Drifting Home

by Pierre Berton

  He had a passion for ritual and for the things that ritual stood for: the high church, the Empire, the Royal family, the army and the Conservative party. My mother accepted it all but took it less seriously. After we left the Yukon it used to amuse her to watch my father stiffen up when an officer passed us by on the street; indeed she would sometimes nudge me surreptitiously when that happened. Freed of the necessity to vote for the Conservatives in those Yukon days of political patronage, she began secretly to support the CCF and would take me to political meetings in Victoria. She was, after all, her father’s daughter. He had been born and raised a Quaker who, after his conversion to Marxism, never again entered a church and who, time and again, ran for office on the socialist ticket in the certain knowledge that he would be defeated. A good deal of this must have rubbed off on his daughter. Once, when I was a boy of about six, I remember her tucking me in bed and I, thinking about the stars and what the universe was like without them, began to ask her questions about God. She answered as well as she could for a while and then she looked at me in an odd way and said: “You know, it is quite possible that there is no God. No God at all.” At those awful words the tears started from my eyes. She was clearly nonplussed but she did not retreat from her premise. Yet in all those years I never heard a religious or a political argument between my parents. They loved each other as much, I think, for what they considered each other’s idiosyncracies as for the ideas they held in common.

  And, of course, they had come through a good deal together; good times, adventurous times and bad times–the honeymoon days in the tent, the golden years on the river, and then the total disruption of their lives in the North and the harsher depression years in Victoria. Those early Thirties were not years of unadulterated gloom but they could not have been easy for my parents. With his accumulated pensions my father had less than a thousand dollars a year on which to support a growing family. Thus every single cent counted, and that was galling to a man who had never before given a thought to money, who had scarcely saved a penny and who had been used to purchasing on a whim those curious devices that took his fancy and were generally advertised in the back of the Scientific American –bridge chips, for instance, and a table that automatically shuffled cards. Now every expenditure had to be weighed. Day-old bread was purchased because stale bread was a nickel a loaf instead of six cents. Fruit and vegetables were bought at the last moment before Saturday night closing when the grocers sold them off cheaply because they wouldn’t keep over the weekend. The wood for our fire we gathered from the beaches; my father constructed a dolly which we used to trundle down Transit Road to McNeill Bay and there he and I would saw the driftwood into stove lengths and haul it home along with the strips of kelp which he had discovered made a first-rate garden fertilizer.

  A cent was a useful sum of money in those days; a nickel was enormous. Once my mother and I found eighteen cents on the sidewalk three blocks from our house and it was like coming upon a treasure–an event we talked about for years after. For eighteen cents you could buy a pound of stewing beef and several eggs. When the boys in Grade Eight produced a school newspaper by hectograph I could not buy a copy because it cost a nickel; my mother slowly shook her head and said that it was out of the question even though she knew what it meant to me. I wanted desperately to work on its production and, failing that, to own a copy and pore over it; I already had newspapers in my blood, as her father had.

  For my own father, this stringency was confining and frustrating. I remember once he was explaining to me the principle of the hot air balloon. He had discovered somewhere, no doubt in the Scientific American, a description of how to make a model out of tissue paper. The problem was that we could not afford tissue paper. One day he beckoned me into the basement and unwrapped a roll of red tissue. He had made a pattern for the balloon sections and wanted me to help him cut them out. “No need to mention this to your mother,” he said, quietly. “She’d only worry about the money.”

  Another episode stands out even more distinctly. In the Caramelcrisp shop on Fort Street he had spotted a device that was new to him–the Silex coffeemakers that soon became standard at every lunch counter. The principle of the vacuum, on which they operated, fascinated him and so did the beauty of the bubbles, reflecting the red of the elements, rising in the glass bowls. The following day he took me down to see the wonderful coffeemakers in action and I can remember standing outside in the cold, looking in the windows, waiting for one of the Silexes to empty so we could see the process from the beginning. We waited for a long time until my father said: “You know, boy, I think it’s worthwhile going inside and buying a cup of coffee just to watch that thing.” It gave me a good feeling because my father called me “boy” only when he felt close to me and it made me feel close to him, too. So we went inside the Caramelcrisp shop and he sipped his coffee very slowly, waiting for the scarlet bubbles to rise in the Silex and when they did, he explained again, carefully, the scientific principle on which the coffeemaker operated. And then he said: “I don’t think there’s any point telling your mother about that cup of coffee. You know how she is about money.”

