""I used to be immune to mosquitoes, I'd been bitten so much, but I've lost it.... The sound of love in the North, a kiss, a slap." —from Surfacing, Margaret Atwood
It's been much longer than I planned since I posted, but I've been something like busy. I'm writing from my home, a trailer on top of one of the last intact tailing piles left behind by the giant gold dredges that flipped the land here upside down the early 20th century. There are miles and miles of tailing piles around, but many have been levelled off or otherwise altered in the years since.
Surrounding much of the pile is a dredge pond (dredges operated by melting the permafrost beneath the ground and sorting through the mix of dirt and water for gold. Gold is heavier than other dirt, so it would sink to the bottom first. Because the dredges here were massive- like, apartment block massive- the melted permafrost underneath them became a small pond on which the dredges would kind of float, moving and sifting through land and spitting out the dirt and rocks which weren't gold behind them. Now, there's a whole network of ponds that remain behind.) There is a beaver living in this pond, though I haven't seen him yet, only heard him chomping away at night. It's sometimes just too thick with mosquitoes to wait for him.
Out my right-side windows, there's the pond and on the far side of that, another pile of rocks-turned-homestead. This one is long and thin, and looks to be abandoned, with a huge chunks of old dredge equipment and an old truck with no engine scattered on the property. Behind that is Bonanza Creek. I am near where the creek joins the Klondike River, about 16 km downstream from where the huge find that triggered the Klondike Gold Rush was discovered.
It's impossible to resist the romance of imagining all the characters that trucked up that creek to make their fortune over 100 years ago.
Out the left windows, there's more pond and a road that leads back into town. There's a campsite at the bottom of my road, where every day there are more tents. There is a second gold rush going on, and young kids from all over the world have been lured here by invitation or adventure to work for larger mining companies that have been combing this area for years, knowing that there's still massive fortunes to be pulled out of the earth here. Ground Truth, a local, husband-and-wife-owned team, have found several huge deposits in recent years, and now the race is on to re-stake and extract gold deposits all over the territory, but around Dawson in particular. The campground is full of their crews, and I can hear them laughing late into the night. In the morning, sometimes the smell of their breakfast prep is too much and my dog runs down to yap at them and beg for scraps. I apologize, but these kids (and yes, they appear to me as kids) are on the adventure of a lifetime, and they aren't bothered. They're from all over, bonding over their wonderment at ending up in a place so strange it seems it ought to exist only in old novels and illustrations from Boy's Life magazine. They are anticipating helicopter rides to the edge of nowhere. They are swapping bear stories and jokes ( I heard one of them doing "If Hannibal Lecter was from Nova Scotia: "How's she goin' there, Clarice? Are the lamb still givin' ye a hard time now?")
They are far away enough that I'm still hidden, and though it's wise to go into town to avoid losing my social skills, there's a lot of time to be alone here. You can sit overlooking the pond and sort through an incredible diversity of rocks—quartz, shale, bits of driftwood in various states of petrification— and wonder if maybe someone else held them and examined them a hundred years ago.
When I first got here, the pond was half-frozen, and the ice looked so thin as to beg the hurling of shotput-weight rocks into them to enjoy the crash of stone through ice. To my surprise, they would land with a thud or bounce and then slide off the edge into the water. I spend several days with a game i "invented", throwing medium-sized rocks onto the ice then trying to knock them into the water by hitting them with small stones. Protean curling of some sort. It was far more engrossing than I could have imagined.
The property was covered in snow when I arrived, but now it's lush and green. The sun is such in the late hours that one evening, while I was inside for dinner, all the barren trees leafed at once, and I opened the door to find myself surrounded by colour.
I find myself living at the speed of my cat and dog, who are clearly delighted to be here. Smells on the wind or channels of sunlight between clouds and hills become like possessions.
I go into town a fair bit, and now it's filling up with tourists, and though it's weird to see the place become like an amusement ride, it's too difficult to begrudge anyone the joy of seeing things here for the first time, things that are no longer personally novel. Giddy summer workers, RV vacationers where the husband does all the driving and is called Dick, because he is old enough to have been called Dick before it became a pejorative. You remember the first time you saw something too — Jack London's cabin, a beaver slapping its tail on the river— and all you can do is be happy for them.
The people that live here year-round are generous in spirit—it feels too cynical to begrudge anyone their little moment of paradise by being cynical or unfriendly. They will tell you how to do what you don't know how to do. They won't laugh (to your face) at your silly ideas. Wait long enough and someone here will encourage you to actualize your most bizarre experiment.
In any event, I started with the quote from Margaret Atwood because I've been re-reading her, or more accurately, reading her for the first time. I always thought I hated her writing, it was so crunchy and staid. Sexlessly Canadian and devoid of romance. I'm starting to think my problem with her was she was slow, deliberate and seemingly indifferent to outcome. Anti-dramatic.
Things I have never prized until now. The story is as much in the inaction as the action. And of course, once you've lived in the North, that mosquito quote is irresistible, because it makes romantic and sardonic one of the most brutal truths of life here—once it's warm enough to be outside, the mosquitoes descend. The more hospitable the climate becomes, the more the mosquitoes swarm. The North protects itself, slowly and deliberately, and is almost certainly indifferent to my outcomes. The antidrama of the moments between the kiss and the slap more than enough to keep turning the pages.
More to come, when it comes. I'm not rereading or proofreading this, so apologies in advance for how rough it is. You're welcome to read, but I think this is just for me, for now...
But you know, like feel free to comment.
