Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  The proprietor is slumped in a plastic chair, talking about the economy in a tired, unemphatic voice, the eastern sun frisking over the empty lake, setting off dust motes in the mini-mart. There aren’t enough investors, he says, not enough dollars going into finding new mineral deposits, the holdout gold and silver pockets, wherever they may be. It’s mostly all family prospecting now, small claims. Timber isn’t much this far north. It’ll have to be tourism, which the Yukon is a funny spot for, from most people’s point of view, being a wedge of territory on the way to Alaska. It just isn’t convenient to leave the Alaska Highway and go up to Dawson City, say, five hundred kilometres north; nothing but trees till you get there. Gas being the price it is, not many people will bother.

  He tells me the Yukon makes about a hundred dollars a day per mobile home rolling through to Denali Park—a hundred dollars in gasoline and bottled juice. Nothing at all off the buses.

  ALASKA, ON THE OTHER HAND, is a glutton for tourism. I see evidence at the bottom of the White Pass when I drive over the U.S. border down to Skagway, mile zero of the Goldrush Trail. My destination is Haines, a forty-five-minute boat ride down the Lynn Canal, but the shuttle to Haines doesn’t leave until five. In Skagway the mountains pitch straight into the ocean, there is no beach to speak of, nowhere to go but the half-mile stroll through town, which is a pure tourist arcade. At the height of the season there might be four cruise ships a day in the ports between Prince Rupert and Skagway. The Princess is in today, a ship the size of four apartment buildings, a floating wall, no resemblance to a sea-going vessel. I can’t think what it would do in weather.

  It looks like these panhandle towns are being trained into ruin by tourism. Twenty or so of them lie between here and Ketchikan—a handful of little coastal communities isolated from one another except by sea, occupied for thousands of years by Aboriginals who lightly pillaged the water and forests, then by whites, who pillaged hard and, along the way, worked themselves into tight-knit little villages with their own character and particular hardiness. Now they’re up to nothing but fobbing off souvenir baseball caps and “fossil” pendants on wave after wave of tourists streaming off cruise ships in Nike running shoes.

  Haines is keeping a better grip on itself. There is still some diversity in Haines, with its creaky eagles, sprawled under gigantic mountains. I get here in the evening, the catamaran shuttle Fairweather slamming over big swells in Lynn Canal against a ferocious south wind. In my kayak I wouldn’t stand a chance. Human horsepower is about half a knot.

  I walk up to the Halsingland, part of the old Fort Seward, a wooden hotel that keeps a few low-end rooms without baths, splendid enough for me, with fifteen-foot ceilings and tall, rattly windows that look out on the bay. I’ve stayed here a couple of times, most recently last year when I came in April, before the hotel was really open. I arrived off the ferry late at night. I had called ahead, but when I arrived there was no one at reception and the desk was shuttered closed. No one around at all, not a sound, but I found an envelope propped in the corner addressed Jill, with a key in it and a note: If you need anything, call Louise. Good night.

  MAY 23

  I recross into the Yukon tonight after a perfect day rock-grubbing in the intertidal zone at Haines. I come over the White Pass in the gold of evening, my eyes everywhere and the window rolled down, though it’s freezing. The ziggly poplars that never grow straight are in glistening bud, still tight and sticky, barely there.

  Tagish and Tutshi lakes have broken free of ice, a change that happened overnight. When I came down yesterday the lakes were all black shadows under a grey skin of ice, torn open at the shore. Further on, where they fronted the wind, the lakes were blown open straight across, a frothed, thin edge of ice driving down the water, harried by the north-rushing wind, the crinkled, black water shining and flying at a thin veil of ice, like old silk over the loosening water. It was a live thing, the breakup. This evening it is accomplished: there is no more ice. The water jiggles innocently north in its summer shape, no memory of confinement.

  I pass a grizzly bear, snorfing by the roadside.

  ATLIN IS A gold rush town. Partners, two young men in their twenties, one from Nova Scotia and one from Juneau, found the black sand that heralds gold in a creek bed running into Atlin Lake late in the winter of 1898. The gold rush to the Klondike was in full swing a few mountains away. When news broke about the Atlin find, thousands of people struggling over the Chilkoot Trail, along with most of the work crew engaged in building the White Pass Railway, walked away from their endeavours overnight and headed east to Pine Creek. In the last months of the season the town of Atlin burst into being.

