Drifting Home

by Pierre Berton

  In front of us, as we sweep around the great bluff, the old town lies spread out along the right bank for about a mile. Years ago it stretched for a mile and a half but age has caused it to shrink. The gaps where buildings once stood are more pronounced, great blank areas covered in bush or grass and empty spaces between buildings that once were crowded along Front Street. The old police barracks is in good shape, because the Historic Sites and Monuments Board uses it as a headquarters. St. Paul’s church, where my mother sang, is freshly painted. But dancehall row is no more: the old Orpheum, the Monte Carlo, the M & N, Apple Jimmy’s, the Flora Dora and Dominion Gambling House–all of these historic structures which survived to my day have since been burned in one of Dawson’s innumerable fires. (I think again of my father waiting protectively in the movie house.) St. Mary’s Hospital, built by Father Judge, “the Saint of Dawson,” where I almost died of pneumonia at the age of two, is long gone, too; indeed the whole north end is a decaying shambles, returning to scrub bush. But one brown old building still remains and on its side we can make out the faint letters LADUE SAWMILL COMPANY.

  We bring our boats into a little beach just below the Bank of Commerce–the same bank where Robert Service once worked as a teller weighing gold until he was dismissed because he was making more money from his poetry than the manager made from banking. The bank, an Edwardian structure sheathed in galvanized iron, has been freshly painted and behind it, perched on the beach in tip-top condition for the tourist trade, is the restored steamboat Keno on which my friend Hambone once worked as a steward.

  The smaller children begin to scamper about in excitement.

  “Why, it’s like an old-fashioned town!” Peggy Anne exclaims, looking up the street at the old frame buildings, with their cornices and fretwork, their bay windows and overhanging balconies. I am startled by her delight, which contrasts with my own despair. I am seeing Dawson now through four pairs of eyes. I see it as my father first saw it when it was in its prime: the biggest city west of Winnipeg and north of San Francisco, with running water, electric lights and motion pictures, with the buildings spanking new, the streets crowded with men from all over the globe, the restaurants serving oyster dinners while string orchestras played the classics, and the dancehalls, the gambling houses and the saloons roaring full blast day and night. I see it as I remember it from my boyhood: a very ordinary town no different as far as I knew from any other town–rather, in fact, like the small towns I used to read about in Booth Tarkington’s novels, complete with dusty roads and shady walks, neat, flower-decked cottages and pretty, steepled churches, with horses clip-clopping down the main street and the river running past our front door. I see it as it looks to me now, through the eyes of a returning native: shrivelled, faded and apparently dying–so many shattered windows, so many boarded-up doors, so many gardens abandoned to the weeds, so many wooden sidewalks smothered by the invading alders. Last, I see it through the eyes of my children: a quaint storybook town, a fossilized piece of the past, romantic in its old age, even charming in its decay–a sort of Disneyland here in the Yukon, except that nothing is made up, everything is real, all is history.

  Skip has a minibus to take us and our gear to the hotel – not one of the hotels of my childhood but a new motel called the Eldorado, complete with cocktail lounge, running water and keys for the doors. The old hotels are all gone. The Occidental across the way, better known as The Bucket of Blood, has been boarded up. So has the old Principal down the street. The Central is gone; the Royal Alexandra is gone; the Regina is gone; the Yukonia is gone. They were all of a piece, these hotels: the ceilings of stamped-out metal, the floors of worn linoleum, with circular black leather settees, the potted ferns, the spittoons with dead cigars floating in them, the polished desk with the mustached clerk in striped shirt and armbands, the big register book, the staircase winding up to the rooms that never needed a key, the chipped china basin and jug, the great brass-knobbed bed, the single bathroom down the hall, the polished mahogany bar downstairs, the back room with its inevitable poker game, the big doors that never closed. I drank my first Tom Collins in one of these hotels at the age of 19, to celebrate the end of my last season in a mining camp; it cost fifty cents, which was an hour’s wages in 1939, and it was technically illegal. But if a hotel man had a beer licence it was tacitly agreed that he could sell anything and all of them did.

