It’s Remembrance Day

So far, so Canadian.

Hopefully I have been able to put a few revealing scratches into the surface of What It Is Like Up Yukon. And they are only scratches because the Yukon-ness of Yukon runs deep and wide. Turning glimpses into gazes is ongoing work. At the same time, for those who have never been to Canada, especially west of the Rockies, most of my descriptions and commentaries have perhaps addressed aspects that were within the realm of the expected.

Now I am back in Ashcroft, in Sun Country BC, and I am savouring a landscape and a climate that is far from many people’s stereotype of Canada. By the end of this post readers will be aware of circumstances that make this a short update. So I will just run through an improvised impressionistic list of coming back here for my third visit (I spent nearly 2 months here in 2007 and much of my book is based on events here).

baked pyramids and cones of dunes overlapping like mountains in Chinese paintings…wetter than usual Spring makes a bottle-green sheen on the hills and the dark pink dunes…tall, plump sage brush bushes pump out an iced matt blue backdrop offset by pale yellow mustard flower banks…all clouds must remain very high and present themselves in clean white cotton at all times or just disappear and leave the impossible blues to get on with it…railtracks (big but dwarfed by the landscape) sandwich the main part of the small township…I sleep under a single sheet in the warm night and am woken up by blaring freight train engines (they have to bellow twice into the darkness when approaching a level crossing) but am immediately lulled back into slumber by the gentle, unhurried rumble-rock of the mile and a half long freight liners, supplemented by the electronic flatlining chants of the crickets…intricate plateau shelves of mesa separate the dirt-dunes, covered with sock-torturing prickly pear cacti, juniper, bunny-bush and sun-scented sage…roadrunner quail (a.k.a. chuckers) and gophers stitch the gullies and flats with holes and in-and-out scamperings…rattlesnakes stay shy but are there, likewise bull snakes, coyote, deer, horses, black bears…the land is dry but try saying the word ‘arid’ to the churning Thompson River that gives a sinuous spinal column to the whole wide valley…Gold Rush service station history idles in artefacts and a trove of a museum, and in the corner of the eye a much more ancient First Nations presence flickers on at a mingling point of various Secwepemculecw (Sushwap) bands, particularly the Bonapartes…the rocks and willows and cottonwoods of the Slough (‘slew’) are cradled in an amphitheatre of sculpted hoodoos, turrets and buttresses of eroding clay…on the hills the pine-beetles’ toll makes dark brown reading, but in the gardens the wealth of greenery and blossom and fruit and berries startles and smiles…businesses come and go and people come and go and community persists and makes itself felt to the awake being, and as in my references to Whitehorse and the scattered enclaves in Yukon, it is the warmth and openness of the people that completes the sense of connection…oh, and one day the Ashcroft Opera House will rise again!

There are many more aspects of the township and the surrounding area that deserve mention, but I am only here for a short time and these are the impressions that have surfaced for me in a couple of days. There’s a strong arts community here too (if you check out just one check out the website of Royden Josephson). And if you stay anywhere, stay at the Blue Sage b’n b. Plugs over!

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My re-connection with, and remembrance of, all things Ashcroft, has been curtailed by news from home in England. I had planned to explore the Okanagan Valley, and spend some nights in the extreme splendour of Valhalla National Park in the Slocan Valley, visit friends in San Francisco, and finish up back at Gabriola (with a climb of the Golden Hinde, the highest peak on Vanvouver Isalnd, as a finale to the trip)

My Mum has Alzheimers Disease, amongst other ailments, and there has been a sudden and serious deterioration for her. No need for details, but the upshot is that I am heading back to England pretty much immediately to be with my sister, my Dad and my son and the family.

I am thinking of my Mum’s life as a river. For 87 years the river has laid down a bed of experiences, occasions, events, unhappinesses, comforts. It has worn and sculpted banks of memories and interactions with the world. For better and for worse that river has teemed with life. Now dementia has made that flowing water crystal clear and sterile and devoid of nourishment. It is as if the water is still coursing down stream, but not touching the banks or the bed, not connecting with the past, the present or the future.