  It lies at the mouth of Pine Creek halfway up Atlin Lake, an enormous glacial string bean, its southern tip straying into the gravel fingers and islands at the foot of Llewellyn Glacier and its northern end reaching into the Yukon. Other than the reserve at Five Mile, south of town, there is no other settlement on the lake. Inland Tlingit probably had known the district for centuries, had trapped there or made summer camps, but only a handful of white prospectors likely ever reached the lake prior to the gold rush. It lies in the Coast Mountains, two thousand feet above sea level, entirely different in character from the coast two hundred miles away. Atlin is dry, climatically semi-arid, with thin, stony ground and low, wind-stricken trees, mainly spruce and pine, alder and cottonwood. Any abrasion to its surface takes a long time to heal.

  At its peak there were five thousand Atlin residents. The boom was short-lived, but the town prospered and managed to hang on as a tourist attraction till the Great Depression put the White Pass and Yukon Railway Hotel out of business and the town’s ferry in dry dock. By the forties and fifties there were only about a hundred residents, clinging on without economic prospects of any kind. In the sixties, with gold at something like ninety dollars an ounce and a cultural movement underway that had people roaming around looking for uplifting places, Atlin began a revival. Small prospecting perked up and a handful of artists moved in, setting up in the squatters’ cabins along the shore or, if they had money, picking sites for themselves in the surrounding hills and building log houses. Today there are about five hundred Atlin souls.

  MAY 24

  Four o’clock. It’s my birthday and I’m in my yard—here again—Atlin Mountain shimmering in late, high sun, a raven extemporizing on the flagpole at the weather station next door. He makes a roughed-up silhouette doing his spring repertoire: tut-tuts, wet chortles, barking dog impersonations. My yard has a tilt, a gentle grade from the hedge to the shed and little buildings where I stay. At the moment the yard is shivering with young dandelion leaves, wild rose stubble and filaments of last year’s grass. The hedge is barely in bud, and for once I can see through it to the road.

  Joyce has left me keys to both buildings and I’ve taken the cabin, the smaller place, a square, uninsulated room lined with wood like a cigar box, the door facing west. In the mornings this room is freezing, but by afternoon I can open the door and the sun will gradually crawl in and fill the room. By suppertime, when I’m standing at the counter making dinner, the heat hits hot on the backs of my knees.

  My room has white curtains on rings that I draw across the windows at night as a cue that it’s time to sleep. There will be no true dark this time of year. The fridge is in the corner with an Arborite table beside it and three matching vinyl-and-metal chairs, the stuffing coming through the seats in a couple of places, pressed back by duct tape. There’s linoleum on the floor and several unrelated scatter rugs, an old stuffed armchair, a sinking double bed with a voluminous polyester duvet, a set of plywood cupboards above a two-burner electric stove with the choice of ON or OFF. All in all, it’s my grandmother’s cottage kitchen, and I couldn’t be more content.

  I moved in in a burst, dragging water from the lake in galvanized buckets, swabbing out the fridge and storing my Whitehorse groceries and a bottle of wine, whacking the rugs against the porch, unloading my clothes into the cupboard w
ith the pots and pans, setting out my stones from the beach at Haines yesterday. Luxury, pure luxury.

  MAY 25

  I am not so chipper this morning. It’s a low, cool day, a clamped-down sky—the reason for damp spirits, I suppose. I live in the mountains, but not every day. From time to time they vanish, buried in cloud. I’m just tired. Leaving home was hectic, people-stuffed, with no time to pause before the next wave. Hectic when I got off the plane, too, figuring out the car, driving straight into the mountains, a winter-bound, formidable landscape only twelve hours from leafy, smelly Toronto. Skagway was depressing and a day among the piles in the tide zone at Haines thrilling. One way or another I’ve been in a state of constant response. Last night I slept in a clean bed that’s my bed, and I slept long, and today is a day without animation, making no demands at all. Full halt.

