A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
|
 Home
Interested in fishing while you are in Alaska? Take a look at the selection of fishing books on our partner site OutdoorsDirectory.com Click on the image for more information.
Purchase the Milepost here. Click the image for more information.
|
 |
Chapter VIII
The travelers returning to the ship at Skagway left next morning at nine o’clock. As the little train swung slowly away between the painted trees, I could not help feeling slightly forlorn as I stood beside the track waving to the Kentucky ladies and all the others I had met in the past few days. The hearty man from Wisconsin, making the trip as an excuse to urge away a friend whose wife had just died, ran down the steps to shake hands and wish me luck. Perched on a rope chest as we drifted north between the rainstorms on that last afternoon of the voyage, he poured out his frank dislike of the English people. I discovered the bitter memory of a rebuff he had suffered as a young, lonely boy when he had been drafted for a few months to England during the First World War. This however had not deterred him, during the Second War, from practically adopting two equally lonely R.A.F. boys into his home. The clerkly little Englishman who had lived for twenty years in Vancouver spending his weekends sailing, had never lost his north country accent. This morning, standing beside the Yukon in his neat hat and overcoat, he looked as though he was about to catch the 8.30 from Highgate to a City office. He confided as we said goodbye that he rather wished he was coming with me down the rest of the Highway. The ample lady in blue tweeds from Victoria who longed to visit England again, and her friendly husband in the yellow sweater; the other pleasant woman whose hair seemed so perennially bound by a scarf that one thought of it as part of her coiffure; that tall, walnut coloured man who had slept whole-heartedly between Bennett and Skagway and even the little man in a roomy cap and his stoutly upholstered wife, with whom I had hardly exchanged more than smiles, all paused now to wish me good luck. At the last moment, when everyone was asking what had become of them, the honeymoon couple from Seattle panted up. At every port the first to land, the last to re-embark, they had taken photographs, bought moccasins and postcards, souvenir totem poles and bits of silver. They had explored the bars, and throughout the voyage had danced and played games and exclaimed over the scenery with such naïve zest and unaffected delight that the other passengers found them irresistible, and willingly photographed them against every background they selected. This morning the bride’s effervescence seemed unwontedly subdued, and she explained to a sympathetic audience that she was feeling rather sick, due she thought to something she had eaten. This evoked a chorus, several voices declaring that they too, had felt the same way during the last day or two. More suggestions followed, the most salient being that of the blue tweed lady, pronouncing it was probably due to a salad. Lettuces were grown by the Chinese and if we knew - as evidently she did – what methods were used in their cultivation we should none of us ever touch a salad again, unless made at home! An aghast silence was ended by Miss Juliet placidly observing that she always ate salad whenever she could get one, and had done so throughout the trip without ill effect. Opening her handbag, she brought out a little box and offered the bride, leaning languidly on her husband’s arm, two bicarbonate tablets.
