The Good Life Gets Better E-Book

Dorian Amos

• Herausgeber: Eye Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 337

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

The sequel to the bestselling book about leaving the UK for a new life in the Yukon, Dorian and his growing family get gold fever, start to stake land claims and prospect for gold. Follow them along the learning curve about where to look for gold and how to live in this harsh climate. It shows that with good humor and resilience life can only get better.

Leseprobe

Copyright © Dorian Amos 2006

All rights reserved. Apart from brief extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the publisher.

Dorian Amos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

The Good Life Gets Better

1st Edition

August 2006

Published by Eye Books Ltd

Eye Books

29 Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

Tel: [phone]

website: www.eye-books.com

Set in Garamond and Frutiger

ISBN: 9781903070499

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!

WINTER 2003

SPRING 2004

SUMMER 2004

AUTUMN 2004

WINTER 2004

SPRING 2005

SUMMER 2005

AUTUMN 2005

THE DISCOVERY

INTRODUCTION

It’s seven years since Bridget, my wife, and I decided that there has to be more to life than ‘this’. I was a cartoonist and Bridget a psychiatric nurse, and we gave up everything we had ever worked for and immigrated to the Canadian wilderness for a bit of adventure. After making the decision to change our life, it took about five months to sell everything we owned before we said our goodbyes to friends and family and finally headed off into the endless dark woods of a different continent.

We were nervous but not scared, looking back; we were more naive than knowledgeable, but then, that is how it should be. We had little money, no legal right to be in Canada, no equipment, a short-legged dog called Boris and a rusty old Nissan truck. We also had enthusiasm and belief in what we were doing because we were tired of our mundane lives and really believed that there was more to life than what we had … we just had to go and find it, whatever ‘it’ was.

I still remember the words of wisdom people gave us when they heard of our plans: ‘You’re too old to do that sort of thing, it’s time you got a mortgage and settled down’; ‘What are you going to do? You can’t just build a place in paradise then sit in it for the rest of your life - you’ll get bored!’; ‘I’d love to just give up everything and swan off into the wilderness but I have responsibilities’; and my favorite - ‘The grass is always greener…’. It’s amazing how much free advice the chap who sits at the end of the bar can give you. If we had listened to all that advice we would have been scared, and our enthusiasm would have been diluted with other people’s realities and fears. We had enough fears of our own; after all, you can’t just give up your life and walk into the wilderness without a little anxiety. Where would we stay? Would we meet anyone out there? How big are the bears? What should we take? What would we do? The list of questions was endless and in the end we woke up and stopped asking them because in trying to answer them we were talking ourselves out of ‘it’. We didn’t care that the ‘grass is always greener’. It is always bloody greener, always has been… always will be. That’s why there’s a stupid catchphrase about it. But what the stupid catchphrase does not address is why are you looking over the hedge in the first place? If you are thinking of better pasture it’s because you have outgrown the one you’re in, you are asking questions and are no longer following the herd, you actually want to leave for the greener grass and that was the difference between us and the chap at the end of the bar. We left… and found snow on it. It wasn’t greener… it was different, as we knew it would be, because we dreamt of a golden land full of challenges, freedom and wilderness, we did not dream of greener grass. We found what we were looking for and we absolutely love it. As for getting bored, I’d try it, but we still have not had a chance to sit down. As for giving up our responsibilities, we did, easily, and found true ones… each other. And as for being too old to do this sort of thing and getting a mortgage… what a load of bollocks!

We left and felt free. We were unwashed and homeless for a year while we searched the backwoods for a place we could call home. And we finally found it after a canoe trip through 500 miles of wilderness into the far North. We found the Yukon. We found the City of Gold - Dawson City. We found the Klondike. And there we found the endless, remote wilderness. We built a cabin, struggled through -40°C winters, survived rotting ice, killed our meat, built our fires and gave birth to a son whom we named Jack.

And now, seven years on…

GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!

Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland.

STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!

Seattle Post, 9:00 a.m. edition, July 17th, 1897

The Klondike Gold Rush began instantly and dramatically when the Portland sailed into Seattle harbour from St Michaels, Alaska, her hold full of the first gold out of Klondike and sixty-eight weather-beaten Yukon miners who were rich not only with gold but with life. Their arrival brought near hysteria to North America and Europe. Absolutely nothing in this world stirs quite so much emotion in the whole of humanity as GOLD. It has been the downfall of nations and the making of empires. It causes people to kill, steal and con, it makes some men sane and strips the sanity out of others. It has in the past, and to this day still does, lead ordinary men on wonderful, ridiculous adventures in far-off corners of the globe.

