Yukon Earl looks back

By EARL McRAE
Ottawa Sun

Columnist McRae reminisces about the greatest adventure of his life - his cross-country trek from the Yukon to Ottawa with the Dawson City Nuggets, who travelled here to play the Ottawa Senators Alumni in a rematch of an historic 1905 hockey series for the Stanley Cup
  Just when I thought I'd be getting some time off to rest my sore muscles and bones and catch up on missed sleep, Rick VanSickle, the editor-in-vanchief, asked me to write a long piece for today, what he sees as a kind of a post-vanmortem on my great excursion with the Dawson City Nuggets; any left over bits, pieces, thoughts, and memories I might have before we bid it all a final goodbye.
  There are so many, it's impossible to know where to start.
  What I will say right off the top is that the assignment was without question the greatest adventure of my life, a mixture of sheer exhilaration and sheer terror.
  People keep saying to me, "But it must have been so much fun."
  No.
  Fun is the wrong word. I was not there to have fun. It couldn't have been fun if I had wanted it to be. There were moments you could call fun, but for all of us, and especially me, it was work. Hard, fatiguing, frustrating, numbing work. The Nuggets did not have to worry about the nightmare of writing and getting columns back to my newspaper every day. I did. Squeezed by a deadline that, because of time zones, was always three or four hours shorter than normal. It was hell. When I told a Sun colleague it was lucky we were able to get even one column in the paper from the trip, it was no exaggeration.
[Photographs]
by Earl McRae and the Dawson City Nuggets
[Page 44-45] Clockwise from left: Yukon Earl McRae, centre, and some of the boys travel across Lake LaBarge. The Nuggets look in awe at Lord Stanley's Cup at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. Yukon Earl tries to file his story from the ferryboat by cell phone as American photographer Skip Heine looks on. Nugget Kevin Anderson loads up along the trail. Three of the Nuggets enjoy a morning breakfast in the crisp air on the shores of Lake LaBarge.
[Page 46] Above, the Nuggets gather for a group photo in Toronto, with the CN Tower looming in the background. Right, things could have gotten ugly on the trip as one of the Nuggets tries to chainsaw Yukon Earl McRae's neck. Far right, Nugget Dave Millar is well decked out in Yukon duds in a Vancouver hotel lobby.
[Page 47] Left, Diamond Tooth Gertie gets the Nuggets to kick up their heels, Above, Willie Gordon and Diamond Tooth Gertie entertain fellow passengers on the Nuggets Special. Right, the Nuggets struggle to get snowmobiles up an icy hill.
  I mentioned moments of fun. Those came on the final two legs of the journey, the ferryboat and train when I could shed my restrictive clothing and warmth entered my body. The hell part was the first leg, the nine days by snowmobile across the glaciered mountains of the Yukon with their terrifyingly narrow passes, switchback, ice-rutted trails, and overflows. Never having driven a snowmobile before, and not one pulling hundreds of pounds of equipment in a skimmer, nor for six and seven hours non-stop with the sickening smell of oil and gas in your nostrils, the ceaseless and grinding roar of the engine in your ears, the razor-edged wind in your face, the constant battling to control the shimmying machine over the sharp twists and turns and steep icy hills and deep, sudden drops, it was a mental and physical punishment I've never known before.
  "Oh, c'mon, you had fun," they insist.
  To which I reply: "Try it sometime."
  Try struggling off a snowmobile at the end of the day to help carve a camp out of the wilderness when the temperature is 40 degrees below zero, and your hands are numb and swollen from gripping the handlebars and throttle, and your entire body is in agonizing pain and has shut down from the cold, and the snow is two feet deep, and the head-to-toe Arctic survival clothing you're wearing weighs, it seems, 500 lbs., and you can barely move or think; when all you want to do is collapse on your face in the snow and sleep or die, but you can't, you have to go on, somehow, some way, so you stagger through, you fall into your sleeping bag, too tired and cold to remove your two pair of socks, your pants, your turtle neck, your polar-fleece jacket, your polar-fleece hat, and you lie awake and shiver most of the night, your body suffering exhaustion shock.
  Writing the column? My biggest nightmare. How do you write a column in the mountains when you don't have a word processor with you because there is nowhere to plug in a word processor, the cold would kill the batteries, there are no phones, no cellular service. I was given a satellite phone to lug with me, but it was useless from Day 1 because the high mountains blocked the signal from the satellite over the equator.
  That's why I missed one day of writing. That's why, when I was able to get to a pay phone in the two small towns we hit, I sometimes had to phone in two columns to run on the days I'd be out of communication. Try writing a column when there is simply no time or place to write a column, and no desire in the hostile cold; try writing a column with a pen or pencil in longhand in a notebook when your fingers can't grip the pen or pencil, and it's so cold the ink freezes and won't write and, to my surprise, pencil lead, too.
  Try phoning in a column from a pay phone on the side of a shack when you can barely read your notes, hold the notebook, hear the editor at the other end, or move your lips because of the bitter cold; and you're holding up the players who are shouting to hurry, we're behind schedule, we have to go; and the phone connection suddenly goes dead in the middle of your dictation, and you plead for a few more minutes, and you phone back, and you shout, back up, start again, shout, curse, and wish to hell you'd never undertaken this insanity. Try doing your job when the only thing on your mind is survival.
  It was the same on the ferryboat and train. I had my word processor again, but there were no phones on the boat or train. Twice the boat docked along the Alaskan coast, and I'd jump off, grab a taxi 12 to 16 km into town to the newspaper office, hook up my computer, send in the column, invariably encountering time-delaying communication gremlins, and tear back to the boat, once almost missing it.
  The boat didn't always dock, and the train didn't always stop to permit me to find a phone. Panic. The satellite phone, for some reason, still wouldn't work from the boat or train so that I could dictate off my computer screen. I had to borrow a cell phone from a passenger on the boat, lying on my stomach on the top deck with the dim, battery-dying computer screen balanced before my face, screaming in the wind to an editor in Ottawa who could barely hear me; the phone going dead every few minutes.
  When the train stopped for half an hour in Edmonton, the paper arranged for a photographer from the Edmonton Sun to meet me with a cell phone so I could dictate from inside my compartment. But, I was out of the necessary cell phone range until half a day past Winnipeg, and even then had to shout and holler over a static-filled line, numerable disconnections.
  I took a camera along to shoot pictures, and that was another agony. The parts would seize up in the unbearable cold, or the batteries would die, until I learned to stuff the camera deep inside my clothing next to my bare chest. Getting the rolls of film back to Ottawa was a military operation; media relations operative