It has been a long process, but to witness the outcome is still tough stuff in the moment. That’s for the rest of us…what is it like for her?

We sing about “precious memories”, but memory is no more resilient than a heart or a tendon. Luxuriate in, and celebrate memory…make it into a material that works for you and connects you to the right, compassionate, empathetic stuff…make yourself vulnerable and stupid through it as well (as I do in this blog): emotional truth is more important than factual recording.

I am definitely continuing with this blog, so please do subscribe, comment, email etc etc…I really enjoy writing it and the interactions it has led to have been truly wonderful. Clearly the focus on BC, Yukon and Alaska will shift (but will still be very present – I’ll be back, he says in best Arnie voice) but I shall scribble away about all sorts, including trying to get published and all points between here and somewhere funny, stimulating, communicative, connective.

Ted xox

Rhythm Method

We have all walked along crowded, ultra-busy city streets…sometimes lengthy straight ones, sometimes through Jackson Pollock drip-lines of mazy corners and densely packed pavements. When you do that you tend to get into a rhythm, plotting the gaps and the best chances of moving forward, changing lanes and revising your direction from moment to moment. On good days it becomes second nature, an easy dodgem-dance involving happy co-ordination of eye, brain, feet and torso.

Sometimes though, you can get out of synch. For whatever reason, perhaps a futile thought-drift into the past or a desire-driven fantasy about the future, you lose that necessary rhythm. You bump into people, you get held up behind slower movers, you get involved in split-second two-steps with oncoming bodies. And that loss of a relaxed, mindful progress can take on a buffeting momentum of its own. You have to work a little at regaining rhythm, or even stop, step aside and go again.

After just such an unforseen loss of rhythm (jangly but interesting) on a long round trip to Calgary and back up to Whitehorse, I now feel back in a conscious, progressive stride. Maintenance is ongoing. No more colliding with coyotes or rubbing spines with porcupines or getting blocked in behind bumbling-bummed bears. Feet, brain, torso and heart are doing joined up motion again.

Q : How many years do you have to live before you stop needing to have learning experiences?

A : Tough as they may be sometimes, learning experiences just keep on a-comin’ so get used to them. It’s learning how to learn that is the key, and I am still a novice at that.

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Now that the summer solstice is here the Yukon day takes a mere hour or two for a moderately shady break around 1.30 to 3 in the morning. The dipping of the sun below the horizon happens with such reluctance and such yawning angles of light that the skies vary from night to night. There are fish-flesh ripples of orange on the stratospheric clouds, and there are darkly marooned hazes of sullen glow-halos behind the high ridges.

Where snow persists in the topmost corries of the mountains, the geometry of the fading sun gives a neon pink spotlight to the peaks. For half an hour each night the tops become pyramids of fresh bubblegum….not fancier metaphors for hot pinkness, just chiselled pyramids of vibrant, blousy bubblegum.

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One of the compensatory joys of the arduous trek back up to Yukon was the passage through the Northern Rockies, a big area full of characterful beauty and fascination. There was no time to stop on this journey but it did bring waves of exhilarating memories from 3 years ago. There are large tracts of the Northern Rockies that are remote, but where the actual mountains are easier to access. There is a thinner forest defence and you can get onto good solid rock above the tree-line relatively quickly.

There are still creeks and rivers to cross, and a little bushwhacking, but the rewards are immense. You don’t have to be a climber, skilled in severe routes on both rock and ice (required for most of the massive, serrated photo op Rockies of the Icefields Parkway). You can contour up many of the Northern Rockies and, in fine weather, use the happy alignments of slopes and ridges and tors to get up into heart-stoppingly beautiful panoramas, with vaulting connections between the tops that allow for miles of energised legwork.

