In
the summer of 2003 Annette, myself, a cousin and husband, decided to
leave Vancouver and head for Alaska. We flew to Whitehorse and hired
a car for the drive up through the Yukon. The road, sometimes
metalled, sometimes gravelled, was open and empty, and whiplashed
lazily across unchanging country until we reached Dawson City at the
confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. Dawson is of course the
town that leapt to its feet during the gold rush of 1898/9. Stories
of the prospectors and the peace-keeping mounties led by Sergeant Sam
Steele, are legendary. Sam acted as policeman, jailer and judge, a
fair but tough man who wanted none of the violence of miners' courts
and lynchings that had beleagered the California gold rush: he was
ruthless with those who looked on the gun to settle their disputes
and was not above jailing a man for hanging out his washing on a
Sunday. Skagway, one of the gateway towns to the Klondike had
decended into wild lawlessness, a barbarian enclave, and Sam was not
a man to allow such a deterioration occur in his territory, despite
the fact that thousands of 'gold stampeders' were thundering into
Dawson's streets.
I
believe the present town looks much the same as it did in 1898. The
houses are clapboard, with wooden facias and fronted with boardwalks.
The roads are dust in the summer and frozen mud in the winter. We
were there during the long sun - darkness banished - and there was no
time of the day or night when people did not walk the streets. There
were shops selling the tusks and bones of mammoths, presumably found
locally, and gold nuggets, and the collected works of the Klondike
poet Robert Service of 'The Shooting of Dan McGraw' fame. I could
not afford bits of mammoth or gold, so purchased one of the latter
and have never stopped delving in its fascinating pages. I also
bought Pierre Berton's 'The Last Great Gold Rush' into which I fell
headfirst on the first page and did not surface until I broke through
the ice at the end. A truly superb work of pen.
Why
am I writing about Dawson, when there were three thousand miles of
Alaska ahead of me, with bears and whales, and towns like Chicken
with two dozen inhabitants, named when the founders got confused by
seeing ptarmigan? Perhaps it's because it intrigued me to find there
were people who lived in Dawson City all year round - through winters
of subterranean darkness and summers of unrelenting light - still
working gold claims. These 'sour doughs' as they are called (after
the bread dough that kept the early prospectors alive) are not
seeking to make themselves millionaires, but simply to make enough
money to enable them to live in a place where the temperature drops
to below minus sixty degrees and the only light comes from electric
bulbs. Why do they do it? Who knows? They live on a different world
to the other ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the human race: where
days last months and nights are seemingly endless. Time must take on
a different quality, work in a different way, when the clocks cannot
differentiate between noons and midnights. Surely the minds of the
women and men who live there are lost somewhere along scaleless
ribbons of dark or light, in that place where sun and moon are
barefaced liars? I am intrigued because my feelings while writing a
novel take me to a similar place: to a realm and time where I see no
end in sight: just an endless flow of thoughts turned into words.
