Call of the Mild: A Writer's Sojourn in Dawson City, Part I

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 (and reduce 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 pooches 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 first peregrine falcon, eagle, bear, moose, lynx, or 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 scored 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 my partner Katy, visiting for a few days, just before the place 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. But people 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 almost fit into Toronto’s plutocratic haven of 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 I write) and break up in early May. A free, five minute car ferry, open 24 hours a day, delivers 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, Dylan, McLuhan 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. And Berton 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, a primary motive 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 groaning 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 scribe 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 a little 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 music 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 Hollywood 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. 

So I'm enjoying the plentiful paradoxes: a lively ghost town, teeming with friendly extremists, independent yet egalitarian conformity-averse characters who come from somewhere else to re-make themselves, misfits who fit in (and it seems Upper Canadian Fitz fits in, too). This is the kind of place where, if the town council installs a new stop sign, it's ripped out the next day; or if anybody steals anything (a rarity), everyone knows who it is --  "Hey, Frank, give it back!" -- and so he does. And like Ireland and Newfoundland, everyone dawdles; "Dawson Time" is a welcome antidote to my Protestant punctuality.  

No kidding, there's literally some social event every day and night. Cabin fever is not easy to catch, unless you choose it. One woman told me the hyper-activity is no accident: "If we didn't keep moving, we'd all go mad." So it's perfect for a visitor from another planet like me: spend hours or days alone writing -- I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK; I sleep all night and I work all day -- then dip my beak into the local scene, ad hawk, as it were. 

I've already caught several art shows, concerts, and film nights. I helped judge entries for the Dawson City International Film Festival (400 entries from around the world). Then a chi-chi wine tasting, hosted by a true blue Upper Canada College old boy, complete with jazz quartet. There are rotating house parties and house concerts all winter long. Remember that Charlie Chaplin film, "The Gold Rush", where he eats his boot, slurping down the laces like spaghetti? The character was based on an actual Canadian Anglican bishop who was trapped in the wilderness for weeks and survived by boiling and eating his boots. His house still stands; I attended a concert there where his talented, guitar-playing great-grandson, visiting from Australia, sang a wonderful set of original songs. This week I'm seeing Martha Wainwright, daughter of Kate McGarrigle — in a town of 1,300, no less -- playing in The Odd Gallery, the cultural hub -- a nice segue into that old joke about single women in search of partners in the male–rich Great White North: "The odds are good but the goods are odd."

One of the members of the Write Club, Lulu Keating, is a documentary and feature filmmaker, proprietor of Red Snapper Films, which I think, wild guess, refers to her red Irish Catholic curls. She's a kind and witty soul from Antigonish, Nova Scotia — as I say, everybody here is from somewhere else. I've seen her CBC doc "Moody Brood", a portrait of her parents and 10 siblings, and it’s hilarious. Lulu invited Mike and I, together with Sarah Pupo, the new artist-in-residence (born in High Park), to drive six hours up the Dempster Highway to experience the Arctic Circle. It's the only road in Canada that penetrates the Arctic Circle and it's serpentine as hell, not unlike like the Cabot Trail, except all dirt and ice patches, no day at the beach. Lulu also invited her little black dog, who proved useful: whenever anyone farted, we blamed her. 

Driving the Dempster, you don't see another human for two hours, then suddenly an Inuvik or Whitehorse-bound transport truck blasts past, throwing up a blinding cloud of dust and shooting gravel into Lulu's windshield, which is already cracked, so who cares. We stayed overnight in Eagle Plains, a truck-stop oasis with bearskins clawing the walls and the heat cranked up to near-unbearable levels. No eagles, but en route we did see a herd of migrating caribou, a lonely plaque for RCMP officer Francis Fitzgerald, a Dudley Doright character who froze to death chasing outlaws in 1911, and mesmerizing landscapes that kept changing with every twist and turn. The Yukon Trance may sound similar to the one you see in the eyes of Toronto subway strap-hangers, but believe me, it is qualitatively different. There's just nothing like that brace of clean, cold air, a primal blue sky, or the wisps of fog skimming the endless treeline of tilting black spruce -- "the drunken forest" -- the only species hardy enough to take root in the tundra. A natural high.

And, oh yes, my brother insisted on watching the World Series.

Back in Dawson, we stood on the spot of the original gold strike, August 17, 1896, a day that is celebrated every year as part of the Discovery Day Festival. Coincidentally, August 17, 2001, was my first date with my partner Katy — a miner for a heart of gold (my apologies, Neil).  Nearby stands a massive, seven storey high gold dredge, now an artifact; in the old days, it would squat in the creek bed like a hippo and churn up the gravel with rotating iron buckets, spewing the tailings in all directions in its search for nuggets. The dredge moved one mile per year — not unlike how I write books.  

I must confess I'm tiring of the ongoing, and perhaps fatal, debasement of the word "awesome." Snow-capped mountains, the Northern Lights, and dredges are awesome; scoring a free lift to the liquor store is NOT awesome. Got it, kids? (I'm afraid I have yet to see the Aurora Borealis, the acid trip without the acid, but there's a jungle telegraph in town, so I will receive a phone call when it happens, usually around 2am).  

What else? Oh yes, on Halloween, I was disappointed that I did not hear a single knock on my door, even though I saw squadrons of mini-vampires flying down my street. I bought a whole bowl of Mars bars, which I am now sticking in my morning porridge. I guess they thought that writer guy from Toronto (Mars?) eats too much garlic.  

I am told that the westernmost point in Canada, Boundary Peak, is only a few clicks from here. Then I realized that I have seen the easternmost point, Cape Spear in Newfoundland, and the southernmost point at Point Pelee. That's leaves the northernmost point -- Cape Columbia, Ellesmere Island — to go. Not in this lifetime; two and a half out of four is good enough. OK, maybe if climate change turns the North Pole into the Caribbean.

Time to end my epic report; I will try to compile one more in December before I decamp. I have dozens of pix in my computer but alas the anemic local server refuses to squeeze them through the pipeline. Dawson has the most expensive (and temperamental) internet in the world -- another first. But I was able to post a bunch of good shots on Facebook, so check them out.

 I'm saving some of these random musings for the Berton House logbook. I must include my story of meeting Pierre's widow, Janet (still going strong in her 90s), who by coincidence resided in the same retirement home as my mother, also named Janet. As I shook her hand, she blurted: "So you're the one who never calls!" 

 One final, fantastic piece of news: Random House has signed my new book, "Dreaming Sally", pub date 2018. Life is good.

Thank you, Pierre, wherever you are, for everything, especially for footing the bill. I kiss your bronzed muklucks. 

 Yours from North of 60,

 James