Drifting Home?

I’ve been too busy to write much. Nicole is back from Newfoundland. We’ve been packing and shipping, packing and shipping, buying and packing and shipping.

Last night, even though we had a truckload of stuff from Wal-mart (mostly cleaning supplies), we decided to take the night off. Nicole googled the Food Mail Program. It’s the government’s subtle way of influencing what people in the north eat. Basically, they make it relatively cheap to have perishables and healthy food shipped in. Chips, pop, alcohol, and wieners, however, still cost about $2.50 a kilo, on top of the already inflated price. When Nicole heard this, she immediately wanted to go out and buy some pop. We’re going to need mix for the boatload of liquor we bought yesterday. I’m going to miss beer.

As we were going to bed, I found some reading material on my grandfather’s bookshelf (we’re house-sitting for my grandparents). Drifting Home, by Pierre Berton, is his account of a 13 day journey up the Yukon river to his hometown of Dawson. Burton also writes about his own father, who came to the Yukon during the Gold Rush of 1898. As I read the first chapter aloud to Nicole, I changed the names and dates to reflect our own journey.

“I know we’ve left something out [Nicole] would say in her cheerful manner. “I just know it.”

I skipped the part about their boxes being “bruised” after three thousand miles of travel.

Then I came to a passage about Berton’s grandfather.

"Words, he said, could not describe the beauty and magnificence of it. He had almost half a century left to live, and it would be spent among mountains like these, far from the Atlantic’s shore… He believed he was going to the Yukon for a two-year stay but those two years lengthened into forty. The decision to join the stampede changed the current of his life, as it changed that of so many others."

Nicole and I both saw the parallels to ourselves in this. We are, after all, only going for two years. She started pummeling me as I read this.

“Stop it Brodie! Turn out the light and come to bed!”

But hey. He’s writing about the Yukon. We’re going to the Northwest Territories.