  Now, behind our locked doors in the Pembroke baths of the Eldorado, we sluice a week of Yukon dust from our bodies to emerge in store clothes, well-scrubbed and barely recognizable. A man from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board is waiting in the lobby for me. He does not seem to have changed greatly since the days when we Wolf Cubs cooked our beans on the hills above the town-a little greyer, perhaps, and a bit heavier, but as calm and unruffled as ever. John Gould, whose mother made the best baked beans in Dawson, is now in charge of a multi-million dollar plan to restore some of the buildings in whose shadow we both were raised. He talks about it matter-of-factly. The old Palace Grand dancehall was the first. Now the original post office is being repaired. After that, probably, Mme. Tremblay’s old store. Who would have thought of Mme. Tremblay’s store as a monument? To us it was a place where, during Christmas week, you could look in the lighted windows and see the mechanical toys you hoped somebody would give you for Christmas. Now the store is to be preserved and its owner, long deceased, to be immortalized. She was, it turns out, the first woman to cross the Chilkoot Pass, years before the goldrush. I had never known that; to me she was a motherly creature, with white hair and a French accent. But her story and that of her store have already been detailed in a plaque displayed on the building. Later, other buildings will be preserved with the help of John Gould, whose even temperament and obvious good health are a tribute to his mother’s cooking.

  The children are already noticing something about Northerners–that they are shaped to a different mould by climate, loneliness, environment and heritage. More than once Patsie in the log has referred to the inner serenity of the wilderness people. Almost everybody who visits Dawson talks about the special quality of the old timers. Part of it comes, I think, from a kind of personal security which is the stamp of those who have survived and prospered in a harsh environment; some of it springs out of the very isolation of the northern communities, which forces the people to fall back on their own resources (we notice the absence of television aerials in Dawson) ; some of it comes from the need to co-operate for survival rather than to compete–the tradition of the open cabin door goes back before the stampede. It is difficult to bamboozle Northerners. Phoneys they can spot a mile away. Fads, fashions and sudden enthusiasms are not for them. They suffer no identity crises. Men like John Gould know exactly who they are and where their roots are and so they do not find it necessary to play a role or wear a costume.

  The wooden sidewalks of the old town beckon. We leave John Gould and set off on a tour of exploration and of re-discovery. The Red Feather Saloon is kitty-corner from the motel and across the street, Billy Biggs’ blacksmith shop is long disused but still standing. I can remember when it rang to the sound of hammer and anvil, the sparks flying out from the dark interior, while we boys sat for hours watching the horses from the neighbouring livery stable being shod. Most of Third Avenue seems to have retreated into the weeds. The flower gardens, once Dawson’s pride, have almost all disappeared. If the town is to be restored it must be done quickly. The old gun shop, certainly the most photographed building in the Yukon, is literally falling apart and has had to be propped up with poles on the outside and steel beams within. It will take some doing to preserve it in one piece.

  Walking past these buildings I cannot help but think of my father, fading gently away in the last six years of his life in Vancouver. It was as if his real existence ended after he left the Yukon. Slowly he began to lose interest in the things that used to excite him: mathematics, the classics, his garden, the Royal Astronomical Society, contract bridge, and finally, even his loom. He
took to reading cheap detective novels, one after another, while the Scientific American lay untouched in the magazine rack. It was if he were holding a waiting brief for death. “It’s not likely you’ll be seeing me again,” he’d say, every time I said goodbye to him at the end of my various army leaves. Yet he hung on, growing weaker but never desperately ill, until the very end of the war. When I came back from overseas in the summer of 1945 he was bedridden and it was clear that his life was struggling towards its close. We took turns sitting up with him at night, my mother, my sister and I, sleeping on a little cot in his room – for he could no longer look after himself. For some of this time, especially in the nights, he was half-delirious. Once I heard him call out in anguish: “Matchsticks! Matchsticks!” I could not fathom what he meant. “Matchsticks! Match-sticks!” my father cried again and then looking up, from my pillow, I saw him gazing down at his legs, the blankets flung aside. They were indeed as thin as matchsticks, these withered limbs, once as thick as tree trunks, that had carried him over mountains and across the Yukon hills and which, when he was 46 years old, had outmarched those of soldiers half his age.