The engine’s soft purring faded round a distant curve and I went back up the street and into a small shop kept by a woman in a green dress who told me she came here from Glasgow thirty years before to be with her husband. She was hoping now to make a visit there in a year or two and asked me many questions, shaking her head at the apparent food shortages she had heard about yet found almost impossible to imagine. It was a brilliant sunny morning and I returned to the River. The paddle steamers plying down the Yukon to Dawson City during the short summer months were roped up now, and behind them. Resting on its side lay the paintless, timbered hulk of the “Yukoner”, the bleaching skeleton of that once famous ship which in Gold Rush days had passed down the River burdened with a wild, jostling throng of men and horses on the last stage of their journey. Now only the wind whistled forlornly about it in the surrounding grass. Old Eriksen had been right last night when in his slow, sing-song accents he had predicted frost. The air was crystal like and distant peaks held fresh snow. Soundlessly, the River swirled at my feet as if possessed by knowledge of the pursuit to which last night’s frost had added urgency – haste to outstrip the relentless purser which alone has power to leash it in the grip of ice. I climbed down to dip my hands in the water, realizing there was no gradual shelving of the bank, it just fell, engulfed like a dropped stone. I had heard someone say a man had been drowned here two nights ago. It was thought he must have slipped in while working on a boat moored to the bank. Although close inshore, the current was too strong for hope of rescue, even had it been daylight, and in this cold no one would live more than a few minutes. The hotel lobby, I noticed at noon as I negotiated the wind ruffled pools before the door, had the aspect of a beach from which the tide had ebbed. Old Eriksen sat placidly beside the stove, listening to the radio. His wife, having spent her morning in whirlwind bustle through her spotless rooms, putting fresh linen on beds, beating pillows, superintending the kitchen, removing all trace of the previous night’s visitors, leaned against the desk, her hands clasped. She was talking with her daughter as though time was hers, then turned to tell me there had been no word from Mr. Graves. “But maybe he will come yet – we shall see” The contrast between the two women was arresting. The unharassed serenity of one, her smooth, unlined face and fashion less dress and the mimosa-like grace of the girl with her fluffy, blond hair, expressed not merely the difference in age, but of race. The older Eriksens were Swedes. Twenty years away from their own land had not dimmed their character. It lined their speech, pervaded their cooking; invested their surroundings with an atmosphere intangibly Scandinavian. It coloured their personalities, thrifty, competent, self-reliant and cheerful. In speech, manner and dress, from the crown of her attractive head to the tips of her toes, the Eriksen’s daughter was a Canadian. The weather forecast over, the family trooped into the dining room to sit around a table in the corner. Mrs. Eriksen presiding, her rapid, unperturbed accents penetrating her daughter’s laughing chatter with two young men in overalls who had dropped in for dinner and her young brother, to busy with his dinner to do much talking. Old Eriksen chimed in occasionally, his unhurried accents distinct. They all ate with equal heartiness and rapidity, and before long the neighbours pushed back their chairs, hitched their belts and departed, still chaffing. Mrs. Eriksen vanished in a housewifely flash, her young likewise disappeared and Mr. Eriksen returned to his haven by the stove. My own table companion was a middle-aged man in dungarees and having agreed that it was a good day, thereafter became so earnestly absorbed in his dinner that I didn’t like to disturb him further. So on finishing my own meal I left him and went out to stroll along the rail track by the River. The sunlight glittered, patterning the water, but the wind’s blade was iced. I felt as if I was alone on the flat roof of an empty world. Through a break in the trees, an upward glance revealed only a distant snow peak hovering, remote. Into the crystal stillness the “tock” of a hammer fell slowly, and from a siding among the shacks an Indian ganger glanced up as I passed. In Whitehorse the streets didn’t end. They just petered out beyond the last houses and became wasteland among spruce and birch. I had set out intending to follow the rail track out to the Canyon, a much shorter way than by road but the rapids were further away than I realized and ahead of me the track stretched away to fade in the woods. I turned to wander back. It was in the Post Office, where I had stopped to write a card to a friend in London that I realized the meaning of the Yukon expression ‘Outside’. I had thought vaguely of the North as some distant vastness associated dimly with Polar bears and Eskimos. Now, quite unexpectedly I realized that for those living here, it was a world of their own, ‘Inside’ where they lived and worked. All around, anywhere else was ‘Outside’. Looking round at the people chatting with their friends, posting parcels, getting their pensions paid, this was ‘Inside’. I dropped the card into the mailbox, a glance at the address conjured up a familiar picture: the building in a well-known street as I had last seen it, in the petrol smelling heat of a hot day, amid the ceaseless roar and rush of traffic, the bewildering maze of politics and portentous talk – that now for me was ‘Outside’, and I, here, was ‘Inside’! I pushed open the swing door. On the porch an Indian baby was bawling. Behind me people were still engrossed in their various affairs. Surprised by the strange sound of my voice when I spoke to him, the baby’s howling ceased as suddenly as a turned off tap, and watching his mother push him away, his round black eyes gazed up at me, sloe-like. Yes, I too, if briefly, was ‘Inside’! Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
End of the
Alaska highway HOME | Visitor
Information | Business & Relocation
|