[Photographs] by Earl McRae and the Dawson City Nuggets
[Page 44-45] Clockwise from left: Yukon Earl McRae, centre, and some of the boys travel across Lake LaBarge. The Nuggets look in awe at Lord Stanley's Cup at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. Yukon Earl tries to file his story from the ferryboat by cell phone as American photographer Skip Heine looks on. Nugget Kevin Anderson loads up along the trail. Three of the Nuggets enjoy a morning breakfast in the crisp air on the shores of Lake LaBarge.
[Page 46] Above, the Nuggets gather for a group photo in Toronto, with the CN Tower looming in the background. Right, things could have gotten ugly on the trip as one of the Nuggets tries to chainsaw Yukon Earl McRae's neck. Far right, Nugget Dave Millar is well decked out in Yukon duds in a Vancouver hotel lobby.
[Page 47] Left, Diamond Tooth Gertie gets the Nuggets to kick up their heels, Above, Willie Gordon and Diamond Tooth Gertie entertain fellow passengers on the Nuggets Special. Right, the Nuggets struggle to get snowmobiles up an icy hill.

Continued on next page

'Memories piled upon memories'

Jim Nicol meeting me in Whitehorse and then Vancouver and racing the film to the airport for transportation to Ottawa in diplomatic pouches.
  Fun? Oh, yeah, it was fun. Depends on your definition of fun. There were some funny moments. Like the time I was heading with my toilet roll into the scary woods, afflicted with grizzly phobia, found what I thought was a private spot, was about to drop my pants, when I heard a sing-song voice call from nearby bushes: "I SEE-EE-EE yooo!" To say I nearly leapt out of my pants and hit the Hale-Bopp comet in the sky above is an understatement.
  It was Agata Franczak, one of the female Rangers, doing what I was there to do. I thank her for sparing me gawd-awful embarrassment; but I don't thank her for delaying what I so desperately had to do for one more day.
  I remember, too, the morning I spent 10 minutes yanking on the cord trying to get my snowmobile started. "The %$#@& won't start," I cursed. "Try turning on the ignition switch," said John Flynn. "John," I said, "promise me you will never tell this to anybody."
  And the time on the boat we were in bald-eagle country. I was standing on the deck with Pat Hogan. "Have you ever seen a bald eagle?" he asked. "Of course," I said, insulted. "Lots of times." Just then, a bald eagle swooped from the sunlit sky and skimmed over the water. "Hey, there's one now!" I shouted. "No," said Hogan, "it's a seagull." It was a seagull. "Pat," I said, "promise me you will never tell this to anybody."
  The small incidents that, in themselves, don't seem the things of enduring memories, but, for some reason, are. Like the grey afternoon we stopped for a short break and hot rum in the middle of frozen, bleak, wind-swept Lake LaBarge, and Kevin Anderson turned to Don Reddick, a writer from Boston who had written a novel on the original Dawson City Nuggets, and said looking down at the ice: "Just think, Don -- you're only three feet from instant death." And 20 feet away: Dark, open water.
  The time I was sitting in the reading room of the boat off Alaska feeling a million miles from home and a young woman came up to me and said: "Are you Earl McRae?" How could she possibly know me? "My dad has been following your column back home and he told me if I bumped into you to say hello. I said 'Dad, fat chance, the Yukon's a big place.' " Her name was Ann Chapman, a nurse from Ottawa working in Whitehorse and who was taking her visiting brother on an ocean cruise.
  Pelly Crossing, a building holding the communal showers, and the indescribable luxury of hot water cascading over me after five freezing days and nights in the same clothes. Seeing my face in a mirror for the first time in five days and nights and being shocked at the white in my beard and the puffy, blue pouches beneath my eyes the size of walnuts. Saying a silent prayer of thanks every day for my smallest piece of equipment, but the most important; my $85 side-sealed polar sunglasses without which I'd have suffered snow blindness.
  The afternoon our path was blocked by a deep overflow of water, the only way around it was an ominous glacier so slick and dangerous that we had to unhook the dogs from their sleds and pull the slipping and sliding animals slowly and delicately across it to safety; and the horrible sound of the ice cracking beneath as we gunned our skittering machines across.
