Call of the Mild: A Writer's Sojourn in Dawson City, Part II
Pierre Berton House, Dawson City, Yukon, December 8, 2013
Here's my last chill-packed installment of "The October-December Romance Between Tall-But-Sensitive-White-Wine-Drinking-White-Male-Writer and the Inscrutable Great White North."
Subtitle: The Primal Canadian Experience, Writ Large.
In the last episode, I neglected to report a near-death experience I shared with Brother Michael in late October (no bears involved):
Dan, a volunteer tender of the needs of Berton House scribes (chauffeur service to and from the airport, local sightseeing tours, etc), offers to drive us up the fabled "Midnight Dome", a 3,000 foot peak overlooking Dawson. (See video at the end of this email).
Half way up the winding dirt road, dusted in light snow, we encounter a barrier: "Road Closed." Undeterred, Dan squeezes through; no Yukoner worth his salt backs down from Authority. Forward momentum carries us to the top, but the road is now 80% sheer ice.
We enjoy the awesome vista (fully deserving of that promiscuous word), and snap our pix. We read a panel explaining that every June 21 since 1899, the townsfolk have assembled on the Dome to revel into the night that never comes. Wonderful daguerrotypes of corsetted Victorian dames partying like it's 1899, thick clouds of psychotic mosquitoes dive-bombing veiled faces, gazes fixed on the Midnight Sun, rotating round the summer-solsticed horizon without bothering to set.
As we return to the car, Dan — hereafter and forever known as Dangerous Dan -- slips on the ice and crashes onto his side. I am sure he has broken his hip, but he assures us he's OK. Back in the car, inching down the steep hill, we share a quiet, collective "oh-oh." Then a much louder "whooooooaaaaa….!"
Suddenly I feel like a member of the Jamaican luge team, except there are no guardrails on either side, only a drop into the primeval forest. Braking makes it worse, swinging us towards the edge. I envision trunks of black spruce impaling the windshield. Or worse.
We finally skid to a stop. Mike and I scramble out, trying to guide Driver Dan to less treacherous ruts in the road. Suddenly he hits another ice patch and the car slides straight down the slope towards a sharp, unforgiving curve, inertia winning, Dan losing. I close my eyes, only to see a blazing headline in the Yukon News: "Elitist Toronto Writer Kills A Nice, Kind Man Who Was Only Trying To Help."
Miraculously, the car glides to a standstill, in concert with my heartbeat. Dan is ghost white, hands still welded to the steering wheel, eyes locked in a thousand mile stare.
"Are you OK?"
"Yes……...no."
Risking three way cardiac infarction, we micro-manage the remainder of a normally benign ten minute drive at a glacial pace, landing safely back in Dodge nearly an hour later. I cross myself, and I'm not even Catholic — at least not since the Battle of the Boyne.
A story to tell my grandchildren, if I had any.
###
The arts scene thrives apace. I've enjoyed assorted travelling troubadours — C.R. Avery, a porkpie-hatted, Tom Waits-like, ivory-tinkling "hobo-erotic hip hopper", master of mouth organ and raunchy boho poems; Sarah MacDougall, a Swedish-born beauty emanating a soulful Melanie/Buffey St. Marie vibe; and Miss Quincy, a sassy, tattooed, Montreal rock n' roller. All worth their weight in gold, or at least the price of admission, but it was uber-talented songstress, Martha Wainwright, brother of Rufus and daughter of the late great Kate McGarrigle, performing before an intimate crowd of 80, who not only iced the cake, but took it. I sat front and centre, five feet away from her, basking in the dazzling mix of folk, punk, Edith Piaf, comedic shtik, you name it. Charisma to burn, enhanced by the fact she's sprouting a baby bump under her frayed black tights.
Two nights later, I took in a one man play, "Broken", by Brian Fidler. It's about the author’s childhood relationship with his grandfather, fated to succumb to Alzheimer's; the stage was set with real-life props — his grandfather's easy chair, camera and tripod, collection of dusty slides, some projected on a screen. Strange, given my last book was about my search for my own grandfather, not to mention my discovery of his collection of dusty slides, which in my own public talks I have projected onto a screen.
Yet again, the Uncanny slips under the front door of James FitzGerald's life. But wait, there's more.
Like the Wainwright concert, I parked myself front and centre. Midway through the play, Fidler thrust two pages of script into my hands. Would I mind performing the part of his grandfather while he plays himself?
