So much has changed in the Yukon since the 1960s when I spent several years in
what can only be described as God’s Country, and I was only partly steeled for the changes I
saw when I returned for a visit in February 2005.
My natural romanticism made it impossible in my mind’s eye to accept all the changes I saw and
felt, and there were times when I wept almost uncontrollably at the loss of what had once been.
In the fall of 1966 my wife Isabell secured a post as a teacher in The Yukon, so
we drove from Vancouver in a 1954 Chevy that I bought for $150. With a sleeping bag she
made out of old army blankets, a very second-hand tent, and a rifle for all the wolves and bears
that would be heading straight for us every night, we made our way north – destination Carcross.
The journey was an adventure for a young Scottish immigrant couple just starting out, as all
manner of dire warnings went unheeded while in the comfort of Vancouver. My aged Great-Uncle
George came to our flat armed with temperature charts of The Yukon in a forlorn attempt to put
us off, while his wife, my Aunt Anne, just sat in a corner muttering "there’s nothing up there –
there’s nothing there."
We made it to Carcross, however, and discovered the delights of a wooden sidewalk,
brushwood lazily rolling down the dusty ‘streets’ and, of course, Watson’s Store. (who really
needs a Wal-Mart?). Our journey was not without incident though, having had to be towed across
the border to Watson Lake for repairs.
The teachers’ house was unfinished, so we camped by Tagish Lake for about a
week, and many a gopher became a friend as they weren’t long in sussing out soft touches! We
became friends with an old lady who used to have the trading post at Tagish, and were mesmerized
by her tales of being strapped warmly onto a sled for the trips to Edmonton. I remember thinking
even then at the ripe old age of twenty-two how terribly ‘civilised’ everything had become.
But the Alaska Highway is no longer a magnificent ribbon of gravel and dust
clinging to the contours so that you felt you were at one with the land; a road that felt that
it and its tributaries was taking you with her deep into the heartland of the North. Now it is
a soulless ribbon of asphalt straining from one crest to the next; all gutted from the land -
straightened, infilled and cut; lined with advertising boards; a piece of technology that seems
divorced from the land it courses through; a mere connecting route for the Mighty USA. No longer
an adventure – just another road. Even the Watson Lake signs have been aligned all prim and
proper as if the way they were once placed was an affront to the tidiness demanded by
conformity.
Mining now seems to be a dirty word in The Yukon. (Have you forgotten what
brought the territory into being and into life?) And I was appalled to see signs that read
“This Company Supports Placer Mining – Placer Mining Supports this Company” What an indictment!
And why did you allow the great Anvil Mine to cease to be? If you use almost anything made by
Man, from whence do you imagine its metals come?
I overheard singer/songwriter Al Oster being described as passé, and thought later that his
haunting "Buckets of Steel" might be the closest Yukoners may now ever get to the lure of gold,
being content now to live life vicariously by selling gold pans, nugget trinkets and the like.
The whole of the western world seems in the grip of a corrosive Greenness and Political
Correctness aided and abetted by the legal profession which has found a very rich seam indeed;
but I harboured the hope that Yukoners might have held out against it as they once had and made
their own lives in the way they wanted. (Some of you may remember The Great Whitehorse Parking
Meter Fiasco of the late 60’s when the ‘authorities’ got a bloody nose. The city decided to put
parking meters on Main Street, but few people bothered with them. They were either fed, ignored,
or, in some cases, enterprising souls worked them loose with a 4x4 and chucked them into the
Yukon River. I came armed with seventeen unpaid tickets when eventually hauled before the judge
in what must have been his most crowded session ever. Wisely, he said he was doing nothing about
it and more or less said it was up to the city authorities to sort it out. Our cudgels were then
taken up by Norm Chamberlist, a local hotel owner and something of a frustrated lawyer who
eventually managed to take the whole business all the way to the Privy Council in London and
won our case under the British North America Act of 1867. All in all a perfect example of how
‘authorities’ all over the world should be dealt with by those who believe that George Orwell’s
‘1984’ was a serious warning and not a handbook for local or national governments; as it seems
that ‘public servants’ so easily and seamlessly slip into the role of public ‘masters’).
