Pierre Berton House, Dawson City, Yukon, November 3, 2013
One month in, I'm now deeply embedded in the Dawson City sub-culture. So deep, in fact, I had a dream where I'm helping dig subway tunnels under the permafrost (no basements here, though surely a collective unconscious). The "city" of 1,300 is only 10 square blocks, so I should be finished before I leave.
Dawson, or "Dodge" as the locals call it, is a unique place in my experience — a tolerant melange of hippies, miners, French-Canadians, First Nations, Royal Canadian Mounted Geese, civil servants, gay couples, families with small kids, artists and, in summer, platoons of American, German and Japanese tourists. A microcosm of Canada, sans stockbrokers, tinged with Yankee-fied rugged individualism, a legacy of the Gold Rush. That toughness and sweetness thing. Nature vs. Culture.
The roads are still dirt — why dig up pavement every time the pipes freeze? I have yet to hit the mondo-cold, but I hear it's coming soon, and it comes suddenly. (Nor have I yet sampled the naughty local cocktail, "The 50 Below Job"). I'm told that if you throw a glass of boiling water into the air at 54 below, it vapourizes before it hits the ground. (Wonder if that holds true of sperm?) Anyway, God bless my grumbling oil furnace and 24 hour satellite TV.
The town sits beside the Yukon River between ridges of hills rising upwards of 3,000 feet, a bowl-like effect that seems to buffer the four strong winds (andreduce the hours of sun). A flood dike along the riverfront doubles as a hiking trail, circling up and around the town into the forested hills, culminating in a spectacular vista of the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers. So the community has a "held" feeling. Remember, we are in the middle of Nowhere. Which makes it Somewhere. When people leave Dawson, they are heading to "The Outside." Which makes us insiders, I guess.
On my daily walks, I encounter assorted sights and sounds and smells: whining chainsaws, whiffs of wood smoke, tin roofs (ladders permanently attached to allow sweeping off heavy snow), dogs roaming free (more dogs than people), rusted car wrecks (too expensive to drag away), and swooping black ravens, nearly two feet tall, quoting lines of Poe (and Hitchcock).
There's one post office, one bank, one library, one school, one boozorium, one DVD store, one radio station, one obligatory Chinese restaurant, and lots of haunted houses. I've had a Toronto-quality massage, played ping pong in the curling club (114th annual bonspiel coming soon), and swum solo in a huge indoor pool with a state-of-the art hot tub (now closed, alas, for the winter). The air is extremely dry -- musicians complain of their instruments seizing up --so humidifiers are essential. I saw a fox trotting along the highway, correctly facing traffic, but I'm still waiting to see my firstperegrine falcon, eagle, bear, moose, lynx, wolf. Happy to declare Dawson, unlike Toronto, raccoon-free. And when you pass kids, they always look up and say, "Hi!" -- again, not something I encounter in High Park.
Everywhere you go, the history is right in your face and I think that's what accounts for the strange mystique: ghosts of 19th century miners, mounties, missionaries and madames mixing with sophisticated 21st century techno-types. But the frontier ethos has never really changed. Treading the boardwalks and passing the saloons and false store fronts, you expect to hear Gary Cooper's jingling spurs and the inevitable, "Draw!" Only now it's the artists who are doing all the drawing.
You probably know the story: Back in the late 1890s, 100,000 "sourdoughs" from all over the world braved the frozen Chilkoot Mountains on the off-chance of hitting paydirt. Only a fraction made it; over 3,000 pack horses died en route, and nearly as many people.A"true" sourdough was defined as someone who endured a full Dawson winter from freeze-up to break-up, slept with a squaw, and killed a bear. So far, I've scoring only one out of four — not high on the macho meter.
By 1898, Dawson mushroomed into a luxurious, cosmopolitan town of 30,000, the largest in western Canada, with ornate hotels and theatres and phone system, the "Paris of the North." The landscape outside town looks like Sudbury on a bad day — huge piles of gravel or "tailings" thrown up by the gold-drilling dredges. Fortunes were made, then lost in the casino, Diamond Tooth Gerties (I had a drink there with Katy just before it closed for the season). The One Percenters monopolized the gold claims, so nothing has changed. And of course the original stampeders displaced the First Nations tribe, the Tr'ondeck -- fucked over might be a better term -- who re-settled downriver in a place called Moosehide. Today, their language barely hangs on; two elders still speak their native tongue, although apparently not to each other.
