Dan ONeill - A Land Gone Lonesome

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OTHER BOOKS BY DAN ONEILL

A LAND GONE LONESOME

It is a fine Saturday morning in mid-August. I am hammering in my boat stake among a row of riverboats at the Dawson City beach on the Yukon River. Whack. Whack. Whack. Suddenly something large and very near me moves. It had been lying so inert in the bottom of an open skiff next to my canoe that I hadnt seen it. It is a wild thing with matted black fur. Irritated now, it props itself up, half in and half out of a canvas tarp that contains in its folds remnant pools of last nights rain. Itheis pale to the point of bloodless. Through his beard, parched-looking lips suggest cotton-mouthed dehydration. The morning light is not welcome either. Only one eye is cracked a slit, just enough for him to determine the source of his torment. For a moment, I hold the ax head suspended. He stares. He does not speak, but I hear him wondering if it is absolutely necessary for me to be here, pounding that goddamned stake through his brain. I take it as a wordless Welcome to Dawson. Nodding to the town greeter, I give the stake one last skull-cracking wallop and leave him soaking in remnant pools of last nights partying.

The discovery that launched the Klondike gold rush came on August 16, 1896. That day, Discovery Day, is a holiday in Canadas Yukon Territory. Coincidentally, today is August 16, and as I stroll into Dawson, the Discovery Day parade rolls through the center of town. At the head is a detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A half dozen scarlet-jacketed Mounties march in step behind a handsome, square-jawed officer riding a glossy, black, prancing horse. Cameras snap as the troop files past the still-operating hundred-year-old post office, with its door set into a turret in the corner of the building. Past Diamond Tooth Gerties, where Dawsons signature cancan girls perform nightly. Past the restored three-story Palace Grand Theatre, built in 1899 by an old Indian fighter who entertained patrons by shooting glass balls from between his wifes thumb and index finger. Next, the silver-haired members of the Yukon Order of Pioneers proceed in quaint and stately grace in vintage automobiles, like an old photo colorized and come to life. A flatbed truck serves as a mobile stage for Barnacle Bob Hilliard, the local piano player, an important personage in a gold camp of any era. He is hunched over the keyboard, clawing out ragtime, his face hidden by a mass of tangled hair that bounces emphatically in time. Making sure no one is sucked into a time warp, a file of decibel-dueling muscle trucks brings up the rear. They hang back and rev their unmuffled engines until we spectators have to cover our ears. When their attention spans catch up with them, they pop clutches and lurch back into position. The parade is a little gold rush river of humanity, every character a nugget tumbling by.

Not just on parade day, Dawson is colored by the gaudy circumstances of its birth, comfortable in its skin, happily marketing itself as a raucous frontier town. Walking its streets is like walking through the set of a beer commercial, running now for a hundred years. Here at Second and Queen is the false-fronted Downtown Hotel, home of the World-famous Sourtoe Cocktail, a tourist favorite. Dawsonites say that during the 1920s, when Alaska was suffering under Prohibition, a pair of local bootleggers named Louie and Otto Liken made a run with their dog team across the border. Deliberately, they mushed into a blizzard, bad weather being in a smugglers favor. But on this trip they broke through some ice, and Louie soaked one of his feet. There was no time to stop and build a fire because the boys suspected the Mounties were, so to say, dogging their trail. When they finally did stop, Louies big toe was frozen solid. There was nothing to do but to take the toe off before gangrene set in. Fortunately, the boys were traveling with the surgical essentials: a sharp ax and a sled-load of painkiller.

Half a century later, Captain Dick Stevenson (who has written up this bit of history) was cleaning out the old cabin of the long-gone Liken brothers when he found the toe preserved in a masonry jar under the floorboards. Stevenson, a former wolf poisoner for the department of game, had turned to trapping tourists. He operated a little tour boat, an imitation of a stern-wheeler. Perhaps it was a happy convergence of these two professions, poisoner and tourist host, that led Stevenson to invent the Sourtoe Cocktail. The directions were simple: drop the toe into a beer glass, fill it with champagne, then drink it fast, or drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe.

In The Ballad of the Ice-Worm Cocktail, gold rush poet Robert Service sketched the boys gulling a newcomer into downing a repulsive worm, which by poems end turns out to be colored spaghetti. The current Dawsonites have gone Service one better, as the toe is not a fake. It resides at the Sourdough Saloon in the Downtown Hotel. So far, 18,000 people have earned a certificate of membership in the Sourtoe Club, including British Columbia prime minister Gordon Campbell. Of course, among 18,000 rowdies there are going to be a few swallowers. The first was a placer miner named Garry Younger who, in 1980, was shooting for the Sourtoe record. As Younger tossed down his thirteenth toe champagne, his chair fell over backward, and with a gulp the toe was gone. Had it been recovered when Younger passed it, the original Louie Liken toe might still be in use. But a replacement was sent in by a Mrs. Lawrence of Fort Saskatchewan, whod had it amputated because of a corn. For a while, her toe resided in a jar of salt at the Eldorado Hotel, but it disappeared during renovations. Toe Three was a more traditionally obtained part, having come from a trapper in Faro who lost it to frostbite. Lost to the cold, and lost again to a thieving soldier who set it up as an attraction in a tavern in London, Ontario. The military helped to track down and return the toe in 1983, but it made its final journey soon thereafter when it followed a shot of booze down the gullet of a baseball player from Inuvik. Toe Four had a longer run but met with foul play while on tour at Watson Lake. A Texas big game hunter took it home and refused to give it up until the Watson Lake police asked the Yank how hed like to face extradition proceedings for transporting human body parts across an international border. Toes Five and Six came as a set from a Yukon old-timer too modest to have his philanthropy recognized. Three women drove all the way from Sudbury, Ontario, to deliver Toe Seven, donated by a diabetic whod read about Dawsons cultural traditions in the newspaper. The latest toe came from someone who no longer mows the lawn in sandals.

IT IS LIKELY THAT The Pit was the town greeters undoing. The Pit is the Beer Parlour in the Westminster Hotel, which was established in 1898. Its a half-a-blocks-worth of false-fronted buildings in the middle of town, all tarted up in pink and purple and strung with Christmas lights, several of which work. Everyone calls it The Pit, even the Parks Canada people at the visitors center. In its fundamentals, a night at The Pit is not so unlike a night in this same bar during the gold rush. I imagine the atmosphere was the same then as now: charged with a heavy layer of smoke, clothes reeking with sweat and creosote from leaky stove pipes, a volatility fed by testosterone and jangly music. One night a friend of mine saw a scuffle break out over a provocatively dressed inflatable doll. I guess there werent many other women in the bar at the time, and the doll had attracted two patrons, one staggering through a two-step with her, the other trying more and more insistently to cut in. Push came to shove, but not much more. The last time I was there, the prettiest girl in the place was dressed in Carhart coveralls with tire tread marks running diagonally across the front. I wondered if shed peeled the clothes off an accident victim, like a thrifty trapper might skin a roadkill. People say The Pits regular band, the Pointer Brothers, has a bar tab so enormous that the group has become essentially indentured servants, having to work for years into the future without compensation to square up on the bill.