Living in the Klondike we hear many stories of these adventures. One is of Antoine from Dawson City, a true Yukoner through and through, tall, loud and crazy, living life at his pace and in his own direction, as free as the wind in the spruce in his exciting search for the Yukon’s gold. And he found it, lots of it. The ‘colours’ he was finding were plentiful and full of riches and promise… but they killed him.

In the dark of winter and blinded by the glitter of gold, he cut a hole in the thick ice of the Yukon River downstream from Dawson and went diving 20 feet to the riverbed on the bend of the river. It was there that he found and collected the gold caught in the riffles of the ancient bedrock. The theory behind his expedition was reasonable for two factors. One, the Yukon River is so silty during the summer, due to hundreds of rivers and creeks draining into it, that it’s impossible to see through the water, rendering it impossible to prospect. It is estimated that a dump-truck load of silt travels a fixed point every second during the height of the summer. In winter everything but the deepest water is frozen. Water levels drop and the river becomes clear.

Reason two, where Antoine was digging was downstream from the Klondike River in which billions of dollars of gold had been found. Naturally, huge amounts of gold are going to be washed into the Yukon River and get caught in the riffles of the bedrock at the first downstream bend.

It was a wonderful, inventive idea. But it was also crazy and ridiculous. Antoine was so blinded by gold fever that he totally overlooked one thing - the Yukon River… All went really well for about two weeks. He had been diving on a rope through a hole in the ice which was kept open by his mates sitting in a heated wall tent. Then one cold, windy day about an hour and a half before Antoine’s air supply ran out his mates felt a tug on the rope to say he was surfacing. They gently coiled the rope as he came up from bedrock, then it went tight and all motion abruptly stopped. They waited anxiously. Minutes later three tugs of trouble jerked the line in their hands. His signal only told the poor fellows in the tent that he was in great danger. They waited and waited, the rope tight, the only sound the crackle of the wood stove. Antoine had become trapped in 10 feet of slush ice below the main ice. Time passed in the tent agonizingly slowly as his mates stared into the dark river, watching the line their friend was attached to twitch and shake, their cracked and weather-beaten hands gripping it tightly, waiting for the signal to pull, while all the time knowing that time was running out.

For Antoine we can only imagine the cold, the dark, the terror and the realism of his dilemma. He was stuck solid in a murky, cold world. The line around his waist led to safety and he must have felt his friends testing it with the occasional tug. His dark facemask was his world for his last cold hour.

The chaps in the tent, knowing Antoine’s air supply was running out, in a final last-ditch attempt to save him pulled as hard as they could on the rope. It broke. Antoine was never seen again, his body never found, his riches never spent.

This is one of hundreds of stories that stud the history of man’s search for gold and of the crazy, reckless and wonderful people who go beyond the last blue mountain in search of it. Antoine, I salute you.

Although not quite blinded, I feel the gold fever burning deep within me. It stirs wondrous thoughts of wealth, of adventure, of courage and adversity. In a place like the Yukon and the Klondike it is hard not to become infected with gold fever. This whole untamed land is all about gold and the wealth and hardships it creates. The lay of the land forces us to take certain routes through the mountains and valleys. These are natural passes and passageways, ancient ways through a rugged land with few roads or trails. Following them we are forced to walk in the footsteps of men and beasts and in the footsteps of history. The tough, rugged Klondikers of the gold rush, th e amazing athletes of the Han Nation, the Yukon wolf packs, the majestic bull moose, the awesome grizzly bear and the restless Barron Ground caribou have all walked these passes and passageways and their presence is worn into the rocks. While I travelled these unmarked routes through desolate wilderness something happened to me. I’m not sure what yet, but following a lone wolf track fills me with admiration. Finding a billycan hanging from a tree, the tree long since grown around it, fills me with awe. A lonely, rotten and forgotten wooden grave marker, split and weathered, still with the words ‘a native of England’ faintly visible, intrigues me, but it all represents adventure and adventure represents gold and gold is always on the other side of every mountain, in every valley, up every river, always on the other side. $28 billion worth of ‘placer gold’ has been taken from the Yukon since 1896. Placer gold means gold that has been weathered, broken and moved by ice and flood from a major source - the mystical, elusive Mother - and it is the elusive Mother Lode that haunts my dreams in the dark winter nights and it is the elusive Mother Lode I now intend to find.