And, unlike with many ranges, there is very little scree, talus and debris to negotiate. The rock is hard, compact and grainy in texture, with huge boilerplate slabs and rounded humps. On a blissful 3 night bivouac wander during that 2007 journey I felt that I was walking across those tops with spring-heels and a light touch, lungs full of pure air by day and head in a crown of stars by night.

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I was very aware, whilst writing about the joys of Kluane in a recent posting, that I tend to avoid using certain words when writing this blog. For example, whatever happened to the fine word “awe”?

“Awe” has a wealth of meaning and impact that has become locked away behind the over-used “awesome” (or “arse-um” in north American usage). Perhaps the corruption of the word was then completed by the US neo-cons and theo-cons as fronted by George Bush…the obscenity of the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing tactic that was so awe-inspiring that it kept the Iraq war going through to the present day.

In a similar context I find it uncomfortable to use the word “spiritual”. The natural world, in macro breadth and micro detail, allows for experiences of great rapture and insight into all aspects of living. When this is linked to your own heart and mind, and linked to great compassion and mindfulness in people around you, powerful connections and awarenesses evolve. How do we sum up those moments which fuse together to become sustained knowledge?

For those who actively hold to a particular faith it can be easy, maybe all too easy, and the word God is flipped up into the discussion at the jerk of a knee. And “spiritual” has been appropriated by the myriad of New Agey, glossy philosophies and brands (I use that word deliberately as consumerism is a major factor in that whole sector). The word “spiritual” has become like the soup made out of the soup that was made out of the soup that was made out of the original ingredients.

I am interested in the development of the word “humane” or a phrase like “what it means to be a living, awake human”. Some formulation that reflects the connections between thought, feeling and action / experience. Faith feels like a superstitious, desperate gesture. “Belief is the wound that knowledge will heal”.

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Some Yukon proverbs and sayings that I have collected or simply made up would include:

• When it comes to a forest fire the technical term for even the most beautiful tree is ‘fuel’ – cease to hug it at that point.
• What’s the most confusing event in the calendar in Dawson City? Fathers’ Day (substitute your small community name of choice).
• Silence in the mountains makes a great noise.
• Share stories, time and space with the traveller.
• Bears are catholic in their tastes and the Pope shits in the woods.
• People with dogs and no children talk about their dogs more than people with children and no dogs talk about their children (there is a big dog culture in Yukon…and a culture of big dogs, understandably so).
• Neighbourliness and open, welcoming hearts are the order of the day where people don’t have to live on top of each other.
• Always wave to the roadside Raven.
• Every glacier has a crevasse with your name on it. That doesn’t mean you have to live in it.
• Don’t go to Starbucks – go to Baked, The Chocolate Claim, Java Connection, anywhere but Starbucks.
• The wilderness may be driven back by the oil and mineral companies, by the motorised trophy hunters, by the consumers of nature, but the wilderness will return, even if that is in a different form. People compete and destroy each other. The wilderness will wait for that to happen. What you think is wilderness now is not as wild as it was long ago or as wild as it will be again (Vuntut Gwitchin First Nations writer from the Old Crow community).
• Stories are compensation for only having one life.
• Robbing a bank is not as big a crime as founding one.
• Hide with the lynx, run with the wolf, fly with the eagle, find food with the bear…survive with the ground squirrel.

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This time in Yukon has been inspiring and fulfilling. I have a few more days before moving south into BC. Whilst the blog has reflected the place more than the persons, I have simple, honest gratitude towards many people here. You will know who you are. It is relationship to others that completes an inwardly satisfying circle. And there will be much more Yukonnection to come!

Ted xox

The Saffron Windshield

It’s a long way from Calgary to Haines, Alaska: 2,700 kms of landscapes and skyscapes that are immensely varied, and just plain immense. There has not been a lot of opportunity to stop and smell the Indian Paintbrush flowers on the way (matt scarlet beauties that are starting to adorn the roadsides at the higher elevations). However, there are some details that blend the experience of a truck-and-trailer drive north with previous, more leisurely, visits to the same terrain.