I came away this time with a memory of a few true characters, and fewer old
timers, but more of a body of administrators all administering each other (and the few others
left over) for all they were worth. It was as if the enclave of Whitehorse was being
deliberately isolated from its history and its surrounding beauty and vastness by an army of
bureaucrats hell-bent on creating a bland sameness with its southern counterparts, and who are
forever dreaming up rules and regulations and bylaws to fix things which aren’t broken and has
everything to do with ‘control’ of those ‘under’ them. And how in Heaven’s name can you require
so many lawyers and a court building the size you have for a mere 30,000 people? It is
undoubtedly a splendid piece of architecture, but more suited to a populace of a quarter
million.
If mere Administration is subtracted from the Yukon of today, what else
remains? Apart from those who clear and maintain the highway that links one part of the United
States to another, what does anyone else in the Yukon produce? Tourism perhaps – but that is
only a living for a tiny handful of people for a few months of the year (and time will tell if
your average tourist will want to sit in a bar where he can’t have a smoke). Did Robert Service
see and fear all this when he wrote:
They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching -
But can’t you hear the Wild? – it’s calling you.
On the subject of tourism, may I make a comment for the debate on the
perhaps-to-be-built bridge over the Yukon River at Dawson City? It seems to me that if tourists
want to see the Yukon or Alaska they want to go home and talk of the adventure they had and of
the places that comparatively few have visited. They want differences to the norm of
stop-and-gawk tourism. They have already been deprived of the dust of the Alaska Highway; they
have already been confronted with enough of the convention and political correctness they can
find at home - so why deprive them of a ferry, or of that faintly weird sensation of driving
across the ice above a fast-flowing river? It’s what they want to give that little extra edge
to a trip to the North. Don’t build it! All that will happen is that someone who already has
enough will become that little bit richer, and posterity will have just another bridge - to
pass over, and forget.
It was good to come across a nice piece of irony, though. In the latter part of
the 1960s when I worked with General Enterprises as estimator and project manager, I oversaw
the construction of Hougen’s building on Main Street. It was at that time built as a single
department store, and sadly involved the demolition of one or two rather old traditional
buildings which upset me a lot at the time. And today? Up go the ersatz fronts.
Perhaps the saddest experience of all came to me when I went to Carcross to
see what had changed (and I was happy to see that there at least very little had). The
school house we used to live in was different. As cheechakos in Carcross, Isabell, as one of
the two teachers, received many little gifts of cakes and fruit which were left inside the
porch as thoughtful gestures of welcome. The porch is no longer there today – a canopy had
replaced it. But, the main door now has two stout locks in contrast to being told we were being
laughed at because we bothered to use the one flimsy lock at all. I found that sad, but it is
alas a world-wide thing, and not restricted to sub-arctic villages.
You will have noticed that I refer to the Yukon as she used to be called, and
not just Yukon which seems to be the title in official use there today. It is such a bland
word on its own and imposed as if to rid the mind of the territory’s once turbulent,
adventurous and dangerous times. It makes the place no different from Saskatchewan or Ontario
or the others as it trips off the tongue. Imagine if suddenly there was to become "The
Saskatchewan"? Would you not subconsciously hesitate and wonder why "The Saskatchewan" – and what
was so special about it that warranted the epithet? That little word ‘the’ made the Yukon ring
with what it was – separate, different, mysterious; or in Service’s words – “Lofty I stand from
each sister Land, patient and wearily wise…..”
Thank God that there is nothing the bureaucrats can do about ‘The Great Alone’
which will still be there long after they are gone having lived out their pointless existence
in a land that never needed most of them in the first place, and to take their pensions – and
run.
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Nikki and Alastair Findlay at Bove Island, Yukon, in February 2005.
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