WINTER 2003–4

December 2003

-40°C and the wind of change

It’s mid December and the days are short, the sun conspicuous by its absence. A relentless cold presses down from clear skies. Everything is motionless, engulfed in a white, frozen silence, and not a whisper of wind stirs the snow-clad spruce which bow to the awesome power of the Yukon winter. Dusk is creeping out of the forest by 2.30 in the afternoon. Stalking it is the sinister chill of the night that parades sparkling constellations and whirling northern lights in a dark, domed sky until the twilight of dawn dilutes the display just before 10 in the morning. Below our cabin thick white ice fog hangs in the snaking river valley shrouding islands and ice as if they didn’t exist. It’s been like this for what seems like weeks now but they say on the radio it’s finally going to warm up tomorrow. That actually means it might be -25°C instead of -48°C, which is incredibly warm after a week of ‘get the dog in’ weather. At -25°C we can quite happily go about our daily lives with only a few minor adjustments such as putting on a hat, not having to think about not putting anything on the floor of the cabin in case it freezes, and putting an extra log in the stove. But at -40°C or lower, life becomes extraordinary.

I find living in -40°C temperatures staggeringly difficult because nothing is designed for it, not even ice. Twelve-feet-thick river ice can crack and split causing previously-frozen rivers to open! Strange things happen, trees suddenly split apart with a massive crack that echoes for miles in the silent forest, Boris craps under the cabin and smoke from the wood-stove doesn’t actually rise but lingers on the porch like the Avon Lady desperately searching for a doorbell.

I am definitely not designed for weather this cold. I’m forever picking ice from my nose, while my ears blister, cheeks go white, eyelids freeze shut and facial hair becomes a breeding ground for icicles and other festive, winter, fluffy bits. But what I find most staggering of all is the fact that every time it’s -40°C, we always have to go to town.

The process of going to town as a family is a long and painful one because it takes careful planning, and planning we have always had difficulty with; but now it is almost impossible with a hyper two-year-old Spiderman who shoots everything that moves with anything that’s handy.

We haven’t been to town for two months, and now that the Yukon River is frozen which makes a trip to town possible, the call for fresh fruit and veg is overwhelming, so tomorrow we’ve decided to take the truck, because if we don’t, we won’t stand a chance of getting anything remotely carrot-like back to the cabin without it freezing. It’s going to be interesting. This cold spell looks like it’s staying - let’s hope the weatherman’s right for a change.

The weatherman’s wrong as usual. I opened the door of the cabin this morning and was engulfed in a veil of steam from the dark. Opening the door of the cabin every morning is our way of forecasting the day. The amount of steam that erupts when the cold air meets the cabin air is proportionate to the temperature - the colder it is the more steam there is; and the temperature is proportionate to the success of the day - the colder it is means the chance of success decreases.

It’s probably about 10.30 a.m., daylight is creeping over the spruce trees and a raven is gurgling from somewhere aloft. More ice has built up on the windows overnight and Boris is refusing to move from the front of the wood-stove as Bridge battles to put another log on. I sit at the window with a mug of tea and watch the daylight gradually bring a foreboding sparkle to the snow while I pluck up the courage to go outside and find the truck.

When I find the truck and eventually dig it out from under a winter’s supply of snow, the sun is just cresting the trees, which is as high as it gets this time of year, but it has no heat in it. We haven’t used the truck since sometime in October so of course it won’t start. At this temperature of -41°C, the oil in the engine is so hard the pistons struggle to move through it, the seats, tyres and suspension are all solid, and just turning the stiff key causes the battery to die quicker than a West-Country hedgehog on the A303.

I dig a hole in the snow just in front of the truck, put a sheet metal stove in it and extend the chimney up under the truck’s engine. After taking the battery and spark plugs into the cabin to warm up, I light a fire in the stove and dash back to the cabin to wait. As the short daylight hours pass I watch the smoke from the sheet metal stove rise around the bonnet of the truck melting all the unnecessary plastic bits and forever changing the smell of the truck from stale peanut butter sandwiches to a dirty smoke house.