  He could not find work. Young men could not find work and he was approaching 65. Once, at Christmastime, he got a job for two weeks as a postman’s helper. For months he advertised in the classified section, offering to teach French or mechanical drawing. He finally got one pupil in mechanical drawing. The first lesson was scheduled right in the middle of our first real summer holiday–a week at a cottage on Shawnigan lake. It meant that my father could not join us for the first half of this slim vacation because he was waiting for his new and only pupil to arrive. Yet for a growing boy there were compensations in having a father who was always home. We spent more time in each other’s company than most boys were able to spend with their fathers, working on the beach gathering wood or in the garden or camping in bivouacs made of cedar boughs (we could not, of course, afford a tent) or hiking around the lower Island in the summer and sleeping out under the stars. It wasn’t quite the same as the Yukon, where you could camp anywhere, but it was much easier than it has since become to find a piece of forest or a clearing in the woods or a spot beside a lake where civilization had not yet intruded.

  In the little church in the woods there is no sound. I find that I am walking almost on tiptoe through the old pathway back to the settlement. Beneath my feet I can hear the crunch of the kinni-kinnick berries.

  It is mid-afternoon before we finish lunch. Skip suggests we take a couple of the boats and run up the Pelly to visit the only working farm in the Yukon, operated by two brothers named Bradley. Not everybody wants to go; several are already snoring in the shade. But half a dozen of us pile into the boats and, an hour later, pull into a dock below a farmhouse to the unexpected sight of a barnyard with cattle and chickens scurrying about in the dirt and some two hundred acres of waving grain here in the heart of the wilderness.

  In my day there were several farms in the Yukon. There was one on the flat benchland above Dawson, with great haystacks in which we children used to romp, and another a few miles upriver on the banks of a little slough called Sunnydale, where we went on picnics, and others on the low, tear-shaped islands downstream from town. Most of these produced hay and oats for the teamsters but some also grew wheat. Now these have all vanished. Though farming is practical in many places, the Yukon is still a territory obsessed by mining and the laws and customs favour the mining interests over everyone else. Yet this farm on the Pelly has been in continuous operation under various owners since 1902. The brothers Bradley have forty head of cattle and grow both oats and wheat successfully.

  The farmers greet us and we walk up towards the main lodge through a dense tangle of Oriental and California poppies and tall blue delphiniums, which have sprung up on their own from seedpods dropped the previous fall–clear evidence of the land’s fertility. In the old days, Dawson was a fantasy of bloom in the summer; the swampy soil was rich and the sunlight almost end
less. Schizanthus and nasturtiums tumbled out of window boxes; monkshood, larkspur and calendulas popped up like weeds; delphiniums and poppies escaped into the grasses so that long after cabins had mouldered away, these flowers appeared freshly each season. We have seen them from time to time in the old river towns, the tall blue spikes marking the outlines of past settlements.

  We go into the lodge and one of the brothers produces a jug of cold milk from the ice box, the first fresh milk we have seen since we left the Outside. We fall upon it like castaways. And then the brothers tell us about the oil men who are prospecting this valley without regard to farms.

  “You know I had a man from a big American company sitting right here last year in this living room where you’re sitting, telling me it was okay to keep farming for another year!” one of the brothers tells us.

  My nephew Berton pricks up his ears, sensing a story. The farmer explains that he and his brother do not own the mineral rights on their land and so, technically, under mining law anybody can stake it for gold or oil or any other mineral.