  But still he did not die, though he clearly expected to. Night after night he used to gather his family around him for the deathbed scene which, with his love of ritual and his knowledge of history, he wanted so badly to enact. That was how men died in books. That was how kings died. But this neat, romantic ending–this final satisfaction–was to be denied him.

  “It’s an awful thing to have to say,” my mother said to me when I returned from overseas, “but, oh God, I wish he would die! Is that so terrible? To wish that for him?”

  It was not terrible, for we all wished him to be out of his pain–pain that even morphine could not relieve. When my month’s overseas leave ended he was still alive. Although the war was over the army did not acknowledge that fact and I was shipped off to the prairies to learn jungle warfare in order to fight an enemy who no longer existed. And there, in August, I got a wire from my mother urging me to come home because my father had been taken to the hospital. I was given compassionate leave and caught the next train to the coast.

  In the CPR station in Vancouver I bought a morning paper and read it while waiting for the streetcar. As I passed the classified advertising section, a name caught my eye. It was my father’s. It headed the obituary column and, reading the details in the agate type, I felt only an immense wave of relief that it was over.

  “It was his heart that kept him alive,” my mother told me when I reached home. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Everything else went, apparently–his circulation … everything. It’s all in the autopsy. It was his heart that wouldn’t stop beating. The one thing he thought would kill him turned out to be the strongest part of him.”

  The Administration Building, where he worked for a quarter of a century, still stands in Minto Park. It is a handsome structure, in a design which might be labelled frontier classical. Much of it has fallen into disrepair since the government offices were moved to Whitehorse but part of it has been converted into an historical museum. For me, as for my family, this is a place of endless fascination. Every kind of memento is to be found here, from bits of mining machinery to old scrapbooks. The Dawson that I knew and that my parents knew is preserved here in artifact and photograph. There are photographs of the town in its very first days as a tent community; photographs of the great days, when it was jammed with cabins and warehouses and a dozen steamboats and hundreds of small craft lined the river bank; photographs of Dawson as I knew her in her fading elegance with fretworked public buildings and cottages with wide verandahs. Here, for instance is a photograph of a house I often played in, that of the RCMP inspector; it stands to this day, across from the museum, but it is a total ruin. Here is a photograph of the Discovery Day parade in the 1920s, showing the long line of goldrush pioneers, my father among them, wearing the gold and purple sashes of the Yukon Order of Pioneers and heading off to Minto Park where Mr. Schwartz was preparing to dole out free soda pop. Here are photographs of all the old steamboats, and the railway trains that once ran out to Bonanza creek, and the great costume ball where my sister went dressed as Bo-Peep and I as Little Boy Blue. Here is the school we went to, now torn down and here is a photograph of the first airplane into Dawson, the Queen of the Yukon. Here is a photograph of a snowshoe party taken before World War One and at the far left of the group stands a slender woman in a fashionable long skirt and toque; I recognize those solemn, brown eyes which I see again in my own children and in her grandson Berton. Here she is, ten years later, in a photograph of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire; the face has a few lines on it, but the eyes are still large and solemn. And here, in an album showing all the children born in St. Mary’s Hospital, is a photograph of an equally solemn little girl with those same brown eyes and I explain to Berton that this is his mother, pictured at the age of two. For him this whole experience is more moving than it is for my offspring, since he knew his grandmother much better than they did. She lived a few blocks away and used to tell him stories, all through his boyhood, about the strange town in the north where his mother was raised. For all of his life he has seen this town in his mind and he tells me now that in one way it is exactly as he imagined it–for my mother’s descriptions were nothing if not graphic–and in another way it is oddly different. But then she was describing Dawson as it was almost half a century before.