Using these handy tips, we have in the past spent three entire days trying to turn the truck from a red garden ornament into an automobile that is automated. Spurred on by the thought of ten-day-old lettuce, failure on the first day has only hardened our resolve. The next day sees the same struggle except I usually throw in a couple of nifty, kung-fu-style chops to the bonnet. Finally, with no change except having drained the battery, I put some moose sandwiches, a battery charger and the dead battery in a backpack and walk into town, hoping the battery won’t freeze before I can charge it in the nearest electrical socket so I can try again the next day.

This time, however, it seems we might be lucky. After a couple of hours of warming the truck with the sheet metal stove, I reconnect the warmed battery and spark plugs. It takes both hands to turn the frozen key stem, but when I do the truck reluctantly coughs into life for a few brief but encouraging moments, then dies. I wait a couple of freezing seconds then turn the key again. This time it bursts into life with a roar, and rattles and shakes as an enormous amount of blue smoke bellows out of the exhaust. I keep the throttle to the floor knowing I’m doing un-repairable damage and watch the snow vibrate and crack on the windscreen and steam from the frosted engine mix with the blue smoke as the engine begins to warm. After about ten minutes of sitting on the frozen seat, the cold seeping through every garment I’m wearing, I pluck up the courage to take my foot off the accelerator and the truck idles, not well, but it idles. SUCCESS! Crispy carrots here we come!

While we let the truck warm up for an hour, Bridge and I go through the yearly ritual of finding the wallet, because we always forget where we left it the October before. After we locate it, we load Boris, Little Jack a.k.a. Spiderman, survival kits, chainsaw, food and laundry into the truck knowing that our real troubles are about to start. With a few revs and a sudden release of the clutch, we un-stick the tyres and drive through the snow to the river. The tyres are frozen square and half the truck is only doing half of what it should be doing, while we freeze on frozen seats inside the cab and frost up the windows. As we drive we don’t so much sing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in a fun family way but simply pray nothing snaps and leaves us stranded.

On the river the fog is thick and swirling in a strong Alaskan wind. As we approach we see a track already across the ice, and water running over the shore ice like a steaming lava flow because the river has cracked somewhere up river. Bridge and Little Jack stay in the truck to keep it running as I walk out on to the jumble of ice which is creaking and cracking in the cold air. With the chainsaw I cut into the ice until the two-feet bar is buried vertically. No water spews out, which means the ice is thicker than two feet. I wave to Bridge who drives the truck slowly on to the ice while I test another spot with the saw. The wind coming out of the north is gnawing at my face, freezing it within seconds. I’m bundled up in everything I own without a hint of skin exposed, but my right temple feels like someone is driving a nail into it.

I look back at the truck, bright red and steaming in a totally white, fog-blurred world and I wonder how Bridge is feeling driving on to the ice - the first time is always nerve racking, especially when you can’t see properly through the frosted windows. I cut into the ice once more and still no water comes out. My fingers holding the saw are now virtually numb. The ice seems safe enough so I run back to the truck to escape the wind. Bridge drives over the jumbled ice, and with every bump we pray for solid ground as we are thrown backwards and forwards in our frozen hard seats. The heater whines in its struggle to pump cold air, the windscreen creeks then cracks and Little Jack shoots Boris with a paint roller… there must be something seriously addictive about fresh lettuce.

In town the snow is dirty. Wood smoke mingles with truck exhaust and ice fog hangs low like smog in the street. Nobody’s around, but the lights are on in the houses, and the shops on Front Street shine with tacky Christmas decorations and pipe out carols to no-one in the -40°C wind.

We go for lunch and stock up on supplies, and the longer we’re in town the more people we encounter. It’s nice to chat and catch up on what’s been happening in the world after our two months of solitude across the river, but we begin to notice an unusual buzz around town and it doesn’t take us long to discover the reason. The Government has announced the building of the Yukon River Bridge. Our hearts sink into the snow. They are going to build a massive steel bridge across the river to join Dawson to nowhere. A bridge will really affect our lives. There will be no more lonely Freeze Ups, no more struggling to cross the river at Break Up. The town will expand around us and electricity poles will march up the hill in a regimented line through unkempt natural beauty. Since we arrived in the Yukon over seven years ago everyone has been talking about a bridge. Several people have moved across the river and built cabins in the trees to secure land in the hope of making a quick buck. I now know why last September an odd chap from the phone company, wearing bright orange overalls and a thick fur hat, was struggling through the woods with a GPS.