Swallowtail butterflies are enjoying a gala year. They are everywhere…big gaudy yacht-sail wings and succulent, peach-fuzz bodies. Many of them are as big as finches. Pastel yellow, with mocha stripes and borders, and brilliant blue tail-gunner markings. After years of failed butterfly photo attempts I have succeeded in taking a really good picture of a Swallowtail today (coming to a flickr site near you when I have better computer access).

Unfortunately many of the Swallowtails are drawn to the roadside verges, so rich in lorry-whoosh-spread flowers. And this makes them easy prey for the voracious windshield. At each stop I have to wash and scrape to remove the broad smears of bug kill from the screen. Some of this is mundane browns and whites…but all too much of it is the egg yolk yellow of the kamikaze Swallowtails. It’s the kind of egg yolk yellow that people fondly imagine they will get when they buy wholesome looking brown eggs.

Insects proudly and recklessly wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies, hence that queasily satisfying crunch factor. They wear their spine on their sleeve. There’s nothing but oozy goo within. And in the case of the Swallowtail that inner gunge harmonises beautifully with its predominant wing colour. I gaze at the passing mountains and forests and lakes through glistening smears the colour of the centre petals of a fat, brassy dandelion.

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Thank you to various readers who have sent in emails direct to me or commented on the blog with thoughts about getting writing published. It does seem to me that it is all about somehow getting a breakthrough, a first sympathetic reading. When you are in the throes of trying to get a book accepted by an agent or a publisher you become very sensitised to what does make it through the various systems.

The first and most nagging question is, surprise surprise, am I good enough to be published? After that comes a list of wry observations: some books that are accepted are pretty dire; once published, some authors seem to be able to experiment more creatively, whilst some seem to be able to get away with inferior stuff just because they are ‘in the system’; the current publishing trend is for books that pander to a media-driven hot issue, or books by c*l*br*t**s; most literary fiction is read by women and they mainly seem to want to read books by other women; economic recession means that there is a ‘no risk’ culture in publishing; small regional publishers hang on in various geographical areas and subject areas, but publishing as a whole has become centralised and corporate and geared to faces that fit an elite scene linked to creative writing courses in ‘approved’ institutions.

True or false?

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Compared to my journey in 2007, I haven’t yet hit on much live music. Plenty of good recorded music, but not enough of the live ‘n local stuff. I referred to the excellent Dan Bern gig in Vancouver in an earlier posting, but it’s been a dry few weeks since then.

Imagine, then, my delight to have spent an evening in a dark bar in Whitehorse enjoying a young Yukon musician called Ryan McNally. I had missed a rockabilly trio led by Ryan a week earlier, so made up for it by watching his jump blues band deliver a fine, fresh, take on great songs by BB King, T-Bone Walker, Joe Turner and others. Ryan is a talented young guitarist and singer, with a warm and easy energy. And he works with a powerhouse of a slap bass player. When I headed out for my house-sit home I noticed that the last slabby cornices of snow had avalanched off the topmost corries of the Seven Sisters peaks above Lewes Lake. I think it was the slap bass gut-thudding beat that did it.

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On the current driving marathon I have been very happily trundling through parts of Alberta, BC and Yukon that are at least somewhat familiar to me. One exception has been the road less-travelled that runs from Chetwynd up to the Alaska Highway, a short cut to avoid the industrial ugliness of Fort St. John and the functional pit-stop of Dawson Creek. This winding switchback is Highway 29, and it runs up the Peace River Valley, the site of various dinosaur footprints and bone caches.

Here the land is gently undulating, pastoral and very green. The scale is still wide and expansive, but the dominant forests are aspen and birch, with cottonwood and balsam poplar underbrush. There are some spruce and pine, but they have been affected by the climate-change loving beetle infestations. The Peace Valley is thus becoming a forerunner of what much of BC and Yukon will perhaps look like in years to come, with the broadleaf trees replacing the bug kill ‘evergreens’. The nearest to the bug magnet spruce are the graceful tamaracks, the only non-broadleaf trees to shed their needles in winter. The Peace River region makes you want to reach out and ruffle the heads of the dense waves of leafy crowns, like a warm, pale green pelt.