Why the hell not? No harder than falling off a frozen mountain.
I will not re-create the dialogue, except to say it ended with a handshake as I (the grandfather) exact a promise from him (my grandson) that if I am ever incapacitated, he will rescue me from the hospital.
After the play, back to "reality", I gave Fidler my card and bid him read "What Disturbs Our Blood."
The next day, I received an email from a woman who is compiling a book of unusual words used in a single sentence, written by assorted Canadian writers from Atwood to Znaimer. It's called "A Rewording Life", all proceeds donated to — what else? — Alzheimer's research.
So, what word did she assign to me?
KISMET
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and no, I'm not making this up.
I befriended the two artists-in-residence, Zach Gough, 27, born in Kitchener but living in Oregon, and Sarah Pupo, 30, born in High Park but living in Montreal. Keeping my coincidence portfolio alive and well, I learned that Sarah's father, Sam, taught at the same school as my partner Katy for decades. A few years ago, I met him at Katy's retirement party. So it goes.
Zach interviewed me on the local radio station for a fun-filled hour of free-association, touching on topics like "the art of listening." (And if only 27 people were listening, I was still grateful). Zach is the kind of guy who hitch-hikes down the Oregon coast for the express purpose of interviewing the people who pick him up. He invented a board game called "Outsider Art/Insider Trading" which satirizes both capitalists and the art world. He gave a wonderful lecture at KIAC (Klondike Institute of Art and Culture) envisioning "The Art Rush of 2015" when 30,000 artists descend on Dawson, driving the town down the fast track to gentrification, a la Queen Street West.
Since 2001, over 150 international artists-in-residence have lived in Macaulay House, a creaky Victorian pad just down the street. My friend Margaux Williamson, a former AGO artist-in-rez, stayed there last year; when Sarah told me that one of the bedrooms is haunted, I emailed Margaux to confirm or deny. Her response: "TOTALLY HAUNTED!"
A gold miner turned wood-working artist, Greg Hakonson was the prime mover behind the artsification of Dawson. In the 1990s, the place was moribund, down to a population of 800. After the Berton House residency was created in 1996, Hakonson and others founded KIAC in 2000, then the School of Visual Art (SOVA) in 2006. In concert with a resurgence in gold mining, these three institutions jump-started a nationally and internationally-flavoured arts scene and, as the city fathers (and mothers) had hoped and planned, boosted the population and the local economy.
There's even an impeccably renovated Gilded Age theatre, the Palace Grand, that lives up to its name (the impresario Alexander Pantages built his first theatre in Dawson during the gold rush). Booming in summer (60,000 tourists, largely American, German and Japanese), Dawson now teems with music, film and visual arts festivals and claims the highest per capita concentration of art students and artists anywhere. The transient summer workers now face a housing crisis; they have to camp or squat wherever they can. The smart business people score their bundles of cash from May to September, then head to Club Med.
Greg Hakonson's father, Bill, was a local legend, a larger-than-life (and cheater-on-wife) entrepreneur/gambler who famously won a cab company in a card game (not the Dawson cab company, which has exactly one car). Bill founded the local nine holed Top of The World Golf Club, the northernmost in the world; last summer the course had be shut down for a while after a bear ate a moose on the seventh hole. When Bill died in 2011, his son prepared a Viking funeral on the Yukon River, building a wooden boat to carry the remains and shooting a flaming arrow from the shore to set it alight. It was filmed by Troy Suzuki, son of uber-evironmentalist David Suzuki, who has lived here for 20 years. Like I say, most people here are from somewhere else — and escaping somewhere, or someone, else.
In my last report, I mentioned that when I first arrived, I dreamt that I was digging a subway system in Dawson. (It must be in my DNA: in 1954, when I was three and a half, my mother took me on an opening day ride of the Toronto subway, Eglinton to Union stations, nose pressed to the glass in the lead car). Well, life imitates art, or dreams, or vice-versa. I just learned that a few years ago, an Austrian artist, Martin Kippenberger, dug a subway entrance and steps on a Dawson street as an art installation, complete with imaginary underground connections to similar installations in subway-less cities like L.A. As his fellow Austrian Sigmund Freud once said: "Wherever I go, the poets have been there before me." Alas, Kippenberger drank himself into a dark hole known as an early grave. Then an art gallery bought his Dawson installation and moved it to Seattle.