It truly is a shame. The town has so much charm, history and character which will be overshadowed by a huge, modern, steel bridge. Dawson City is a real frontier town, a gold rush town built on gold and dreams, and a bridge will turn it into a typical North American highway town. At the moment Dawson is the end of the road and attracts ‘The Colorful Five Percent’, the people who can’t, won’t or refuse to fit into the plastic, shiny world outside where cholesterol levels, the price of petrol and the latest style of jeans depict the way people live, instead of the day length, the mercury level in the thermometer and the rutting season of large leggy ungulates.

Dawson City has gone through monumental changes in its short but dynamic history. Before 1896 it didn’t exist, the area being a frozen swamp used by the Han Nation as a fishing camp. Besides the Han Nation and other First Nation bands the whole territory held only a few hundred brave prospectors or Sourdoughs, so-called because they carried in a bag on their belts a fermenting yeast, sugar and flour mix which they used as a starter for making sourdough bread. They lived a hard but quiet life governed by an honorable code and the Yukon’s weather as they sought hidden fortunes in unknown, nameless creeks. Then on 17 August 1896 George Carmack stumbled upon unimaginable wealth lying in the bottom of Rabbit Creek (later renamed Bonanza Creek) and the frozen swamp began to fill up with tatty canvas tents and the odd hastily-built cabin as word of the discovery drifted throughout the Yukon. Men dragged their outfits to the frozen swamp from the established mining camps of Circle City, Alaska, and Forty Mile, Yukon, just for a chance at the rumoured gold lying by the ton beneath the frozen muskeg. Very quickly, tented saloons and rough lumber dance halls began to appear as outsiders who had heard the whispers and climbed the passes arrived to make their fortunes. By the summer of 1897, a year later, 3,500 people were crammed onto the frozen swampland, and gold nuggets were thrown around like toffees in a parade. The hillsides were stripped of trees, and roughly-constructed cabins, hotels, casinos and saloons were built in their place, the streets turned to mud and the honorable way of the Yukon order of Sourdoughs counted for nothing. They felt out of place and vulnerable in the rapidly growing town where gambling, drinking and dance hall girls came before honour, respect and honesty. Many moved on, knowing things were only going to get worse, because news of the strike had not yet reached the South. When it did, hundreds of thousands would burn with a fever which would compel them to climb the passes and run the rapids until they too reached the end of the rainbow, bringing with them change.

Creating change this time, however, seems to be the aim of a small, rather loud percentage of the town that has forgotten why they moved to the Yukon. They have become stuck trying to make a conventional living in a remote, small, northern town with dirt streets, no real services and no sun for a month in January. They are too busy complaining about the cost of freight to get out into the raw, natural beauty which surrounds them for thousands of miles. All they see is what they haven’t got - paved roads, proper sewers, dependable electricity, a Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through, and a bridge, and it’s not fair because everywhere else in Canada has. They are too busy trying to make money selling dingy hotel rooms and failing to see what they do have, which is beauty and wonder all around them, the chance to sit, alone, in the endless, snow-choked forest by a fire and listen to the silence, the chance to hunt their own meat and to drift for miles on untamed remote rivers snaking through unimaginable country, and the irony is nowhere else can offer that. Instead, the small, rather loud few want the chance to make a name for themselves and a lot of money by bringing Dawson City into the modern world, making it like everywhere else, for the greater good of us all but especially themselves.

We have come to the far North and built a home out in the bush because of what it offers, because of what is here and because it is not like everywhere else. It enables us to live a life full of challenges, a life we can look back on and be proud of, that we live and feel every day, but all that is now threatened because some business owners in town need a bridge to make more money. We feel a strange kin with the Sourdoughs. They were independent men who enjoyed the struggle of poling alone up a wild, unmapped river, while ice built up around their boat and the nip in the air stung their faces, their main thought being the gold that had to lie in the bottom of a creek around the next bend. They pushed all boundaries and lived life on the edge. They were the select few who ventured far into the dark forest of the northern spruce, they needed the unknown and the thrill of discovering what lay over the next mountain. It was only when they found what they were supposedly looking for, i.e. gold (the only legitimate reason a sane man wanders through wilderness with purpose), that things changed. As soon as gold was struck anywhere in the North, word spread like chicken pox at daycare. Thugs, gamblers, priests, prostitutes, dance hall girls and police flocked to the previously unknown area to make money, build bridges, save savages and make names for themselves.