  The bonding, boys-will-be-boys humor, born of the punishing ordeal, and totally appropriate under the circumstances, Me: "I'm so (bleeping) sore, I can't sit down." Wes Peterson to Doc Parsons: "Probably his prostate." Kevin Anderson: "Good ol' Doc -- the only guy on the team who can get away with sticking his finger up somebody's butt."
  Me again during a coffee break high in the mountains: "I can't undo my Thermos top; it's frozen." Anderson: "You have to take out your (you know what) and pee on it." Dave Millar: "Won't work. It's so friggin' cold, you reach in and can't find your (you know what)." True. I didn't rediscover my (you know what) until the hot shower in Pelly Crossing.
  The dim, cozy, noisy bar when we finally reached Whitehorse, and Cowboy Larry Smith and his stories from his rodeo days: "Met Willie Nelson in Corpus Christi. Patsy Cline's big hit song Crazy? Willie wrote it. Had it stuffed in his shavin' kit for years. One day he needed money to date a girl. Took the song to a music broker in Nashville. Guy gave him $500 for it. Got to Patsy and the rest is history. Willie never got a cent of royalties. He didn't care. He got the girl."
  And: "Ridin' a bull in Texas. Got thrown. Busted two ribs. Wanted to keep ridin', but they wouldn't let me. Said take that car and get to the hospital. A blue and white '56 Ford. Automatic transmission. Wouldn't go forward. Only reverse. Jumped in and drove that sucker 60 miles an hour backwards 10 miles to the hospital."
  Me: "Cowboy, what caused that big fight among your dogs in the middle of the night?" Cowboy: "That is the stupidest question I've ever heard. Dogs fight for the same reason humans fight. How the hell do I know, I'm not a dog. Maybe a dog peed on another dog's leg. If somebody right now decided to pee on your leg, what would you do?" Me: "Fight." Cowboy: "So stop askin' dumb questions."
  The nights on the boat, snuggled in my bed in my pitch black stateroom, the boat gently swaying, lulling me to sleep; the train rocking rhythmically through the black dead of night and lying in my bed and looking out at the dark, distant mountains and forests flashing endlessly by my window.
  But, would I want to do it all again?
  No. Am I glad I did? Yes. Because I survived. Dorothy Parker, the late, great writer once said: "I hate writing, but I love having written." That says it. There are so many memories piled upon memories, that it's still mostly a blur. It was often tough, it was often torture, but even those times, strangely, become precious memories.
  There were many fine times, too. The frigid nights around the campfires. The humor, the jokes, the incredible camaraderie. The smell of the coffee, and sizzling bacon, and beef stews. The gloriously clear night skies awash with more stars and constellations than I ever knew existed. The dancing, shimmering Northern Lights.
  And, finally, three memories that have captured me most of all: One, the eternal deep, dead silence; utterly profound, haunting, and spiritual; staggering in its dimension; the silence Robert Service talked about and that you can never know unless you go to the Yukon, a place of breathtaking beauty.
  The second, the boat late one night; hearing the distant, melancholy strains of a bagpipe; following the sound to the top deck where stood all alone, playing into the wind, a young carpenter from Ketchikan, Alaska named Ken MacRae. A crowd soon gathered, including fiddler Willie Gordon, and Willie asked the piper if he could play Amazing Grace "for me and in memory of my father because it was his favorite song." As the piper played, Willie stood off to the side by himself, weeping softly, tears running down his cheeks. "It's not a sad song for me," Willie told me later. "It's a song of hope. I've been there. I've been that poor wretch."
  The third, walking back to my hotel in Dawson City late one night, the snow-packed streets empty and silent, the windows dark and shuttered, and seeing only the dogs, not stray dogs, but dogs that have homes, trotting alone or in pairs along the streets, in and out of the moon-lit shadows, completely free and unattended.
  And I remembered my childhood and the small, sleepy village where the dogs roamed freely, and on that night in that magical place, I felt I was in a Sherwood Anderson short story of a time and a town long ago and far away, all so beautiful, so innocent, and I knew then and I knew there that one day the spell of the Yukon would bring me back.