  I sit in my place on the shed stoop where I have spent many hours over the years, getting ready to leave Atlin or arriving in Atlin, reading or writing, looking up blind, my thoughts down some hole, eyeing the slump of Monarch Mountain to the east, cast with snow or free of snow, the ball of willows higher than my cabin hiding the yard, the distance of the yard in one phase or another—bumpy and dry with spent grasses, or gleaming with new, or stiff with snowdrifts. I’ve been out here on this shallow, peeling step many times, eating a meal, watching the sky, listening to the birds and the sounds of town, the sound of hammering or sawing, the sound of a small plane taking off or landing on pontoons or skis.

  Maybe I am exactly in my place in Atlin. The layers of activity I navigate when I am home pare down when I am here. In this place there is physical beauty in endless and serene motion on a scale that rules everything else. Nothing in Atlin is bigger than the mountains or the sky between the mountains or the weather the two of them cook up. I live here in a house the size of a tent, with only enough room for what I need, and only one of what I need—one speed on my stove, one plate, one warm sweater. Time is very long and contains so few items that I have all my choices in front of me and can see all of them at once. There are ten, not a thousand. Maybe fewer than ten.

  I suppose, since we moved to cities, there has been too much to respond to. We have more or less abandoned sleep as an alternate realm, stopped remembering what we dreamt in the night, given up reflecting. The ruminative, self-generated occupations of consciousness tend to close down in a busy life. Not everything in our nature is marvellous and worthy of protection, but some things are. There is now too little time to produce the next thought or the next event out of something internal, something in the way of natural inclination or imagination. The dense, speeding field that surrounds us day to day directs what we attend to. We’re used to it, but I don’t think we’re rigged for it. We don’t really have the metabolism for it, and some parts of consciousness get lost—sustaining parts of consciousness.

  This is my chance here, when I’m a long way from my crammed life and from everybody I’m entwined with. The beauty of the place is the medium, none of it man-made. I can rest and ruminate here, take up the natural activities of consciousness at a pace I can manage.

  I SHARE THIS YARD with a fox. Slender and lithe, streaked grey. She just trotted into the yard, not even seeing me till she reached the corner of the shed. When she turns to look at me, her eyes are milky, bleak, as if she has cataracts. Elizabeth is right about who’s been throwing dirt around.

  MAY 28

  Bree, my girl, I loved talking to you on the phone before I left for Atlin. Not because I was about to come here but because it was a family day, all of us assembled at grandfather’s and Joon’s, all stalwartly in the yard because it’s spring and the barbecue had been rolled out of the garage and the plastic taken off the wrought iron, all of us running back inside as often as possible because of a freezing northeast wind. Talking to you topped it off. I’m glad you are in Brooklyn and not Cambodia.

  It was the same kind of day as when you and Charlie were home at Easter. Bright and chilly. I have a picture in my mind of the two of you setting off back to New York, that long drive ahead of you in Charlie’s old Saab losing reverse gear, you in a slithery Asian skirt, thick sweater and Stetson hat, and Charlie in his button-down shirt, apprehensive. I like Charlie. He’s a tall man but has a light touch.

  Jesse outdid herself on the salads—noodles shaped like ears, with roasted peppers and saffron, and another one with endive, pear and walnuts. Mark barbecued chicken. Joon baked a salmon and bought two cakes, a chocolate one and a fluffy yellow one like a hat, each with a slab of icing on top, tombstone-like, inscribed with our names, the eight of us who have birthdays this month.

  Grandfather picked up Brant mid-morning and drove to Hamilton, his hearing aid in or out, I don’t know, to fetch Brant’s friend Deborah and her boy Davey. Cathie came, whom I haven’t seen in a long time. She is more beautiful now, her hair pure white. She reminded me she is still married to Brant. I said, “But not in your heart?” and she said, “No.” Our cousin Mike came with his wife Roz and their two babies. They are training Michala, the girl, not to retaliate when her brother torments her. “Use your words, Michala,” they say. I think she should retaliate.