In the middle of the valley road is a small community called Hudson’s Hope. The cafe there does the wedgiest, tastiest cherry pie. I didn’t ask who Hudson was, or what he hoped for. It was probably gold rather than world peace, or spiritual enlightenment, or the publication of his deep and meaningful novel. Hudson should definitely hope that the proposed new, additional dam on the Peace River be defeated.

It is very apparent that, despite the vastness and the beauty, big tracts of northern BC and Yukon are under a variety of environmental threats. The biggest and ugliest blot on the west currently comes from the Alberta tar sands rape and pillage of great swathes of land just the other side of the Rockies. This is now the world’s second biggest oil source, but it comes with a heavy price in terms of ecological degradation and pipeline planning. You can see the short term economy booming and the long term despoliation spreading hand in a time-bomb symmetrical tandem.

It’s that thing about unquestioned so-called ‘growth’. We live on a finite planet, but we want infinite expansion of luxuries, never mind necessities. So in the UK we end up with industrial towers of wind turbines on our most precious uplands. Something has to give if we still want our Peace River Valleys. We’re implicated as individuals as well as a species. I offset, I re-cycle, I campaign…but my windshield still finds the Swallowtail, it’s all a matter of degree. 

Ted xox

From Wem Sweet Pea to Wild Sweet Pea

The roadsides to the west of Whitehorse are now avenues of hot pink-purple Wild Sweet Pea flowers (a.k.a. Sweet Vetch) often offset by pale stands of Yellow Locoweed. The Wild Sweet Pea looks at first sight like a vertically challenged ringer for the Fireweed blossoms that will take over the land and warm the cockles of the eyeball in a few weeks time.

My home in England is in a small-town-cum-large-village called Wem. Yes, just one syllable…Wem. When I was in Dawson City for the music festival 3 years ago I drew the legend “From Wem to Dawson City”, along with some staves and crotchets, in the dirt that had crusted onto my van. Some young teenagers came up to me at one point to admire the slogan…”Cool! Wem! West Edmonton Mall! We love that place!”

Anyway, Wem is the spiritual and botanical home of the cultivated Sweet Pea. A man named Henry Eckford developed the garden version in Wem over a century ago. Every year Wem hosts an international Sweet Pea show. People from all over the UK bring their cultured Sweet Pea flowers to exhibit, and some folks come from Europe and the USA, bearing fast-frozen blooms in state-of-the-art containers. I went to see the show one year – unless you have feasted on Yellow Locoweed you do not need to go twice. The flowers are insipid, papery, artificial looking hothouse creatures. They need to be seen in the open air in fat banks of trailing blossoms and bursting pods. The Yukon’s wild version is definitely a bruiser of a flower, too vulgar-mauve for a glass case or a Japanese lacquer vase.

However, there is also a rub to the rampant wildness that is the essence of this part of the world. The Wild Sweet Pea, or Vetch, can be toxic to humans in significant quantities. This is only an issue because Yukon and Alaska also has a flower called the Bear-Root, or Indian Potato, which is very similar to the Wild Sweet Pea and is an important food source for Grizzly Bears, and traditionally a rich carbohydrate for First Nations people. Confusion between the two was allegedly a key factor in the lonely death of Chris McCandless (known as Alexander Supertramp) whose story is told in the book and the film Into the Wild. The wilderness giveth and the wilderness taketh away – it is beyond neutrality as well as positivity and negativity.

Wem, by the way, is a place of rampant wildness only on Friday and Saturday nights after the many pubs turf their punters out into the twisty little mean streets.  I plan to remedy this by setting up a rival operation to the Sweet Pea Festival. It’s time that Yellow Locoweed, and its Yukon partner, the purple Showy Locoweed, were given their place in the limelight…an Eckford-style messiah for the so-called Crazyweed is just what Wem needs.