Dawson City is a testament to this. As churches, cabins and casinos sprang up and the area became ‘civilized’, the lonely prospector found himself surrounded by what he had escaped from. All of a sudden he was subject to other men’s laws and religion. He had to take his hat off to eat, bow and kneel on Sundays, he was robbed and conned and made into a criminal if he carried a gun. When the noise of plunking pianos, drunken brawls and fighting dogs became impossible to bear, he left once more to wander the lonely misty valleys in search of what he was supposedly looking for.

After a bumpy ride home during which we sank into silence, we reach our cabin in the dark. It is our home, built with our own hands, and it has sheltered us from the ravages of the Yukon’s storms for over five years. It stands silently in the spruce, silhouetted by a clear sky studded with brilliant stars and a distant moon, but as we walk up to the door all we see hanging over it is the dark cloud which no wind can clear.

January 2004

Cabin-bound and fighting the fever

With my job as a Park Ranger comes a Ranger cabin in the Tombstone Mountains. It is eight feet by twelve, which gives me no room to do Yoga if I ever felt like it, but it’s a great little cabin, with a wood-stove, a small table and a bed. I use it as a base for week-long winter patrols in the mountains, and it makes life a little more comfortable at the end of each day. However, I’d just been cabin bound in it for six days and it got progressively smaller! A vicious wind raged constantly, driving the -50°C air under the door like a rising tide. The clear nights went on forever as I huddled in the dim light of the wood-stove, longing to get out under the sparkling constellations domed over the sky, but when I did venture out I lasted minutes, and was amazed to see icicles down the side of the cabin chimney while smoke billowed from the stack. The snow was drifting all around the cabin so I had to walk everywhere in snowshoes while the wind sucked the heat from my body. Many a time, after a quick jaunt outside, I made it back to the cabin and found the door blown open and the place full of snow, freezing by the minute.

It’s times like that, when I’m isolated and Bridge and Little Jack are miles away at home in the cabin across the river and I’m stuck, imprisoned in a tiny log cabin by a brutal storm, that my mind races with wonder and questions about what the heck we are doing and where the heck we are going. Adventure for adventure’s sake seems to be dulled now that Little Jack is running around happy and contented and oblivious to the fact there are things like computer games and Garfield in this world. We need a reason, a legitimate reason, for relishing these hardships, for sailing close to the wind, not knowing if we’ll get home by nightfall or what the next day will bring. We really do need a realistic reason for it all. Maybe we are being selfish, even foolish, maybe we should go back and get a mortgage on a house that has running water and a lawn and where the dustmen come and take the rubbish away on Wednesdays. I could get a steady job as a bus driver, barman or cartoonist again. Jack could have friends and go to school in a white shirt, grey shorts and polished Clark’s shoes. Bridge could put away the chainsaw and join a club, go for coffee at a friend’s house or get a part-time job at the library. Sometimes the thought of those things seems fantastic! I could even go for a pint of bitter in the Chicken and Chaplin after a hard day’s work, see the chaps, tell rude jokes and moan about the price of parking meters. I miss, even long for, all those things sometimes. England has its unique quirks and will forever be with me. British Rail serving warm cans of lager but running late, absolutely no free parking, and the old git at the end of the oak bar in every pub who knows it’s going to be a harsh winter because of the number of blackberries in the hedges are all truly British and I miss them greatly, but something keeps me here in the wild North Land. Something here promises the unknown, promises excitement and adventure, and I now believe it to be the challenge of finding the elusive Mother Lode lying in the frozen mud, ready to create a world-wide storm.

For a long time now we have drifted through the mountains and along the rivers of the Yukon and I have felt the tug, asked the question, and dreamed the dream of gold in the creek bed around the next bend. The problem is, I’ve always been a logical person and I think there is absolutely nothing logical about prospecting for gold. It takes a dreamer to search thousands upon thousands of miles of pristine wilderness for the chance of finding a fortune, but people do. But no matter how you look at it, the Mother Lode itself is a logical concept. Only forty per cent of the supposed gold hidden in the Yukon’s wilderness has been mined and that gold is placer gold. It has been peeled by the forces of nature like a man whittling a stick; it came from somewhere, somewhere big, the Mother Lode. The Yukon is eight times bigger than England and has not been explored properly on the ground. There are still hundreds of thousands of acres that have not felt the tread of a human foot. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of unnamed creeks that have still not felt the bite of a shovel or the steel of a gold pan, and unfortunately for Bridge and Little Jack I have read somewhere that only 0.000002 per cent of one per cent of the total estimated gold in the earth has been recovered.