  The afternoon went along and we improvised, the way we do. Grandfather drove Jess and the boys to see his tennis club, the big girls got a lift to the subway so they could go to work. Jack, my Jack, practised tennis serves in the road with young Jack. Grandfather saw them from the living room and I asked if his grandson showed any promise. “Too soon to know,” he said. Joon tended us, covered the food when it started to dry out, washed the silverware and put it away. “It’s a good family,” she said. Then you phoned.

  I’m here again in Atlin and I was wondering how many times I’ve been north since the first time in 1990, when you were nineteen and came out to meet me. I worked it out by counting off what you were doing the last ten years. See if I’m right. Montreal for a year after the summer you came out to meet me and we drove home together. You got a place in Westmount and you and Joanna went paint crazy, body-prints on the living-room walls. Then you went to UBC for a year. I have a violet you sent in November, pressed in a card. You stayed on, tree-planting, and met Conor, and I came out to see you a couple of times, sleeping on your floor in Victoria. We took off camping somewhere. Do you remember Denman Island, those mid-Gulf Islands we visited? It was March and rushing spring. The halibut were spawning and we saw eagles all the time picking off their eggs.

  I think it was January 1993 when you went to Cambodia to see your dad. Conor followed and you got a job at your dad’s little news agency and stayed four years. Leon and I came to see you after the first year. That was a good visit, a long one. I have strong, 3-D memories of our time there, some ache stringing all the pictures together, I don’t know why. You and Conor curled asleep on your white bed, blurred under the mosquito net, the cool stone stairs, always in shade, going up to your apartment, your sandals by the door with the thinnest soles, no arch support of any kind, you bargaining over old silk in Khmer in the covered market, me lying on your kitchen floor for the cool of it, resting my eyes, which leaked the whole time, me shopping in the market for anything recognizable to cook, the view from your balcony of the National Palace with its chili-pepper, flutey towers, the orange clouds stacked up at sunset like an explosion, the brown Mekong River sliding past your apartment, walking in the street with you, arm in arm, leaning on your confidence in that overwhelming place, our trip to Angkor Wat, the sad, blackened porches and tunnels, the faint dreaming faces in the walls, the live gum trees bursting through the walls, knuckled roots strangling the rotting stone, the heat and silence.

  I went back to see it again, did you know? After you left. I hired a Vespa and driver and went all over the compound, out where the Khmer Rouge have their target practice, where a tourist was shot a week later. I remember the sound at Angkor Wat, the particular whine in the gum trees—some insect—and the high keening sound constant in Phnom Penh, which I thought was the mourning of thousan
ds of murdered Khmer but turned out to be moped tires. I remember the straight-backed old women with silver brush cuts, the Buddhists in marigold robes and parasols, you with your camera, your hair bundled in a scarf (what’s the Khmer word?), your brown shoulders a little rounded.

  You wrote me one time that soon we’d be in the yard together putting in a garden, but we do not seem to find ourselves in the same yard. Not so far. My yoga friend Kharoon said, if it’s what you have, it is for you, but sometimes I wish that it were not this way, that we were a little more in each other’s hair. Sometimes I wish we had ordinary times and bickering times and not only our best selves with each other. Do you think we’ve become a bit enshrined?

  Possibly not. I just remembered our blowout on the phone at Christmas. Possibly we are not yet a mother and daughter in porcelain. That’s good.

  Meantime I’m in Atlin again, my glorious hideout. I’m glad you have your sand dunes and tides on Nantucket when Brooklyn gets too much. I like to think of you digging clams, your hair whipping around. We all need rocking, and nature does it best, don’t she.

  You are very precious to me. My deep correspondent. Not the writing kind, the other kind, my deep companion.

  Much love,

  mum

  MAY 29

  It was snowing when I flipped off Joyce’s polyester duvet this morning, and I thought the motorboat ride with Gernot would be scrubbed—which it was, but not because of weather. “Weather would never stop Gernot,” Elizabeth said. Gernot is sixty and last year, after training at breakneck speed on the Atlin trails all winter, he skied around Birch Island in a day, a circumference of about a hundred kilometres. Today his boat has motor troubles. I saw him in it, floating on the lake, the engine coughing, when I walked to Elizabeth’s.