  “Their surveyors had been over it and had staked it but they told us they wouldn’t be moving in just yet so it was all right to keep farming. Right in my own living room! We took them to court and had the staking declared illegal. Now what do you think of that?”

  We think that long after the minerals have been dredged or pumped from the earth, the soil of the Yukon will still be rich enough to grow oats and if there is no fresh milk in Whitehorse and Dawson it is not because cattle cannot be raised here but simply because of the feeling that this is strictly mining country–a fixed idea that is the legacy of the stampede. We finish our milk and bid the farmers goodbye and set off down the Pelly towards Selkirk, thinking how disappointed the others will be when they hear what we saw and what we had to drink.

  Supper is not quite ready and so we lie back on the edge of the bank in the early evening sun, watching the river and the sky. There is a touch of fall already in the air. I notice that the Michaelmas daisies are beginning to show their purple heads above the grasses while in the sky a few mallards and Canada geese are winging south. The mornings are already crisp and before long the tenderer flowers will be blackened by the first frost. August, after all, is an autumn month in the Yukon. Frost usually strikes around the 20th. Indeed, I can recall times when it hit Dawson before Discovery Day, the 17th, ruining the flower and vegetable judging. But generally the weather held past the big day and the cauliflowers from my father’s garden, nearly as big as cartwheels, and the marrows, three feet long, and the sweet peas, with as many as seven flowers to a stem, would more often than not win him a blue ribbon. It is difficult to describe the size, texture and flavour of vegetables grown on summer days when the sun shines for twenty-two hours. Our celery, for instance, had a crispness and a nuttiness not found Outside and the cabbages, as big as soccer balls, were firm and crunchy from the heart to the outer leaves.

  Pamela announces that the beans she has been working on all day are ready. Beans are a Yukon staple; it is hard to imagine the stampede without them, for in those days they were cooked and frozen and carried like marbles in men’s pockets and thawed out in the mouth on the trail. In my boyhood, beans were served at children’s parties as sandwiches are served today. Our Wolf Cub hikes in the hills centred around a pot of beans. Each boy was asked to bring a tin of them and all these tins were poured into the common pot and heated up together. But Johnny Gould and his two brothers brought along a brown pot of their own, containing their mother’s home baked beans. Sometimes John would throw these into the common pot but more often, it seems to me, the brothers would refuse to taint the best baked beans in town with the tinned variety and would cook and eat their own.

  As we clean up the last of our plates with pieces of toast grilled over the flames and the dishwashing crew moves to its task, a cry goes up for more ghost stories. I see Peggy Anne’s face light up with fearful expectation and realize that we are again going to have company in our tent. The teenagers are already talking about the cemeteries behind the settlement and about the ghosts living in the silent cabins to our rear. Now, as dusk falls and the fire drops to a mass of coals and the rum is added to the coffee and a sighing little wind springs up to rattle the aspen leaves, I decide to tell them all the legend of the Lost Cabin.

  “What is the Lost Cabin, Dad? I’ve heard you mention it before.”

  “It’s something we don’t talk about too much, Patsie. Like the Walker of the Snows. But there’s a song about it, you know.”

  “A song? Sing it, Dad.”

  “I’ll do the first verse.”

  I give it to them in a minor key, slow, melancholy and brooding:

  Oh, somewhere north of Sixty, where a clump of birch trees bloom

  By a valley in the Yukon, there’s an old, abandoned flume

  On a bleak and lonely hillside, where the trees are white with frost

  There’s an empty, moss-chinked cabin that is lost … lost … lost

  And many men have sought it to their cost

  “Was there really a Lost Cabin?” Peggy Anne asks. “Or is it made up? Were there spooks in it?”

  So, allowing myself to be persuaded, I tell them the story:

  “Somewhere back in the hills on the benchland overlooking an unnamed valley, there is supposed to be an old cabin sitting on one of the greatest claims in the Yukon – a claim, it is said, richer even than Number Sixteen on Eldorado.