When I’m stuck for six days in a small draughty cabin, running out of food and struggling to stay sane, the adventure of gold is what fills my thoughts and takes them over the last blue mountain into the unknown, and that is what keeps me here.

February 2004

Just another -40°C day

The day is clear, cold and classic -40°C. It doesn’t feel as cold as it is because the sun is shining, but the two ravens with frost around their faces, huddled together atop a frosted alder tree, look cold. Our cabin is just high enough on the hill to look over the ice fog hanging in the river valley so we can see forever into the brittle, clear day right to the mountains on the horizon. All movement is halted and all sound engulfed by the cold that rains down on this white land from the flawless sky.

We are running out of firewood and I intended to go looking for dead standing trees on the skidoo today but I can’t get it going. It amazes me every time how really cold metal gets at -40°C. The skidoo is frozen, totally seized with cold. If I touch any metal on it with bare hands I freeze to it; even with gloves on, the cold in the metal soaks the glove like a liquid freezing the hands. I put a couple of lit candles against the engine earlier and threw a tarpaulin over the bonnet to try and warm it up a little so I could at least pull out the starter cord. If I’m careful and gentle I can pull it out now, but it takes forever to retract back into the engine block and doesn’t seem to create anything remotely close to a spark.

I open the bonnet as one of the ravens gurgles in the quiet. Maybe it’s telling me something and maybe I should listen, because those two old timers in that tree have been in this brutal land for probably fifty years (they live for nearly eighty years). I acknowledge them with a whistle which seems to go unnoticed, then I try to take off one of the spark plug leads, but it’s too brittle and snaps. It’s at times like this that I wish I’d got the wood in the fall, back then when life was easy. Undaunted, I reach for the tool kit under the seat and go into the cabin for a cup of tea and wait for the tools to warm up to a useable temperature.

Full of tea and warmth I put on my heavy winter gear again, pull my facemask up over my face and venture out to accomplish my mission. The spark plugs are stiff but I manage to undo them with my briefly steaming, adjustable wrench fresh from the top of the wood-stove. To get the skidoo going in these temperatures it needs all the help it can get, so my plan is to pour a little petrol into each cylinder, put the plugs back in and pull the cord… it will then start. It will. It must! I put the plugs on the wood-stove while I look for the petrol can. I find it empty and half buried under a pile of snow, one corner of which is stained yellow, so I cuss Boris as I dig it out. I need to fill it by siphoning some petrol out of the 45-gallon barrel that stands waist high in snow near the outhouse. I hesitate, looking at the wood pile to see if all this is really necessary; it is. I find the siphon hose hanging on its rusty nail by the shed and I gently pick it off, trying not to twist or bend it in case it snaps, and carry it into the cabin to warm up.

After another cup of tea I put on all my winter gear again and trudge back to the barrel of petrol with the now briefly flexible siphon hose. Knowing it’s only a matter of minutes before I won’t be able to bend it, I hastily put one end into the barrel, crouch in the snow next to the jerry can, put the other end into my mouth and suck. As the ravens watch me gurgle, I see the petrol in the hose rise out of the drum, over the arc in the hose and down into my mouth. Instantly I feel as if I’ve been hit in the teeth with a hammer and am felled. I am almost puking with the pain in my mouth from the -40°C petrol against my teeth. That was not the plan. I wanted to avoid getting it in my mouth but it was too quick. I really think it has cracked my teeth as I spit and cough like a ten-year-old tasting tequila. As the pain arcs to my forehead I stagger to my feet to grab the hose and stem the flow of petrol soaking into my coat. It snaps and the flow slows to a drip. I am now unbelievably cold and burping up petrol fumes that make me want to vomit. My teeth feel as if they are in pieces and falling out of my mouth, and to top it off the ravens on the alder are gurgling to each other, almost laughing, so I give up and stagger into the cabin to collapse by the stove. With the hose snapped we can’t get the petrol out of the barrel. I think it’s going to be one of those days where we just sit in front of the stove and drink tea. If we run out of firewood before this cold snap ends we’ll have to use the sofa.