The Slow Fix

by Ivan Coyote

  It got so every once in a while I would leap right out of a dead sleep in a cold sweat with the smell of buttered toast and BenGay still caught up in my nostrils from the day before. I would slip out of bed and into the long blue dawn and down the highway into town. Every time I drove past the marsh I would have to slow down to thirty clicks or so, just in case a coyote or a deer darted out of the brush and into the road. One time I saw a lynx glide out of the bushes and cross both lanes in four satiny strides. I watched a blue heron gobble up a frog one morning, and the image of its impossibly long and graceful legs appeared behind my eyelids whenever I closed them, and got me through my shift that day.

  A few years back, Wal-Mart talked the City of Whitehorse into paying several million taxpayer dollars to backfill the marsh with gravel so they could build a store there. Think of the jobs it will create, my aunties argued with me, think of the bargains, finally we won’t have to pay whatever the shops on Main Street decide we’re going to have to pay for a new pair of jeans, plus there will be a pharmacy and one of those machines you can print up your digital photos on, with the red-eye remover and the white borders and the whole nine yards, just like you see in the big malls down south. Finally, everything you can get in Vancouver or Edmonton, but without the plane ride.

  Now when you drive down the Two Mile Hill and take the corner that still wraps itself around the end of the clay cliffs, you pass the Wal-Mart, two car lots, a Radio Shack, a dollar store, a family restaurant, and a drive-thru Starbucks that all squat in a neon square bordered by sidewalk where the marsh used to be. The gateway to the last frontier now looks a lot like Prince George, or Fort St. John or Thunder Bay or Red Deer. The ravens gather and gurgle around the blue dumpster behind the McDonald’s. The pavement in the parking lot gets so hot in the summer that the air ripples above it, a desert of concrete sprinkled with shriveled up French fries and glinting hubcaps left behind when the RV’s tires scraped up against the curb that the city workers built around the new stoplights and the traffic circle. Now we have a Boston Pizza and a brand new KFC, an A&W, a Burger King, and two Tim Horton’s, one for smokers and one for those who have quit. Now Whitehorse looks like anywhere else, at least from the warm side of the wind-shield, just driving through. If it wasn’t for the sideways sloping shadows that stretch across the chip seal under the midnight sun, if it wasn’t for the wind-worn spine of the clay cliffs still sheltering the place where the marsh used to be, if it wasn’t for the shape of the curves in the river that still runs past where they built the Wal-Mart, maybe I wouldn’t know I was home at all.

  TWO: OH, WHAT A LIFE

  On February 15, 1949, Florence Daws stepped off the White Pass and Yukon Route train and down onto the frozen wooden sidewalk at the foot of Main Street in Whitehorse. She carried one suitcase and had her son David, who was almost two years old, slung on one hip. She had just turned twenty-nine, and she was three months pregnant.

  Her husband Al had hitched a ride on a postal truck from Vancouver a couple of weeks before, to find them a place to rent and look for work. Al had inhaled something he shouldn’t have during the war, and the doctor had told him that his damaged lungs needed a dry climate. He had heard stories about the Yukon, all full of tales of two jobs for every strong back and all the dry fresh air a fella could breathe. Al had originally dreamed of taking his family to Australia, but who could afford it?

  Flo had been born in London, England, in 1919. She was working in a munitions factory at the end of the war when she met and married Al, and returned with him to Canada. She had taken the boat from Vancouver to Skagway, Alaska, and then the train to Whitehorse. She was tired, her feet hurt, and she wasn’t dressed for the weather. The rest of the story goes like this, only told in a heavy Cockney accent.

  Flo sat on a bench with her son in her lap and surveyed her new home. Nothing but potholes and mud roads and cold. There weren’t even any street lights yet. After about an hour an American soldier pulled his truck over and rolled down his window.

  “Are you lost, lady?” he asked.

  “Nah,” Flo says, “I’m just waitin’ for me husband.”

  The soldier was horrified to find a pregnant woman and child left alone in the middle of February and drove straight to the police station and got them to put out an APB for one Albert Daws, ex-soldier and errant husband. They tracked him down about an hour later, drunk, at a wedding on the other side of town. The soldier helped Flo and David into his truck and they drove over to pick up the old man. He was so disgusted with my grandfather that he wouldn’t even let him get up into the cab of his truck, he made him ride on the flatbed in the cold. Al directed him to a two-room wooden shack on Alexander Street, next to the clay cliffs.

  “Nothing but a woodstove and a bed and an old armchair,” my grandmother tells me, almost sixty years later, at her kitchen table. “Built in a little hollow too, eh?, and it rained so much that summer you ’ad to dry out the firewood before you could get it to burn. Buy your water by the bucket from the water wagon. What a life.” She shakes her head and stares over my shoulder at the empty wall behind me.

  Late in the summer of 1949, my mother was born. Florence Daws would go on to raise all five of her children in a series of shacks in downtown Whitehorse, not really alongside the man she married, more like in spite of him.

