A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
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A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
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Chapter X
It was a perfect morning. At seven thirty I found the trio finishing breakfast. They were making an early start on the next lap of their journey home to California. “The first time we’ve seen the sun for six weeks!”
the girl sighed thankfully. The bus was due to start its three day journey to Dawson Creek, nine hundred miles south, at nine o’clock. The Post Office, from where I went to collect mail and any there might be for Marsh Lake Lodge, also opened at nine. The bus driver agreed to wait for me, meanwhile continuing to hurl freight into the hold at the back of his bus with almost passionate vigour. Attired in a green shirt and very wide tweed trousers I wondered whether, if dropped from a height, he would bounce. Outside the Post Office, Buck and his mother were sitting in their truck waiting for her husband. I retrieved two letters and returned to the bus. The driver thrust the last package into the hold and slammed the door, mopping his face. He then hurtled back into the office, reappearing a moment later with a bag that looked about large enough to hold a few of his handkerchiefs, he bounced into the bus. The bus quivered under the sudden impact, and having collected our tickets and counted us with a pudgy forefinger, he inserted himself into the driving seat, swung the door shut and starting the engine, twisted the bus backward on to the main street with a racing swing. There were eleven passengers. In front of me a middle-aged man in a red check lumber jacket was recounting the details of a recent bear hunt to two women in the opposite seat, snatches of which I caught above the roar of the bus as we bounced and jolted out of the town, passing low shacks and grubby spruce groves and on up a muddy hill that gashed the bluffs before joining the Highway. With his bulk comfortably supported against the wheel, the driver kept up a shouted conversation with two cronies at the rear. Swinging aside from bumps and potholes, nicking corners, accelerating on the long bends, he drove the heavy bus with a sort of debonaire light-heartedness. Gathering speed we raced down a long slope to bump hollowly over a narrow wooden bridge spanning the Lewes River and later converging with the Pelly River to become the Yukon proper. Locally its waters were always referred to as the Yukon. Just above this bridge was the only dam on the Yukon, from which water, stored over an area of two hundred and fifty square miles was released during the springtime ice break-up to enable river craft to carry a normal tonnage of cargo. Before it was built in 1923 the River was often too low after the ice break-up for navigation except by quite small boats. Fifteen miles further was a large board at the roadside that announced: MIKE NOLAN’S LODGE
Here, at one of the Maintenance Camps marking the Road throughout the fifteen hundred miles of its length like fractions on a ruler, we swerved on to a trail cut through the trees to open onto a wide, flat sweep. On one side was the Lodge, square, two-storied, built of varnished logs. On the other the vast expanse of Marsh Lake glittering in the sunshine, its farther shores lost in a maze of mountains. “Ten minutes stop!” announced the driver, plunging out. Voices tinkled suddenly like glass on the silence as we followed him into the Lodge. Mrs. Nolan, a tall, wiry girl, with her dark hair wound round her head, strolled forward to greet me wearing moccasins and a faded khaki shirt and slacks. She had been expecting me with every car, and now was sure I’d like some coffee, but first she just had to serve the bus passengers. While she served them and several truck drivers, sitting on stools at the counter, I sat in one of the sunny windows, gazing around. The low walls held wolf skins and one of bear, brown grey and silvery white, and photographs of fish. From a beam by the shallow stairs hung an Indian ladle carved from the horn of a mountain sheep. Beneath it a small glass case filled with Indian arrowheads and lumps or ore, silver, copper and bits of agate. Framed in the window beside me, tall spruce boughs leant from the forest, the dazzle of water below. An argument was going on. A rather dirty, morose looking man had slouched in and was directing a disjointed complaint to the bus-driver concerning the non arrival of two dozen eggs and several cans of milk which had not been delivered with the supplies he had ordered from Whitehorse (canned milk was drunk universally throughout the Yukon, since there were no cows for many hundreds of miles). The driver disclaimed all knowledge of the missing items. The man persisted and the driver asseverating loudly that there was four dollars and fifty cent’s worth he’d had to bring out and he didn’t know nothing about eggs and cream! Finally the man shambled out, still muttering sullenly, and with an exasperated shrug the driver also rose, swallowing the last of his coffee. Collecting his passengers, he wished me luck and a good trip, and bustled forth. The truck drivers climbed down from their stools and after the concerted roar of engines had died away Mrs. Nolan came over to sit beside me and smoke while I gave her news of her family in the Okanagan Valley. She told me her husband had not yet returned from his hunt with two Americans, but she expected them back today. Then she began to talk about England and the
happiness she had spent there as a V.A.D. during the War when she had
been nursing in one of the Canadian military hospitals which was quite
near to my own village. She recalled too the weekends she had spent with
the family of some official at Windsor Castle with whom she had made
friends, and of the little room she had found so thrilling to have there
in one of its remote turrets. Her memories evoked a fleeting image of
that immense pile of grey, historian shadows, of the dimness of winter
woods and fields – how unimaginably far from this golden wilderness! Then, she, Nolan dropped a pile of extra blankets on the bed and with pardonable pride exhibited the bathroom into which they had just finished fitting the washbasins – the bath itself was yet to arrive. She lent me her parka and we went outside where she introduced me to five of their ten huskies. As we stood on the porch steps I asked her the name of the distant mountains across the Lake. “Oh, I call that one ‘Mary’s Mountain’” – she pointed to one peak and laughed, sweeping her arm along the range. “No, none of them are named – yet. But that’s my favorite, so I call it mine! I must go and see about dinner – don’t lose yourself!” As the door closed behind her it seemed I had stepped into the full glory of the morning. Until this moment I had been only a traveler, the beauty through which I had come ephemeral, though in reality it was my own passing that had made it so. Colour and changing light: the flight of a bird, glint of water and tang of snow – all these I held, random jewels, intangible but unforgettable. Now, in this moment I stood on a inner threshold – free for a few days to wander and listen, to enter. I was ‘Inside’. Reluctant to break the spell, I wandered at last down the trail cut in the spruce to the shore of a tiny inlet where the boats were moored, the huskies frisking ahead, strung out in a frieze along the narrow jetty a foot above the water. Delicately they sniffed at the launch and the light-dappled sides of a scarlet skiff against which the water rippled gently, a murmur in the sun-drenched stillness. The lake was blue, the sky was blue, and far, infinitely far above against the golden rim of forested shores arose another snow laden peak. The cottonwood grove below the Lodge rang suddenly with the frenzied chirring of two squirrels. High in the boughs of a slender spruce they pounced among its swaying cones, defying the leaps of the huskies gazing longingly up, their fur silvered by sunlight filtering through torch-like trees. Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
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