01 - A Second Home

A writer’s ode to the Yukon DNA

Last July, I issued my very first travel ban. I informed my partner, whose patience for delusional antics is seemingly boundless, that she couldn’t make the trip from Whitehorse to her family’s cabin on Shuswap Lake near Kamloops. She was expecting in August, so the situation seemed far too risky.

“You’re right,” she conceded.

No doubt, she was imagining the possibility of delivering a premature baby in a fairly remote setting—medically speaking, not the best idea—while I was at home missing the action.

Bless her heart.

The truth is, I was determined to remove the threat of my first-born going through life with a British Columbia birth certificate.

The fact that my partner comes with Alberta paperwork is a flaw that I’ve been gracious enough to overlook. She did, after all, choose the Yukon (and me). Unlike her, I am what people around here call “born and raised.” I drew my first breaths of fresh air outside Whitehorse General Hospital where my partner now spends many of her working hours. And our house is just blocks from the apartment to which my parents—themselves Yukon “immigrants”—took me home in a brand-new ’72 Datsun 510.

Perhaps my profound attachment to the Yukon was foretold when my folks, impressed by the novelty of life on a legendary frontier, proudly announced my arrival as a “new strike in the Klondike.” For as long as I can remember, I have lived with the sense that belonging to this place is a rare and precious gift. Canada’s most westerly territory, like the NWT and Nunavut, has never had a huge population, so history counts a relatively small number who have carried membership from Day One. As a result, life here sometimes seems like an epic story into which a small cast of hardy protagonists, myself included, has been lovingly written. Over many years, this point of view has been reinforced by the dazzled reactions of Southerners when they learn I hail from the “Land of the Midnight Sun.” It has also been reflected in pop culture’s frequent use of “Yukon” as shorthand to describe a place beyond civilization’s ordinary reach.

Call it a father’s conceit, but I wanted to imprint my offspring’s first experiences with the same mythical Yukon DNA that mine received. My feelings about this place have nothing to do with pride, which is the domain of achievement not accident. Nor are they signs of a hopeless parochialism. I have visited every Canadian province and territory, yet I have explored each with a degree of foreign curiosity only slightly less than I would Timbuktu—and I’ve been there, as well. After many far-flung travels, I have inevitably returned to the town, neighbourhood and damn near street of my origins, with the realization that I don’t really belong anywhere else. When I eventually depart this world, only feet from where I entered it, I might ask myself: Was I man, or salmon?

So, no offense, Shuswap Lake, but I could live without your rugged beauty. CN Tower, Plains of Abraham, Banff National Park—I love you all, but I could live without you, too. More often than not, I could especially live without the long shadow of Parliament Hill.

At the same time, I’m pretty sure I could never live without the mundane sight of the sandy bluffs that curve around my cozy Riverdale subdivision. Or the morning sun as it climbs out of bed behind Grey Mountain and beams through the window of my home office. Or the poplar leaves turning electric yellow during an evening ride along my favourite singletrack.

And finally, I couldn’t be completely happy without some space—a second home, constructed of words—to illuminate the whole experience.

This is it.

First published in the January/February 2007 issue of above&beyond magazine.