Speaking of subterranean dreams, back in 1978, construction workers accidentally discovered 500 early 20th century Hollywood silent films buried near the casino, Diamond Tooth Gerties. On the Nickleodeon circuit, Dawson was the end of the line, so the films piled up because it was too expensive to ship them back to the states. Thrown into a landfill site, the films were well preserved by the permafrost, but the nitrate stock made them highly flammable. Simply drop a cannister, and Mary Pickford would burst into flames. They had to be transferred out by a special military plane, eventually landing up in Ottawa and the Library of Congress.
Like I say, I ain't making this stuff up.
Then there is the story of Wade Simon, long-time owner of Klondike Kate's Restaurant . One day the RCMP arrived to arrest him on 13 year old charges of assault and robbery, which shocked the town because Wade was a sweetheart guy, exemplary citizen, pillar of the community, etc etc. Living under an alias, he had escaped the tentacles of his Montreal gang and landed in Dawson to re-invent himself, as so many do. The judge was so moved and impressed by the positive character witnesses and the example of his self-rehabilitation that he was acquitted, and today he still runs Klondike Kate's, but now under his real name, Philippe Lemarche. But everyone still calls him Wade.
And then there is the guy who has plastered the walls of his house, inside and out, with thousands of empty beer bottles. Presumably he got plastered in the process. A million stories in the land of fire and ice, reflecting the inner extremist in us all. I love it here! I hate it here! It's heaven! It's hell! I want to stay! I want to go!
###
I hung out a lot with the young artists Zach and Sarah and grew very fond of them. (Artists-in-rez stay only one month and they generally envy my three month gig). One day we visited the Camera Obscura hut on the riverbank where light pours through a small hole in the wall and projects an inverted image of the streetscape into a darkened room. Never could wrap my head around physics, as my high school marks attest.
Then we toured the First Nations cultural centre, meeting Trish, the great-great granddaughter of the 1890s chief of the Tr'ondek Hwech'in. Chief Isaac was a visionary who moved the tribe out of the path of 30,000 rapacious gold-rushers, relocating three miles downriver. Had they fully integrated with the whites, no doubt they would have been slowly exterminated.
Trish emanates that sly, soulful, ironic edge of the historically oppressed, although she said that her tribe is less plagued by substance abuse than most, and generally thriving; they were the first to successfully negotiate an aboriginal land claim, with the Trudeau feds, back in 1973. The Tr'ondek were nomadic, roaming the Yukon and Alaska for the past 10,000 years, carrying dome-like tents made of animal skins as they hunted caribou and salmon. Every summer they camped at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers — about a mile from Berton House — and drove stakes into the riverbed to build salmon weirs. "Tro" means hammer, driving the stakes with rocks; "ndeck" means river; "Hwech'in" means people. Whites mispronounced Tr'ondek, hence the origin of "Klondike."
During the winter, they sat in their tents by the fire and told stories -- oral history! — but I'm guessing no one has read "Old Boys." The caribou gave them everything they needed -- beside meat for food, the bones, antlers, hides, and sinew provided tools, clothes, and shelter. Those yellow pebbles in the riverbed? Useless. They respect nature rather than exploit it— what a concept.
At the moment, the Tr'ondek are allowed to hunt caribou and I'm not, which seems fair. I'm told they (the Tr'ondek, not the caribou) rarely show up to the art shows because the KIAC building — "The Odd Gallery" -- occupies the former Oddfellows Hall, one of those 19th century "fraternal" orders that did a less than stellar job of reining in their racism. Although, of course, it's probably more complicated than that. Alas, the First Nations kids are as branded by 21st century consumer culture as the rest of us: Chicago Black Hawks caps, worn hiply askew; TV usurping the fireplace; tweets drowning out the real birds.
That said, the town's various sub-cultures seem harmonious. All communities have a dark side — struggles to keep kids off drugs, etc. – but outside the extreme climate, it's a generally safe and tight-knit place, bolstered by the pervasive volunteerism, looking out for the other guy so he will look out for you. Over 300 people — a quarter of the population -- showed up for a fundraising dinner for the victims of the Philippino typhoon; it took two hours to serve everybody. The last murder was seven years ago when "Two By Four Bob" stormed into Diamond Tooth Gerties and lived up to his name. I'm told that if it wasn't for the drinking, the RCMP would have nothing to do. Gossip is endemic, as in all small towns; but who cares when you've written a family memoir and you've got nothing to hide? Except maybe that I've always liked Yoko Ono.