  I leave the children to pore through the albums and I walk out of the museum and across the hall to the disused wing of the Administration Building. Two boards nailed across the doorway block my entrance but, looking through into the big room beyond, I see what I have come to see. The ceiling has partly fallen in and the room is littered with debris. The lines have been blurred by dust and cobwebs. The big carts of mining files have long since been removed to Whitehorse and the doors of the old vaults hang open, but his desk is there, covered with rubble but intact, the desk at which he worked for twenty-five years. I can see him again … the vest … the armlets … the green eyeshade … and the two small children, riding on the carts into the vault and then taking him by the hand at closing time to lead him up the steep hill to home.

  The rest of the family troop out of the museum and we all leave the building and walk across the little park with its white obelisk, marking the dead of World War One. I look towards the rear of the Administration Building and feel that something seems to be missing. What is it? The place seems strangely naked. Then a recurring dream comes back to me, a dream that I have had for many decades, a dream in which I am scampering and hiding between rows of tall wooden walls behind a familiar building I cannot identify. Now I realize that this is that building and those walls were high stacks of cordwood arranged in parallel lines and stretching out like fingers behind the back door of my father’s office, where we children often played in the afternoons after school.

  The park seems to have shrunk. It used to take me a long time to cross it, or so it seemed; now we reach its borders in a few paces. Part of it has been appropriated for a new hospital, designed in a style I call Territorial Modern. We are cutting across the lawn near Seventh Avenue when a man comes out from behind the building and shouts: “Hey! Where do you get off stepping all over my grass?” I am about to apologize when I notice that he is grinning at me and as he approaches I recognize him. He no longer has the horns or the tail but otherwise he has not changed greatly since that Sunday morning at Apple Jimmy‘s fruit stand. Like John Gould and Chester Henderson, Axel Nordling has remained in his home town. In fact he has now lived in Dawson longer than my father did; he can, however, escape each winter to the Mexican or the Hawaiian sun–the airplane has made that possible. We talk about the rest of the gang, many long departed, some still in the North. I will see a few of them at the Pioneer Dance tomorrow night. But I will not see Chester Henderson nor will I be able to buy another grizzly rug from him at his cabin along the Klondike. He was found there last year, dead by his own hand. H
e was incurably ill and it was not in his nature to allow himself to be a charge on any man.

  We leave Axel and walk up the little road which used to bear the name of Joseph Ladue’s partner, Arthur Harper, and down whose steep slopes I used to coast in the small wagon my father bought me for my seventh birthday. How gentle that slope seems now! How narrow the roadway! At the top, on Eighth Avenue and just under the hill, is the little cabin where Robert Service wrote his second volume of verse. Across from it is a tiny cottage now identified as part of the Robert Service Motel. The canary vine, which used to smother it at this time of year, no longer grows here but the briar roses are still blooming near the front door and the birches and cottonwoods which always lined the borders of the front yard seem scarcely to have changed. I realize, with a start, that these are not the same trees but the offspring of those I knew as a child. And there is the verandah on which I slept and contemplated, each summer, the mystery of the stars; and there is the addition my father built when the family began to grow up. And there, propping it up like flying buttresses, are the long poles used everywhere in Dawson to support decaying buildings.

  There is no one living in the house. We borrow a key and enter through the kitchen. To me it seems oddly distorted, like a house revisited in a dream. The rooms seem tiny, built for dwarves. Can this really be the spacious hallway of my boyhood? I can hardly turn around in it. Did four of us actually sleep in this cubicle of a bedroom? Did this diminutive yard I see from the little kitchen window actually hold the gigantic garden of memory? Nothing has changed yet everything has changed. The familiar furniture, my father’s books, the circular dining room table, the dentist’s chair in the den, the lamp he made as a present for my mother, the copies of the Scientific American, his fur coat and hat hanging next to his walking stick in the hall, my sister’s dolls, my own mechanical toys, the Haynes Brothers piano, the old Remington on which my mother’s novel was written–all these are gone. The house is a shell from which the spirit has flown and, like the road outside and the garden below and the town itself, half hidden by the invading wilderness, it seems to have shrunk, like an old man withering away on his deathbed, his sinews atrophied and his limbs as thin as matchsticks.