A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
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A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
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Chapter I
One September night in 1948 an official at the wharf entrance in Vancouver glanced at my ticket, and observed No.3 – on the right, he pointed towards a dingy doorway, the sort of doorway that elsewhere would have indicated a small town. It was marked Alaska. I followed it along a long dark passage, my footsteps seeming to echo joyfully “Alaska - Alaska”! It had begun to feel like an interminably long way, when a sudden bend opened onto a brightly lit wharf, across it a moored ship startlingly white. A few more steps and I was mounting the gangway of a ship bound for Skagway, a port of which less than a week previously I knew no more than the fact of its existence. Three days ago following lunch in the Okanagan Valley, replying to an enquiry about where I was going next, I had replied I had wondered about going on up the coast from Vancouver to Alaska, and my host asked why, if I was going on up there didn’t I continue into the Yukon and return south by way of the Alaska Highway. Why not indeed? I had not known this was possible, being uncertain even to which port in Alaska ships might sail from Vancouver, in the event of my being able to get a passage, which according to the friends whom I had previously been visiting further up the valley, was most unlikely. “There’s very little chance of you being able to get up there”, my host had pronounced, a puckish, stocky little man who gardened ardently in an Eden above Lake Kalamalka, together with his wife, an elderly brother and a cat named, for some unaccountable reason, Bewdley – all of them English. The brother, a retired parson and schoolmaster, with punctilious manners and quavering scholarly tones issuing unexpectedly from his navy’s attire of singlet and jeans above heavy boots, passed the summer mornings of his age and retirement cultivating marrows and corn from a patch of hitherto virgin soil, his afternoons in the enthusiastic pursuit of rattlesnakes on the sun baked range above the orchards. Following his announcement, my host had paused from
his labors to join me where I sat gazing across the lake beyond the
petunias and peach trees. The little man shook his head, sucking at a grass
stem. “Not a hope I should say – people book six months and a year ahead
for that trip”, he averred.
And so it appeared, did my next host, Nick Solly. “Why shouldn’t you be able to?” he had demanded, “those boats run all the year”. He flicked through the pages of a timetable. I had just missed a boat to Skagway, but there would be another in a few days time. A lean, tough young man with untidy fair hair, his lounging movements belying a capacity for hard work, his speech was usually laconic but now at the mention of Alaska, Nick, with the alacrity of a terrier scenting a rat, dropped the newspaper behind which he had been battling with the somnolence due to a large consumption of roast pork at Sunday lunch, and sat up. He and his wife Margaret had recently returned from a trip to the Yukon, he said driving their truck and camping, to visit her sister and her husband who ran a hunting lodge on the Alaska Highway near Whitehorse. Half an hour later, my mind filled with tales of bears, the Gold Trail of ’98, hot springs and tropical valleys among the snows, the Alaska Highway, moose, glaciers, oil and caribou, I was going North. “Why, it would be simple.” Nick had said. From Vancouver ships ran up the coast to Skagway, from where I had only to go on to Whitehorse by the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. “Then you can stay a night at the Regina Hotel in Whitehorse if you aren’t able to get a room at the Lodge that night – I’ll wire to Olaf Ericksen and tell him you’re coming if you let me know in time – he knows me, but in any case you’d get a room all right.” From there I could phone to the Nolans at Marsh Lake Lodge – Margaret would write and tell her sister to expect me and explain I had very little money – running a hunting lodge in the woods is not a cheap proposition – and I couldn’t stay long anyway, and if they were coming into town they would pick me up. If Mike was away on a hunting trip I could get out there by the bus, which ran twice weekly from Whitehorse to Dawson Creek and always stopped at the Lodge. After staying there as long as I wanted or could afford, I could go on down the Highway by bus to Dawson Creek – some six hundred odd miles – and return east across the Continent by train. Their recent trip was not Nick’s first experience of the North I learnt when, the following afternoon, he had taken me round his orchards above Lake Kalamalka, munching apples as he loped beside me. He had flown in, been on a prospecting trip, and had gone down the Yukon River as far as Dawson City. He was clearly under its spell, and I wondered whether he might at some future time give up his fruit growing to return there permanently. A sudden cold spell was driving a chill wind up the Valley, turning the Lake a dull, leaden gray, and over tea and plum cake round a log fire, Nick and Margaret continued their urging, scattering photographs before me, countless scenes of the Highway, of unnamed mountains and immense, and lonely lakes, rivers flowing northward. “Why, you must go!” they reiterated as if planning for themselves, shuffling the snapshots and letting them fall disregarded to the floor to be retrieved by four year old Roger. In their eagerness, their offers of help ranged from the loan of a camera to a pair of scarlet slacks. Regretfully I refused the camera as I shouldn’t be able to return it, and the slacks would be only something more to stuff in my suitcase. For by now my only fear was that I might not be able to get a passage up the coast to Vancouver, from where the smaller northbound boats sailed, a fear which Nick, giving me one of his enigmatic sidelong glances, appeared to find unnecessary. Having passed his life where, if you decided to do something or go somewhere, you just went ahead. He had never had to exercise himself about tickets or passports – if you couldn’t go by one way, then you took another and that was all there was to it. Too young to join up when Canada entered the War he had continued working here with his father from whom he inherited the orchards, and when later he had volunteered, had been told to stay on and continue the fruit farming, which was mainly for export. That night I stood on the dark Lake shore looking towards the lights of Penticton across the Lake. A plane crossing the hills of the Washington border flew towards me, its lights like a jeweled brooch, a delight after the war blackened English sky. Gradually they faded when it turned away and its droning was lost. But there – northward, the sky was still luminously green, as of young leaves in Spring. Suddenly I recalled the sign that, years before, I had seen on a darkening winter afternoon on what was then known as the Great North Road. The laconic announcement To THE NORTH, flung like a challenge from a sudden bend held something of a mystery marking old maps such as ‘Here may be lions’ – the unknown! In the stereotyped drabness of asphalt, telegraph poles and placard advertisements those three words, blazoned on the rainy darkness of a March afternoon had roused echoes of long forgotten tales – wolves, raiding Norsemen, forests and cloaked riders. And now, up there, where the sky still held that mysterious glow, there was the real North, still not entirely known and I was going there! In that moment I knew.
About the Author Webmaster's note: We received this delightful manuscript from the godson of Rosemary Cook in the fall of 2005. Here is what he wrote about the author.
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