  My grandfather passed away when I was nine, of cancer and liver troubles. He was yellow and angry and weighed less than 100 pounds when he died, and was not mourned by many. My most vivid memory of him was how he used to hang his ancient false teeth halfway out of his mouth and chase me and my sister and cousins around on the thread-bare rug in the living room, until one of us whacked a toe on a doorframe or someone peed their pants or something. My gran would squawk in from the kitchen, waving her straw broom and yelling, “Knock that off, the lot of yous, or I’ll belt the snot out of someone, so help me.” My gran is renowned for belting the snot out of someone, baking an unsliced slab of baloney in the oven like a roast, rubbing the first ten layers of your skin off on bath night with a sandpaper-like towel straight off the clothesline, and for collecting string, tin foil, wax paper, elastic bands, and canned food. She has five children, nine grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and two little dogs that never stop barking. She has had one of her kidneys removed, and now only drinks the green tea, to cleanse the blood. The ruptured disc in her back bothers her a lot less this winter than it did last, praise God, and she permits herself to enjoy eight Player’s Light Regulars per day. Flo is eighty-nine years old and now stands only four-and-a-half feet tall. She can knit faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, without even looking down at her hands.

  Patricia Cumming, my dad’s mom, was born in Saskatoon in 1920, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She married below her, somehow, to a charming Scottish boy-soldier from Nova Scotia whose name was Don. Depending on whom you ask, my grandfather was either a dreamer or a deadbeat. Maybe he was forever chasing the next best economic opportunity, or maybe he just couldn’t hold down a job, but regardless, he moved his wife and four young sons around a lot. From the prairies to the coast, and then to the bush, from Swift River to Cassiar to Carmacks, and finally to Whitehorse, where he landed a job with the highways department. The Alaska Highway is 1,523 miles of road built in a little over eight months through unforgiving country on frozen ground that never really wanted it there in the first place; so getting yourself a job repairing that highway was then and still is considered pretty steady work.

  So Patricia and the boys grew up and grew Yukon roots, got Yukon jobs, and the boys went out and got Yukon girls pregnant, but not my grandfather. Patricia hoped that maybe things would be different when she followed her husband to New Zealand, that he would finally be happy there, with the sun on his back and sand from the southern hemisphere between his toes.

  She finally left him in 1967 and flew back to Canada alone. She tells me the story of how she pulled the car over to the side of the road just outside of Vancouver and stared at
all those road signs for a long minute.

  “I figured I had two options. I could go back to Saskatoon, back to my mother, or I could go home. Home to the Yukon, where I had friends. People I loved. People who loved me back.”

  But she rolled the car three times just outside of Watson Lake, and totalled it. The guy who drove the mail truck gave her a lift into town after he figured out she was a local, and one of the girls who worked in the hotel tossed her the keys to her cabin down by the lake and told her to go, go make herself at home. When she filed a report with the Watson Lake police, it was discovered that she didn’t even have a valid driver’s licence.

  “They didn’t give me a hard time about it, they just drove me to the nurses’ station to get checked out, and then put me on the bus to Whitehorse,” she tells me. “Because I was one of them. And that was when I knew for sure that I was back in the Yukon again.”

  My grandma Pat still keeps her divorce papers in an old makeup case in her basement, along with letters and keepsakes from the lovers who came after. Big Pat is famous for her book collection, her eloquent and biting letters to the editor sent to an impressive list of publications, and for reading at least three newspapers front to back every day. She has four sons, eleven grandchildren, and by my last count, thirteen great-grandchildren. She has had both of her knees refitted with plastic cartilage and takes pills for the high blood pressure. She just turned eighty-eight years old in February, but she never let any of us call her Grandma until well after her seventieth birthday. Said she didn’t want to feel old until she actually was.

  I am a proud third-generation Yukoner, and I have always felt blessed that my family’s blood somehow pooled and settled in the top left corner of the map of Canada. Being from the Yukon means you are tough, that you can light a fire and change a tire, that you aren’t afraid of long nights and long winters, long highways, and long distance telephone bills. You never hear someone brag in quite the same way about being from someplace just outside of Toronto, or say that they read about Regina in a book once when they were a kid and just had to see it for themselves. But the Yukon is different, a place never meant for the weak or the spoiled. Yukon history abounds with the tales of restless or enlisted or gold-hungry men who went north to seek their fortune, but in my family it is the wives of the wanderers who settled and built and gave birth here. He might have dreamt of this place first, or most, but in the end, it was she who stayed, to write the story.

  THREE: WEATHER, OR NOT.

  I was born in Whitehorse General Hospital at 4:45 in the morning on August 11, 1969. It was a Sunday. My dad likes to tell the story of that morning, how he drove my mom to the hospital in the old Chevy, and how my mom sucked her breath in through her teeth and white-knuckled the hand grip above the passenger window all the way down the Two Mile Hill, on account of how the truck slid sideways around the corner because of a freak August snowstorm and hailstones the size of nickels and dimes drumming down on the windshield faster than the wipers could sweep the slush out of the way.

  He claims he doesn’t remember too much else about that day, except that I was born with the right number of fingers and toes, and then there was the hail, and the snow.

  “In the middle of August, right? Your mom is in labour, and of course I had the wrong tires on the truck for it, and we almost hit the ditch going round the corner halfway down the hill.”