Altogether, a romantic if not exactly noble story. Butpeople driven by poverty, despair, greed and lust can't be all bad.
Most of the bars, restaurants and stores close in the fall. The notorious, pink-painted Westminster Hotel, aka "The Pit" (sans pendulum), a decadent 1898 fire trap, stays open 365 days a year starting at 9am, keeping its streak alive as the holder of the longest continuously running liquor license in North America.
And it shows: warped floor, rusty spitoons, canoe and moose antlers hanging over the long bar (and its surly, hungover bartender), bashed up, aluminum-legged kitchen tables of childhood memory, posted pictures of grizzled, tattooed wildmen who drank themselves into an early grave. A legendary house band of killer blues, The Pointer Brothers, is now history as three of the musicians drank themselves into an early grave.Wakes are common.
At the Pit, you get the feeling that some grizzled, tatooed wildman will suddenly slug you in the face for no good reason — but no one ever does. I am (almost) disappointed. When they open their mouths, they turn out to be Kubrick aficionados and Harper-haters. I am reminded of the time I walked naively into a New Orleans bar in the 1970s, only realizing 20 minutes later that I was surrounded by transvestites. But, like here, no one cared who you were or where you came from. I mean, we're ALL weird, right?
But, still, when this tall Toronto tenderfoot ("cheechako") chats up folks at the bar, he does his best to draw attention away from his $10 glass of pinot grigio: why stoke the stereotype of the effete, urbanite intellectual, however truthy it might be? When my circle of companions start ordering shots — impossible to drink alone here -- they force me to plead, "Crohn's Disease!" Call of the Mild.
Did I mention that this is a hard-drinking town?
In stark contrast to the Pit,Bombay Peggy's, a block away, is an impeccably clean, classy bar/boutique hotel that would fit into Yorkville. Back in the 1940s, it was a brothel; Madame Peggy was so popular that a WWII bomber dropped her prezzies from the sky, hence the name. Thousands don't believe it, but I do.
So far, I have found Dawsonites consistently warm and friendly;most leave their doors (and minds) open. I'm guessing they are so damn warm because it's so damn cold.Over dinner one night at The Drunken Goat ($30 for chicken souvlaki, but as good as anything on the Danforth), a guy at the next table started chatting up me and Brother Mike, visiting for a week. This guy, a prospector working way up the Dempster Highway, said that these days they find gold with Swiss-made drones -- no more pan-handling. After he left, we were told we were talking to the legendary Shawn Ryan, the richest man in the Yukon, worth $40 million. Who knew? Love those self-effacing Canucks.
There are two major seasonal rituals: freeze-up in early November (happening as we speak) and break up in early May. A free, five minute car ferry, open 24 hours a day, takes you across the river to the (To be or not to be?) hamlet of West Dawson and the Alaska-bound Top of the World Highway. The ferry-cross-the-Yukon closed a few days ago, but Mike and I were able to get over just in time to see several crumbling steamboat wrecks a mile down river. People now have to wait a few weeks for freeze-up before daring to walk or snowmobile across to town. Some death-wish types like to test it a tad early.
I'm told that spring break-up is spectacular, with massive blocks of ice crunching and crashing downstream, raising a wild racket (reminiscent of break-ups with girlfriends past). In May, a derelict car is pushed onto the ice and bets are made predicting when it will fall in. I was pissed off that the border to Alaska was recently closed, as the Yanks don't clear the highway in winter; I was so looking forward to being strip searched by Sarah Palin. I have learned that years ago when the Alaska/B.C./Yukon borders were being negotiated, the milquetoast Canucks were hornswaggled by the dastardly Yanks into surrendering the Alaska Panhandle. Did juno that Juneau should be Canadian? (Hey, don't knock puns – if they're good enough for Shakespeare and Joyce…)
I've joined a bi-weekly writers' group, "The Write Club", and I'm struck by the quality of the prose, some published, some not. One woman read a powerful poem about the precipitously close link between "peace and the abyss" up here in the "Great Alone", as Robert Service called it. As you know, we writers are prone to melancholy, or worse; everyone here has seen "The Shining" more than once.