###
And now, a word about cold.
We hit the minus 44 C mark in mid-November; that night, Dawson was broadcast as the coldest place on the planet, still six weeks short of actual winter. When I learned that it was 15 above in Toronto, I sulked like a three year old. 60 degrees of separation!
I was told "no big deal" — last year they hit minus 50 in October. I should be grateful? As you know, on the thermometer, Farenheit & Celsius meet at the minus 40 mark -- otherwise know as F/C — Fucking Cold. The Dawson record is minus 55 — the critical point at which thrown boiling water vapourizes before hitting the ground, and the point at which James boards the first available raven back to tropical High Park.
The air is as arid as Arizona. The night the humidifier broke, I woke up feeling like my mouth was stuffed with saltines. The mercurial climate may explain the assorted creaks and pops and groans in the walls of Berton House; it's either that, or Pierre's ghost. Then, during the CFL playoffs, the pipes seized up, but happily the plumber was quick to the rescue. If Dawson City were a Hollywood film, it would be "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" -- Warren Beatty freezing to death in a snowbank as he pines for Julie Christie, the brothel-keeper, drifting into opium-laced oblivion.
Soooo, no choice but to get All Canada Goosed Up — underwear under long johns under sweat pants under corduroys, two shirts and sweater, down-lined coat, floppy-eared hat of coyote fur, two scarves, two pairs of wool socks, jumbo gumbo boots, mega-mitts, the works. No one bothers to spray you with green paint for fur-bearing political incorrectness, although with the scarf wrapped over my face, I look All Burqa-ed Up. Winter keeps us warm.
The 15 minute penguin-waddle downtown to the Bonanza General Store (my weekly salmon run, tinned variety) is beyond brisk — it's a risk. Crunch, crunch, crunch, dodging the snarling three-legged wonder dog, then side-stepping the sudden, swerving pick-up truck, block heater plug hanging from the grill like a belly button cord. It's a demented, bone-dry, lung-seizing, glasses-fogging, predatory brand of cold that first gnaws on the extremities — toes, nose, knees, keys — then tears into the white meat. Even a sneeze crystalizes before your eyes. Then there's something called ice fog; there's a local beer named after it, designed to help us forget all about it. And I must add there's nothing quite like the sight of a flock of snow-suited toddlers, flashlights strapped to their toqued foreheads, charging down the boardwalk in the dark (10am), impersonating munchkin gold miners (minors?).
Two days after the minus 44 experience, we fell back down to a balmy minus 15 and suddenly I felt like doffing my duds and dancing on the Dome. Lugging heavy layers of clothes around induces fatigue (not to mention a voracious appetite) and for a while my circadian rhythm section was a tad out of synch. But nowadays I sleep — and dream — like a bear.
###
For much of Novembrrrr, I overdosed on 50th anniversary JFK docs, hastily revising my opinions of my blood kin. Jesus, maybe Jack and Bobby really did bump off Marilyn. Sainted public servants? Ruthless Irish mobsters? Both? Did Oswald, the angry fatherless outsider, act alone? Yes! No! Wait — nobody ever acts alone!
And yes, the endless Ford Follies penetrated Berton House like a bad dream. No place on the planet is safe. My brother should join the pundit class -- he lives in Ford's ward -- dubbing him "Our Etobicoke-head." I bet you all the farms in Cuba that all these psychotic shenanigans will NOT cost Ford the next election. At some level, everyone secretly loves the shame-resistant. (Black, Eagleson, Drabinski, Mulroney, come on down! Show us your DisOrders of Canada!)
As you might expect, there's a serious sports culture here – curling, hockey, x-country skiing, etc. The legend of the Dawson City Nuggets, famously challenging the Ottawa Silver Seven for the 1905 Stanley Cup and losing by a two-game score of 32-4, lives on with proud perversity. Something in there about the love of extremes, I suspect, even when it's the losing end.
I played snooker on one of those vintage, heavy-duty oak tables, hauled in pieces over the mountains on horseback in Klondike days. I curled for a Christmas turkey, and lost. I think it was 32-4. I play weekly ping pong with Laurie, a sweet-tempered, wheelchair-bound woman who has competed in the Pan American Disabled Games in South America. One game I got so over-heated returning her nasty serves that I knocked a clock off the wall, smashing it to pieces, and setting up yet another of my glib remarks: "I'm a writer. That's what I do — stop time!"