  “Did you wait out in the hall while Mom was in labour?”

  “Course I waited out in the hall. We were still allowed to back then. Why would I want to watch something like that?”

  Obviously the rest of the story came by way of my mother. She claims to remember the hailstorm, but isn’t sure if it happened on the actual day I was born or not. When I pressed her for the details, she wrapped up the conversation by informing me that perhaps once I had given birth, I wouldn’t need to ask why she maybe had other things on her mind at the time.

  I had no evidence, and would have to rely on my father’s version of the story and blurry bits of memories culled from kitchen table conversations between my uncles, who all readily confessed that it was all just a little hazy to them now, the whole second half of that decade being kind of long on feelings and short on facts like it was, the details were kind of hard to come by.

  “It might have snowed that day, who knows?” My Uncle John blew a thin stream of smoke out one corner of his mouth and then smiled from under his moustache at me. “It was four in the morning. It was summer, 1969. If I was awake at that hour, then chances are I was ripped off my head and thought I was hallucinating. Who ever heard of hail in August? And since when did you start listening to my brother, anyhow? Do me a favour and see if there’s any more beers in the boot room, will ya? They stay not quite frozen out there, as long as no one leaves the back door open.”

  The only thing better than a back porch cold beer is a snow-bank cold beer, like you find at a good old Yukon bush party at thirty below. Burning cold, we used to call it. Down south, they call it “a dry cold.” Up north we just call it the weather. We also refer to anywhere that is not the Yukon as “outside,” as in: “I had to send outside to get the part and it cost me a mint,” or, “You know how she’s from outside, and always was a little high and mighty about it too, if you ask me, and she never did learn to tolerate the cold.”

  “Thirty below is thirty below,” my dad would always say, “and thirty below doesn’t discriminate. Thirty below doesn’t care how cool you think you are. Put a scarf on.”

  I would nod and wrap my scarf around my neck and head before I pulled the hood of my parka up, leaving just a sliver of skin around my eyes exposed, a narrow window in the wool just wide enough to see through. By the time I reached the bus stop, my breath would be frozen into beads on my eyelashes, and when I blinked they would melt against my cheeks and roll in cold tears down my face.

  My Uncle John is a carpenter, and years ago I learned from him that the reason the city passed a bylaw making it illegal to construct any building taller than three stories high was not to preserve the small-town esthetic of our humble skyline; it was because of the burning cold under our feet. Whitehorse has no skyscrapers on account of the permafrost, because the ground is too frozen year-round to dig a foundation deep enough to support the weight of anything taller. It explains the absence of any underground parking in this town, too, he told me.

  I always liked the thought that nature dictated the building codes of the north, not mere humans, and that my town looked the way it did because the dirt it was built on contained water that might have become ice thousands of years ago.

  I found a map of Canada that the government put out that shows the different permafrost regions of the country, all colour-coded. The Yukon was mostly painted purple, meaning much of it is what they call a continuous permafrost zone.

  I took this fascinating find up to the cash register to pay for it. The cashier snapped her gum and surveyed my purchase.

  “Permafrost map of Canada, huh? How interesting.”

  I was thrilled to have another permafrost enthusiast to converse with. “Totally. Did you know that if you build a heated structure on ground that has permafrost beneath it, you risk thawing the soil to the degree that the water will drain away and the earth will shift enough to swallow your buildin,g or snap its foundation in two?”

  She looked right at me and said nothing. I assumed it was because she was hanging from my every word, so I continued.

  “For instance, are you aware that the ground this store is built on is actually moving all the time, due to fluctuations in the ground’s surface temperature caused by a combination of co-factors including seasonal temperature cycles, snow-pack conditions, altitude, latitude, geology, soil texture, and vegetative ground cover, not to mention the geothermal properties of the earth itself? Isn’t that amazing?”

  She stared over my shoulder and straight into the beige paint of the wall behind me.

  “I was just joking when I said this map was i
nteresting,” she said. “You know, making small talk? As in, customer service or whatever? I couldn’t actually care less about permafrost, I was just being polite.”

  I stepped back from her counter without meaning to. “You aren’t from here then? You grow up outside somewhere?”

  She shook her head like a wet husky. “I was born and raised. My mom, too. My grandfather worked on the highway. But me, I can’t wait to get some place where the dirt actually thaws out in the summer, some place where you can grow more stuff than just pine trees and cranberries. I’m moving to Grande Prairie to go to dog grooming school next September. Eight more months and I’m so outta here, it’s not even funny.”

  “Most of Alberta only has a mean annual ground temperature of plus five degrees Celsius,” I told her, “resulting in sporadic discontinuous or isolated patches of permafrost at best.”

  “Like I said, I can hardly wait. You going to pay for this, or what?”

  I wanted to tell her that without the burning cold beneath our feet, this town might have been built to look just like Grande Prairie did, and that both of our grandfathers had helped build the only road into this place, the same road the permafrost still puckers and pitches every freeze and thaw. I wanted her to know that not one single day has passed since then without construction still happening somewhere along the Alaska Highway, that it was a road that would never really be finished because of the ice that breathed beneath it, and didn’t it make you think, but there was a line-up growing behind me.