Sometimes, when I awaken at 9am into the pitch black silence,flinging me back to my less-than-fun early childhood, I am compelled to ask myself (and myself alone): "What the hell am I doing here?" But soon enough I surface from the Crypt — just roll back the covers, James, and pour a bowl of Cheerios. AndBerton House is wired with all the comforting amenities, so I'm generally a happy camper. The wilderness really does open up a mine shaft to the unconscious — I'm dreaming like a mad trapper, gold for a writer, one of my main reasons for coming up here.
Outside my kitchen window, a pair of laced sneakers dangle from the phone lines, which as Mayor Ford will tell you is a signal for drug-dealers; but no crack here, except my bad jokes. The bookshelf is bursting with all 50 of Pierre's books, plus stuff by Jack London and Robert Service, whose primitive log cabins (sans TV and internet) stand directly across the street, aka Writers' Block.Then there are books donated by all the previous writers-in-rez dating back to 1996, including the likes of Lawrence Hill, Russell Smith and Charlotte Gray. There's a binder full of testimonies from Writers Past swooning about their Yukon experience (although far too many kvetch about the sheets). I could find only one thumbs down review-- an Iranian guy who was culture-shocked by the murderous winter, then fell on the ice and had to go home early. He ranted about the politically incorrect environmental degradation, etc-- NOT a happy camper. Now all writers have to sign a release promising not to sue if we fall on our pointed little heads.
Service, London and Berton must have knocked off 289 books among them; I'm thrilled to have squeezed out three in my lifetime. Part of Service's famous poem, "The Spell of the Yukon", is writ large on the side of a building:
I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy — I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold and I got it--
Came out with a fortune last fall,
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.
Words of wisdom for our bi-polar bear friends on Bay and Wall Streets?
Just alittle further down Writers' Block stands the YOOP boneyard (Yukon Order of Pioneers) where rotting wooden crosses memorialize assorted sourdoughs, although most of the names are now sadly illegible.Momento mori, paths of glory, youth thrown into a grave: OOPS. Surprising that Powerful Pierre, who loved this place to death, is not among them.
As you may know, Berton was a compulsive graphomaniac who never stop scribbling, even at parties. Both his mother and grandfather were writers, so he came by it honestly, growing up to the sound of clattering typewriters. In fact, his mother Laura's ancient Remington sits on a table by the window. I just finished reading her book, "I Married the Klondike" (Pierre's father was a prospector, among many other things), and Laura revels in telling gruesome stories of epidemics, shipwrecks, a man devoured by a grizzly, and drunks stumbling out of the Pit, falling into ditches, found frozen into giant ice cubes the next morning. There's also a lovely line about the women who swooned at the sight of a Mountie — victims of "scarlet fever."Oddly, even though it's a family memoir, Laura never mentions her famous son by name — a mother's rivalry, methinks.
Then I re-read London's "The Call of The Wild." Naturally it was a different experience from reading it as a kid. All that Nietzchean survival-of-the-toughest-bastard stuff likely made Adolph's blood run hot. But there's a great climactic scene set outside the Eldorado Hotel, still standing, where the uber sled-dog, Buck, (symbolism, anyone?) pulls 1,000 pounds to win his owner a $1,000 bet. Clark Gable starred in the movie — a dog, from all accounts.
I think I am here at the right time. In the summer, the tourists can be as pesky and intrusive as the bugs: one Berton House writer was stepping out of the shower one July morning when he encountered a Yankee tourist, camera in hand, in the kitchen.Then there's the 21 hour a day "Midnight Sun"; you need to hang black crepe over the curtains to reduce the intense glare. But when the touristos split in September, the locals come out of the woodwork and you get to meet the real folks -- "Barnacle Bob", "Caveman Bill", et al.