Drifting Home

by Pierre Berton

  LAST DAY

  We are standing in a group on the top of the Midnight Dome high above the town. It is August 17, the Discovery Day of old, now celebrated on the previous weekend in the fashion of most Canadian holidays “so that the town can enjoy a three-day drunk” as one native put it to me. But the Yukon Order of Pioneers will celebrate it with an Old Time Dance tonight and we will all go.

  We have come up on Skip’s minibus to this highest point above the town to enjoy a picnic and see the Yukon and Klondike valleys spread out below us and look at the view, which is one of the most magnificent in all the Yukon. We have come up past Thomas Gulch, where I once thought myself lost, and past the Moosehide Trail, where, fifty years ago this month, my mother and I ate toffee rolls, and past the cemeteries which stretch out on the hillside–hundreds and hundreds of graves, with half the names obliterated and great trees poking up through the mounds – and past the old farms where we used to play in the hay, long since given over again to the wild, and up above the treeline to this windswept peak overlooking both the rivers and the famous gold creeks and the community of Dawson.

  From this distance one gets the illusion of gazing back in time. The town below us looks almost new. The streets crisscrossing one another at neat, geometric angles give it the appearance of a modern suburb; one cannot see the crumbling sidewalks or the intruding weeds, while the blank spaces appear as parks and the buildings, from above, do not seem to be falling down.

  Out on the grey breast of the Yukon, Captain Dick Stevenson’s little sternwheeler, Yukon Lou, takes its quota of tourists downriver to the empty Indian village of Moosehide and across to the old shipyard where the Susie and the Schwatka and the Julia B. have laid their bones. What saddens me, excites the visitors. They have never seen a steamboat before and these decaying sternwheelers are the stuff of history. If Dick Stevenson has his way, a new boat, perhaps as big as the Julia B., may soon be cruising the river. Every year more and more Outsiders pour into Dawson, which in its old age–and perhaps because of its old age–has again become a mecca.

  Below me I can see the original post office, with its Edwardian cupola, now propped up and refurbished by federal funds, under John Gould’s management. Mme. Tremblay’s is just across the street and a few doors away towards the river stands the first of the restored buildings, the magnificent opera house which Arizona Charley Meadows built in 1899 and called the Palace Grand. Each summer night it is filled with people from the Outside who drive up the highway to visit the cabins where Service wrote his poems and where Jack London spent a winter. The further the goldrush fades into the past, the more the tourists are captivated by it.

  The machinery that used to line the streets and the river bank has vanished. But some of it, repainted, has been arranged in an outdoor museum by George Shaw, the jeweller. There you can see the old stage sleigh my mother took on that winter journey back to Dawson, and the pilot’s cabin from the steamboat Nasutlin and the original steam pumper from the Dawson fire hall, which I remember so well, and a variety of mining equipment–all the pieces of junk from my era now labelled and displayed as historical curiosities. There are at least three museums operating in Dawson now and probably many more to come. For the town, in its decay, has taken on an aura; dying it may be and yet its heart continues to beat; there is nothing else like it in Canada and those who visit it are charmed as my children are charmed.

  “Oh, Dad, can’t we stay a few days longer?” Peggy Anne asks. “Please, Dad?”

  “Don’t worry,” I tell them. “You’ll be back.” There is no doubt about that now.

  And so we sit on top of the Dome and drink our beer and eat our sandwiches, as my family used to do when I was small. There is something missing–a sound once borne upon the wind. No longer do I hear the far-off screaming of the gold dredges, pivoting restlessly on their great anchors. That indescribable whine was created by the action of taut cables rasping against pulleys but to an imaginative boy it sounded like a thousand souls in torment. Today there is only the roar of the Klondike pouring across its gravel bed to join the larger river.

  I point it out to them, the most famous river in the North, stretching back into the hills. In the distance we can see Bonanza creek wriggling off to the wooded horizon, choked with old gravel tailings, its flanks gored by hydraulic works. Beyond that is the King Dome and beyond it, Dominion creek, where I once worked and Quigley Gulch, where my father built his cabin. All of this has become historic country; the gravel piles, the hydraulic cuts, the old diggings, the great, sunken dredge, the bits of machinery lying in the shallow creeks, the famous benches–French Hill, Gold Hill, Cheechako Hill–the claims along Eldorado, each of which yielded a million dollars or more; all have become valuable in themselves through the passage of time.

  “I’d sure like to come back,” one of the children says. “Maybe work here for a couple of years.”

  A couple of years’. My father had come, intending to stay just a couple of years.

  “Yeah, maybe you could work as a tourist guide.”

  Will the tourist industry spark a new goldrush? I look down at Dawson through half-closed eyes and again try to see it as it was when I was a boy and as it was when my father first saw it. And then I try to imagine it as it may look when the main buildings are restored and the whole town and the creeks beyond become a kind of gigantic historical museum. It will not then be the town I knew or the town my parents knew or, indeed, the town it is today; for all I know, the Dawson of tomorrow may be crammed with chicken palaces and root beer drive-ins and flashing neon signs and things that buzz and rotate.

  Nevertheless, certain characteristics will endure. There is a continuity in communities as there is in families. I doubt if there is anyone left alive who experienced the goldrush, but there are many who have experienced the men who experienced the goldrush. On the streets of Dawson I have run into several people who knew my parents. “Your father lent me money once,” one old man said to me yesterday. “Told me not to say anything about it.” “Your mother taught me kindergarten” another told me. “I was in her very first class.” And another: “I still remember the day your father tried to tell me how the Northern Lights worked–how patient he was.” And a fourth: “You know I’ve still got the tooth he filled? Didn’t hurt either and he gave me a free swallow of brandy.”

  It is beginning to rain. The children are reluctant to leave because this really is the end. We must say goodbye to Dawson and also to Skip and Cheri and Scotty and Ross. It is strange to think that Skip will be back down the river again in a matter of weeks with another party and will again be standing here on the Dome overlooking Dawson.

  As the children climb into the bus (“We’ll all write you, Skip!” “Don’t lose our addresses!” “Don’t forget to send the photographs”), I take one last look. Here, on the Dome, we seem to be on top of the world, the land stretching off for miles below us. Upriver, the sun is shining through the rain, mottling the green hills and gleaming in patches on the water. The Yukon, unchanged and unchanging, coils out of the south the way we have come and swings under the Dawson bluffs and around the town, and then winds north, growing wider in the distance, its bright ribbon glittering like silver in the strange light, its teardrop islands half hidden in the soft mist that rises from the water. You can see for a long way from the top of the Dome–ridge after ridge of hills, blue in the foreground, violet in the middle ground, hazy in the distance–but you cannot see where the river will end. Our own odyssey is over, but the river’s has only begun.

 

 

 
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