little slough and out into the main river and some of the children begin to sing a verse of an old Yukon folk song I taught them years ago, which begins with the phrase: “It’s twenty miles from Dawson and times are awful tough.” We are about fifty-five miles from Dawson and we have only one more stop to make on the way. Patsie describes it in the log:

  “We cruised up to a friend of Skip’s place–Pete and Mary’s. They were living in an old trapper’s cabin, roughing it in the bush. Mary was only there, looking like she’d lived there all summer, really peaceful and full of energy and smiles. She seemed to really dig living out there and planned to live there for a long time, always if possible, living with her husband, Pete, future children and dogs. They trap in the winter. The area is reasonably hilly, not mountains, but there are lots of trees. Anyway I found it really a beautiful way of living and an incredible place.”

  They are a very young couple, indeed–from California, I think. Some people might once have called them hippies. They have bought a trapline from an old timer and have learned the business, I suppose, by trial and error. There is a flock of handsome husky dogs, all going insane at the end of their chains, a good garden and a greenhouse rigged up of plastic and full of ripening tomatoes. I think of my own parents, starting out in much the same way, though they lacked the stereo sound system and eight-track cartridges that bring the voices of Joni and Jimi to the wilderness. What a boon those tapes must be in the long night of mid-winter!

  The freight canoe has encountered engine trouble and Scotty will have to drift into town, but the rest of us are eager to reach our destination and decide to use the motors. For me, the scenery is becoming more and more familiar. On our ri
ght, I spot the mouth of the Indian river, some twenty miles upstream from Dawson. That was about as far as the Bluenose could go in a day if we were to get home by midnight, so it has connotations of excitement for me, since excursions to the Indian river were necessarily few. The islands now begin to take on remembered contours, though they have changed so much over more than forty years that it is difficult to tell which were the ones we camped on. But Chicken Billy’s island, which was one of our favourites, is unmistakeable and so is the mouth of Swede creek and the little slough at Sunnydale, where the hay farm used to be.

  Now, rising behind the intervening bluff, I can see the familiar pyramid shape of the Midnight Dome. The bluff ends at the Klondike flats, the site of Klondike City, better known as Lousetown. In my day there were the remains of an old brewery and a sawmill here and many cabins, including the “cribs” of the goldrush prostitutes, some of them still occupied. Now there is nothing. The wilderness has reclaimed Lousetown and this bank of the Klondike must look very much as it did in the days before the goldrush when it was a salmon stream and not an Eldorado.