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Kluane (Kloo-ah-nee) is the vast area of mountains, river valleys and glaciers that dominates south-west Yukon and threatens to squeeze the complex Tongass jigsaw away from the rest of Alaska. Today I walked part of the way up one Kluane mountain with a group of Whitehorse people, a spectacular hike that was a mere smudge of smoke in a timeless atmosphere.

Kluane is a seemingly endless set of high ramparts that defends a seldom penetrated mass of even higher ranges and peaks. The snow on the front mountains has melted just enough for the remaining white fields and gullies to emphasise every seam and crease of the greeny-grey and pink rock pyramids. Canada’s highest summit (and the second highest on the continent), Mount Logan, lies deep in the hinterland. It is more extensive in bulk and square mileage than Everest and is one of the least climbed of the world’s major peaks. It can only be seen from a very few places, the alignments of ridges and serrated skylines of Kluane are so artfully arranged.

The whole place (if indeed its complexity and colossal beauty can be comprehended as a whole place) is like some independent nation of natural phenomena, from the grand to the minutely detailed. In 2007 I spent 5 days and 4 wakeful nights stravaiging round a fraction of Kluane, experiencing a whole gamut of thoughts and feelings from fear to electric elation. Going back today was a catch in the breath, a day-long moment of respectful excitement. If you go to one place in Canada, never mind Yukon, go to Kluane.

I should delete that sentence. I don’t like thinking in terms of hierarchies of wonder. I might even write something similar about the Tombstone Range, or the Northern Rockies, or any of the  great ranges of BC, or Valhalla National Park or Denali in Alaska, or the Brooks Range. So I had better delete it, hadn’t I?

No. It stays.

And spend at least a couple of nights deep in there.

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When writing about the ceremonial rattle-making in an earlier post I mentioned collecting stones for the rattle from a ridge quite close to a Bald Eagle nest. I went back the other day to see if the eggs the parents were sitting on had hatched. The nest now has a scrawny, downy-grey chick being carefully nurtured by the very attentive female and male birds. They are both very large eagles too. Their tenderness is amazing, the generous care and love of every action belying the constant shimmer of violent threat in their eyes.

I took several pictures (just a few are on www.flickr.com/photos/tedeames) but failed to snap the best action shot. At one point the chick pivoted a little onto its front and did a huge projectile defecation from its wizened little sphincter (eagles cause a tightening in that particular muscle in many living creatures so I don’t see why they can’t have one themselves). A real gobbit-jet of white emulsion came streaking out, clearing the edge of the broad nest. I know that eagles change nests every 3 years or so to avoid build-up of bacteria, but I didn’t realise that they subscribed so literally to the time-honoured Confucius-style law: never shit in your own back yard.

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I used the word ‘grey’ to describe the chick’s colouring. I was conscious a few posts ago, when trying to convey the colour of the pika, that the word ‘grey’ gets a bad press. Understandably, in that it has become synonymous with dullness and conformity. However, in nature, greys can be immensely subtle and eye-openingly beautiful.

Look no further than the Herdwick sheep that populate the Cumbrian fells. If you haven’t seen one, check out an image in a book or on-line at least. You’ll still have to make an imaginative leap. Herdwicks make grey the new coat of many nuanced shades.

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Tomorrow I head out of Yukon and down to Calgary. I will then be blogging about the journey back up to here through BC, and eventually on to Inuvik on the Beaufort Sea…with luck (something I do not believe in) and a following breeze (something I do believe in).

Whilst on the road I may be a little slower in responding to emails and comments, but will get back to all in time. Do pass on the blog address. Hopefully some news soon about the book for which I am now seeking a publisher.

I would like to thank all readers and participants in the UK and here in Canada, and special thanks to Jan and Lucie for the opportunity to house-sit in such a special place.

Ted

xox