Twenty five years ago, Laurie was severely injured in a car crash en route to an engagement party with Dan, her fiance. Her legs were broken so badly she spent a year in hospital. She was told she would never walk again, but she did, and does, with pain; the wheelchair is only for ping pong and running errands in town. When she got out of hospital, Dan married her.
Dan and Laurie are the kind of people impossible not to like. Lovely combo of wicked wit and 24 carat kindness. Among other things, Dan runs the various film festivals -- I helped judge the most recent one — and we spend much of our time together acting out the screenplays of our hero Stanley Kubrick. You gotta love a guy who has mounted on his living room wall a replica of the HAL 9000 super-computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey", complete with the all-seeing red eye and the looped, monotoned voice of Douglas Rain: "Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?"
I'm so glad I experienced the cosmic and unforgettable Yukon wilderness back in October because the winter really does drive you indoors. Most of the bars close, although the gloriously seedy Pit -- "Dare to drink where your parents did!" -- drives on with its "Onesie Wednesdays" promotion (reduced prices if you sport one of those one-piece long john/union suits with the trap door ass flap). If you're smart, you'll wear at least two Onesies.
So, over the winter months, unless you are a mad trapper, rotating, pot luck house parties are de rigueur. (Needless to say, the TV news image of the pot-smoking mountie triggered widespread high fives up here). I am hosting a farewell soiree on Friday the 13th, just days before I leave, so I may be asking for trouble.
I know its sounds like all I do is socialize, but I've actually put a healthy dint in my new book, "Dreaming Sally." When I write, I turn on a local TV channel to listen to its continuous flow of boomer rock classics, an apt soundtrack to accompany my keyboard-tapping. Image-wise, Channel 7 is nothing more than a stationary camera, affixed atop the Midnight Dome, that overlooks the town 24/7. At night, the houses glow like embers in a fireplace; whenever a party wilts (which is rare), someone flicks the house lights on and off and the rest of us rush outside to see ourselves on Channel 7.
###
On December 2, I gave my standard "What Disturbs Our Blood" talk and slide show at the Robert Service Library to an audience of 25, and it was broadcast live on the radio. For those of you who have not heard my talk, it's a light, 45 minute romp through family addiction, madness and suicide.
During the Q & A, yet another colourful character with the actual name of Eldo Enns, an ex-Mennonite hippie from Saskatchewan now teaching math at the local branch of Yukon College, stood up and in his inimitable, deadpan way said:
"James, I wish you had told your story in the spring when it's light outside."
The previous night at KIAC, we had watched "Gasland", a stunningly depressing doc about the planet being terminally fracked up, over, under, sideways and down by cruel, stupid and greedy uber-capitalists. Eldo is from a long line of dour Mennonite preachers on both sides of his family — hence his escape to Dawson — and I guess the film, together with my book, sent him to a dark place.
As the talk ended, I thanked everyone for being so kind and generous, indeed treating me like family.
"With a family like yours," cracked Eldo, "that's not exactly a compliment!"
A crowd of us then headed over for drinks at the Downtown Hotel. As we were leaving, I bumped into George, a member of our writers’ group. He had wickedly conned his girlfriend into drinking the legendary sourtoe cocktail, a blackened, frostbitten miner's toe kept in a bottle of salt mixed with Yukon Jack. Over 30,000 people have succumbed to the ritual — to join the club, your lips must touch the toe -- and I'm not one of them. She seemed dazed, or poisoned, by the experience and started staring at my coyote-furred hat as if it were the Aurora Borealis. I think I convinced her that I did not skin the coyote myself, but I'm not sure.
Falling asleep that night, I was feeling vaguely guilty. I couldn't stop thinking of a First Nations guy, Charlie Sheppard, an aspiring writer in his 40s who hangs out with the virtually all-white arts crowd. I had met him a couple of times at various events, but never really spoken with him, so I was pleased he showed up at my library talk. But before the end of the talk, he suddenly stood up and left, the only one to do so, which was unsettling. At one point I was talking about how we all know about the high rates of suicide and addiction among First Nations, but the abnormally high rates among the white elites, particularly, doctors and psychiatrists, remains a taboo subject. I wondered if I had somehow offended him.