  “There are some who claim to have seen that cabin, but only in the distance. Generally they were so far gone that they couldn’t finish their journey. The odd thing is that almost everybody who claims to have seen it, places it in a different part of the country. There was a half breed who came out of the Upper Pelly country who claimed he’d seen it; but he’d lost a lot of blood from a fight with a grizzly and he didn’t know for sure where. Then there was Bert Masters who described the cabin just before he died; they brought him back, raving, from the Nordenskiold country but nobody else could find a trace of it. Charlie MacGurkey always insisted it was on the far side of the Rat River Divide and his description was like all the others: a snakelike valley and a ridge above it with a clump of white birch trees and an old, abandoned flume. MacGurkey saw it in the distance but his grub had run out and, as it was, he scarcely made it back to civilization. Lost three fingers and some of his toes from frostbite and was out of his mind for weeks before he pulled through.

  “Anyway it was MacGurkey who offered to go back and find the cabin. He was grubstaked by an outsider named Kronstadt. They took along a third fellow, not much more than a boy, who went by the nickname of Tubby. The three of them set out in June and headed for the Rat River Divide–the same place where Bishop Stringer almost starved to death and was forced to eat his boots and where Inspector Fitzgerald’s Mounted Police party died of hunger after eating all their dogs.

  “Somewhere along the way, about August, there was an accident, brought on, I think, by an argument. Tubby fell or was pushed off the edge of a cliff and was impaled on a dead tree part-way down. One of the others went down after him but he didn’t bring him back up again. You can guess why. The man was badly injured. He would have to be taken back to civilization. That would mean the search for the gold of the Lost Cabin would have to be abandoned. The thing was disguised as an accident but it’s pretty clear that Tubby was pushed the rest of the way to his death.

  “After that the going grew rougher. MacGurkey and Kronstadt had to go on half rations because the way seemed longer than MacGurkey remembered. They’d climb to the top of a ridge and look out across the valley and there’d be another ridge to climb. It went on like that for weeks and still no sign of what they were seeking.

  “There was an early freeze-up that year. By early October the weather turned cold and the first snow began to fall. Still they pushed on, following MacGurkey’s memory of his old trail, both of them growing weaker and, I’d guess, more cantankerous along the way.

  �
�By the end of the month they were out of food and lost in a blizzard so bad they couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them. Kronstadt was suffering terribly from frostbite and was hard put to keep up with MacGurkey who was in no mood to wait for him. The white storm increased in fury–the wind howling like a banshee–and they knew that if they didn’t keep moving they’d die. They moved on more by an act of will than anything else, following a twisting valley whose outline was barely visible in the storm.

  “Suddenly it hit MacGurkey that he’d seen this valley before–the valley that was shaped like a snake–and as this revelation came to him the storm suddenly died and there, high on the ridge above them, he could see a clump of birches as white as dead men’s bones and the long line of an old flume, pointing down the valley like a skeleton’s finger and, silhouetted against the sky, the dark outline of an old cabin. It was then that he knew they’d found what they were seeking.

  “So they began to clamber up the hillside to the bench above. They could see the old diggings, scarring the hill, and the flume, badly in need of repair, which had probably brought water from a lake somewhere back in the hills. The cabin itself was in bad shape with the roof half caved in and the door hanging loosely on one hinge. But at least the storm had abated.

  “And so they reached the cabin and grabbed for the door. But as they did it opened, as if by itself, and it was then that they realized the cabin was occupied. An old prospector, his hair as white as snow and his cheeks as pale as death, peered out and greeted them. ‘Welcome gentlemen,’ he said, ‘come on in … I’ve been expecting you. Got some coffee on, just waiting for you to drink it.’ And he beckoned them into the cabin and poured out three cups of coffee, which he offered them because, he said, he knew they must be cold. ‘Why,’ said Kronstadt, ‘there’s only two of us; you’ve handed us one cup too many.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the old man, ‘this extra cup is for your friend. Go on, pass it to him. He arrived some time ago–just after the first frost.’