Anne B. Writes

Travels in the Yukon (2016)

            Dawson City is an odd place for a destination wedding. But my husband’s childhood friend, who’d abandoned southern Ontario for the Yukon thirty years ago, was getting married, again, and we weren’t about to miss out. We flew to Vancouver, then Whitehorse, rented a car, and drove six hours to Dawson along the Klondike Highway.

            It was early September, and bevies of aspens draped in mellow autumn yellow danced across the hills. Bright red salmon crowded the churning water at Five Finger Rapids, and near Carmack, a fat porcupine waddled down the road ahead of us without a care in the world. It could have been 1896, and the two of us gold prospectors on the epic journey to Bonanza Creek, toting a year’s worth of supplies and dreaming of the vast fortune ahead.

We spent four days playing tourists, panning for gold in an ice-cold stream, hiking the red slopes of Tombstone Mountain and visiting the pioneer cemetery. We watched the can-can dancers at Diamond Tooth Gerties’, declined the Sour Toe cocktail at the Downtown Hotel, and clomped along wooden boardwalks set above the muddy streets.

Then the main event: the wedding, featuring a buffet of wild salmon and moose kebabs. Many of the guests were trappers or gold miners on a rare trip into town and like them, the groom wore a hunting knife strapped to his belt. We shared a table with a family of four who’d traveled several hours from the log cabin they’d built on the bank of the Klondike River.

After supper and several rounds of rowdy toasts, the guests flooded the dance floor. The Rastafarian DJ played all our requests, and we quickly became a single organism wearing linen and denim and buckskin and beads, pogoing to “Psycho Killer” and jiving to “Electric Avenue” ‘til near dawn.

            A scant few hours of sleep later, we said goodbye to Dawson and took the ferry across the Yukon River.  The Top of the World Highway swoops and soars across the hills; its name comes from both high elevation and northerly latitude, but it’s hardly a highway. The surface consists of hard packed dirt with occasional gravelly sections, and with no safety barriers on the outside of the curves or anywhere else for that matter, if one tire strays over the edge you’re a goner.

The drive should have been hair-raising, but was instead both exhilarating and meditative. Small shrubs in foliage of saffron, apricot and gold daubed the steep hillsides. Here above the treeline, what little green there was came in patches of brilliant chartreuse. Shafts of light streaking through the early morning mist illuminated the plum-coloured rocks.

            We floated through this ethereal landscape for a couple of hours, the ever-changing mountains bringing us views gorgeous enough to break your heart anew around each hairpin curve. I was so captivated that I ignored the increasing pressure from my bladder, and before I knew it, we’d arrived at the Alaska border.

            Here at the most northerly land border crossing in the world, we were the only car in sight. We obeyed the stop sign. Where was the guard? Did anyone even know we were here?

            Finally, an arm protruded from the booth and waved us forward. Passports at the ready, I leaned forward in my seat with a smile. The officer studied our documents with pursed lips.

            “Where do you live?”

            My husband said, “near Toronto” and I said “Hamilton, Ontario” simultaneously. We grinned at each other while she regarded us with a face stony as an Easter Island head.

            “Let’s try this again. Where do you live?”

            “Hamilton, in southern Ontario,” my husband replied.

            “Canadian citizens?’

            “Yes,” we replied in unison.

            She scowled. “One at a time, please. What is the nature of your business in the U.S.?”

            “Vacation.”

            “How long do you plan to stay?”

            “Less than a day. We’re just passing through.”

            She huffed in disbelief.

            “Are you carrying any weapons? Firearms, including shotguns or rifles? Handguns? Ammunition? Knives longer than six inches?”

            “No.”

            “Are you sure?”

            Now it was our turn to raise our eyebrows. Yeah, we were pretty sure we’d know if there was anything like that in the car.

            “Are you carrying currency more than ten thousand dollars?”

            “No.”

            “Has either of you ever been arrested? Charged with a crime?”

            This was a new one. “No,” we both replied.

            “Really? Neither of you? Ever? Have you been pardoned for anything?”

            I tried to imagine how desperate a terrorist would have to be to try to cross here, and failed.

            “Any food with you?”

            “Some snacks,” I replied.

            “Any fruits or vegetables?”

            “No,” I said, as my husband, who has difficulty fibbing, said “Well…”

            We had a couple of bananas in our daypack; no citrus fruit, the import of which is strictly controlled. I stifled the impulse to point out how far away we were from Florida and California. But she sensed that she had us dead to rights and pounced.

            “Don’t lie!” she admonished me with a wagging finger.

            I admitted to the bananas.

            Satisfied now that she had finally caught us out on something, she returned our passports and waved us on with a command to drive carefully.

            When I finally stopped brooding, I noticed the landscape was not as beautiful as before. There were more greens of the spruce and pine variety and fewer golds. We began to see pickup trucks with gun racks in them. Then, a steady trickle of ATVs carrying men dressed in camouflage. Leaning against the passenger seats were long rectangular cases. It dawned on us: hunting season!

            I was now desperately in need of a bathroom break and normally I’d think nothing of a roadside squat behind a clump of trees. Sympathetically, my husband speeded up and we raced down the remaining stretch of the Top of the World Highway, oblivious to everything until we finally reached a rest area.