At a house party two nights later, I got my answer. Charles was standing alone in the kitchen in his quiet, self-contained way. I said hi, but he made no effort to engage. I’m thinking: I’m getting the cold shoulder. Ten minutes later, he sat down beside me and said:
"I'm sorry I left your talk, but I found it very upsetting. There's suicide in my family."
Out comes his story: Saskatchewan-born, the second youngest of 12 siblings, his parents were survivors of the residential school system. He was ex-communicated at age five for calling his priest a fag (not knowing, of course, what the word meant), and became a Lutheran; years later the priest was convicted for sexual abuse. When Charles was seven, his beloved eldest brother, seemingly happy and popular, suicided without warning at age 24.
Because he was an extremely precocious kid -- Charles could read and write at age three -- his parents sent him to a Regina public school in hopes he'd receive a "good" education. The only non-white, he was beaten up, persecuted, the works. The system couldn’t handle a “bright Indian” (and the only Indian) so they falsified his birth certificate to make him older and fit "the norm." An emotional and spiritual white-out, as it were.
Charles loves all things Irish, which naturally endeared me to him even more. He's got two university degrees and written two unpublished books, which I would wager are brilliant; James Joyce tops his assorted literary passions. He is planning a trip to Ireland where he will ride a horse round the island in his full First Nations regalia.
And yes, he wants to buy my book.
Up here, even my waking life is dream-like.
###
My 10 week residency will end in 10 days, so I'm savouring the time — and daylight -- I have left. We're down to five hours of light, tapering down fast to the four hour trough on December 21, then climbing back up just as fast to the June apex. "The Spell of the Yukon" will break, but I expect only when I'm home will the full grandeur, beauty and strangeness of it all hit home.
The Yukon River is still not fully frozen, which is odd given we've had weeks of cold ranging from minus 20 to minus 40. The Yukon is the third largest river in North America and its current races at a mean clip (the native word Yukon means "greatest”). Only one year in recorded history did the river fail to freeze, and this may be the second. Normally, around now, the Territory builds an ice bridge to join the Dawson ferry dock road to the small communities on the other side and the highway to Alaska. They flood the surface to keep it smooth and clear the snow for the transport trucks to cross over; I am hoping to walk across to see the village of West Dawson before I leave, but it might be dodgy.
I'm told that Dawson is downright effete compared to West Dawson where the true wildmen survive in biblical conditions. "Caveman Bill", for example, literally lives in a cave on the riverbank, sustained by a small generator. The standard Dawson joke goes: "What's the difference between jail and West Dawson? Jail has running water and electricity."
Yesterday, Dawson's brand new six bed hospital hosted an open house. I swear, a man could live off the bowls of punch and plates of cold cuts served at the endless string of shindigs. Strangely, the hospital is not a true hospital, to the chagrin of the locals: it does not have either obstetric or palliative care units, so you must make the trek to Whitehorse for the full monty. So what they say is true (cue Rod Serling): In Dawson City, no one is born and no one dies.
###
Pierre Berton's vision has worked brilliantly, for me at least. The global village of Dawson City is a perfect place for a writer to relax, chill out (literally), get inspired and energized, work and play in equal measure, hang with some fine people, then steal back home with a touch of aboriginality. If you didn't feel Canadian before, you do now. I've seen and done as much as I possibly could, except, alas, the Aurora has eluded me, although there's still an outside chance. And at the risk of sounding mushy, I'm sorry I'll miss the upcoming Yukon Quest dog sled races. (One last Dawson factoid: 1,300 people, 2,000 dogs).
I'm now primed to wrestle my book to the ground back in the Big Smoke, or die trying. All in all, my "Awesome Dawson" experience will be impossible to duplicate, unless, of course, it's an all-expenses-paid, 10 year writer-in-residency in Tahiti. I can dream, can't I?
Via YouTube, I leave you with a six minute, raven's eye view of Dawson City. Chastened by my genteel writer image in the land of the macho, I resolved, for a day, to change my name to Mike Winter, strap on a paragliding outfit, and jump off the Midnight Dome in a high wind, nudge nudge, wink wink, flap flap. Once, and Nevermore!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU6fNR1JB9E
I anticipate a happy landing in Toronto on December 19. I do look forward to returning to civilization, although I wonder who's more civilized -- the mayor here is perfectly sane. And if you ever catch me complaining about a Toronto winter again, feel free to spray paint my wily coyote fur.
Warmly, and globally, yours,
James