viewing

in the summer, I'm told that tourists sometimes walk right in the door of where I’m living, to visit the “historic house of Pierre Berton”. No doubt they usually back away in horror, finding some unkempt writer sitting at a laptop in his underwear. Their mistake is understandable: the Robert Service cabin across the street is a tourist attraction you can walk into, and just down the block, there’s novelist Jack London’s cabin, with a re-built food cache on stilts and a proper visitor centre.
To help the tourists, there is a little viewing platform out in the Berton house garden, nearly snowed-over at this time of year (see above!) The platform has a nice wooden banister, benches, and small information panels explaining the history of the house with a brief biography of Pierre Berton. It’s a good idea, though I do wonder if writers living here in summer ever wake up like rare birds, tourists staring in from the viewing platform with binoculars.

Art and snow

Brem has arrived! Bringing the muppet-dog Barclay…so the Berton house is much more lively than before. There are books and music all over the place as Brem unpacks.
Within an hour of outfitting the beast in a little boots and a classy borrowed dog-coat, Barclay had lost of one her boots in deep snow—dogs were probably not meant to wear clothes, and who can blame them. But walking last night was spectacular: it was snowing but the sky was clear over the hill just behind town, so we could see the stars, while snow sparkled diamond-like in the air and over every surface. There is a huge husky mutt nearby whose enthusiasm gave us an excuse to visit C’s beautiful log house, meet her very tough cats Lynx and Raven, and admire her wonderful art collection. More details to come...

groceries

carrying the groceries home (celery wrapped in layers of newspaper so it doesn’t freeze) makes me think about the provisions that used to be needed for a winter in the Klondike. There was a mandatory list of supplies for the prospectors, dancehall dames and everyone else coming over the Chilkoot Pass:
200 lbs bacon, 800 lbs flour, 200 lbs corn meal, 150 lbs beans, 75 lbs sugar, 150 lbs dried fruits, 50 lbs rice, 75 lbs coffee and 1 case of condensed milk.
I noticed at the Fur Show that everyone was taking condensed milk in their coffee, so I guess a taste for tinned milk still lingers over here. Given the prospectors' list, I'd ditch the coffee entirely & pack cocoa powder...

mammoths

one of the women in my yoga class tells me that she used to visit the house I’m staying in, before it became a writer’s residence. “Back when the paleontologist lived in it. He filled the rooms with bits of rock and bones and mastodon tusks. It wasn’t so nice as it is now…but of course as a kid, I thought it was the greatest house in town.” I would probably agree with her, even though the newly-redecorated house is probably more comfortable! There’s a mammoth tusk in the window of one of the closed-for-the-winter gift shops in town. (I can’t imagine trying to get a tusk through airport security these days.)

wolverines

it’s -40.

useful fact for such weather: wolverine fur doesn’t freeze the way everything else does, when you wear it around your face. Wool and nylon and any other fabric you might come up with get covered in ice crystals from your breath. Don’t ask me why wolverine fur doesn’t do this, maybe because wolverines look quite fuzzy but have a particularly mean personality...far nastier than a wolf, apparently, even though a wolverine is more like a weasel (it's actually a trickster character in some stories: a mean, wily trickster.) Not that I’m meeting any wolverines; I’m too busy staying inside, finishing the Yukon salmon Sz gave me the other night. Last night, I had caribou made into Swedish meatballs (!) courtesy of Sz, who said it was Mr. C’s caribou. Sz obviously worries that I’m going to starve out here, far from the cafés of Paris.

earthquake

Rats, I missed an earthquake this morning. It was southwest of Whitehorse and registered 6.1 on the Richter Scale. But it wasn't felt as far north as Dawson. So instead I went for a walk until my toes got too cold (it's -36 on the thermometre outside the kitchen window).

Robert Service

So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands—my God! but that man could play!

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars—
Then you’ve a haunch what the music meant…hunger and night and the stars.
-Robert Service, from “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”

The poem takes place in Dawson; in fact, I'm just finished a novel by Robert Kroetsch based on the poem's mysterious female character, the lady that’s known as Lou. Robert Service spent 1909-1912 in the little cabin across the street from where I’m staying (photo to follow as soon as my camera gets here!), working on his third volume of Yukon-inspired poems. The title? Songs of a Rolling Stone.

CBC North

Yesterday…

I’m sitting in the living room waiting for Eleanor Wachtel to interview Margaret Atwood on the radio, because it’s been advertised on CBC for the past hour. I’m wondering if it’s the same show I heard two months ago, Atwood being deadpan and caustic as usual, the interview trying to make her sound cuddly and failing completely. Then it’s the five o’clock news, all good (well, all bad, actually, but let’s not dwell on that for now), and then all of a sudden, the CBC is broadcasting what sounds like a record being played backwards. I think (and this indicates what a hopeless old luddite I am) “hey I wonder how long it takes before they realize they put the Atwood reel in backwards.” Then I pause, realizing it’s quasi-impossible to play digital backwards. And then my idiocy truly dawns on me: I’m listening to a local call-in show in Gwich’in (one of the First Nations communities up here--I only figure out which language by looking it up on the CBC website). Now I’ve been listening for twenty minutes; all I’ve understood is “New Year”, “Old Crow” (which is a town near here), and the fact that every now and then the host, whose name is Mabel English, says “Thank you” and plays a segment of Celtic music. Listening to Gwich’in is a lot more interesting than the parliamentary analysis show that was on this morning (which says a lot for political commentary in this country)…