Ballad of the Dempster Run
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the folks who turn north for a lark;
Where the road runs thin through the gravel din
And the spruce stand black in the dark.
And this is the tale of a married pair
Who answered the long road’s call—
From Whitehorse north in a rented Ford,
Past Dawson and over it all.
Three thousand three hundred and six kilometres,
By the dash and the fuel-pump’s lie;
Two bears, one caribou, a Tim’s in view,
And the tundra wide to the sky.
We took that F-150 four-by-four,
A rentabuggy stout and red,
And the road ran on till the road was gone
And the Arctic lay ahead.
We flew Air North in a roomy old Boeing,
With legroom fit for a king;
But the seats were hard as a Yukon guard
And numbness was free with the wing.
The folks outbound were cheerful souls,
With wisdom on where to eat;
The homeward row brought perfume and woe
And a stranger pinned to her seat.
Now the Dempster’s a five-hundred-forty-odd-mile
Ribbon of stone and dust;
It bends and drops through the mountain tops
And punishes speed and trust.
The sign says fifty-five miles an hour—
A jest from a cruel-eyed man;
For you meet a trench, or a pothole’s wrench,
And briefly you learn how to land.
At first I said, “Those front tires are soft;
They’ve forgotten the proper air.”
But the rubber was tall, with a sidewall wall,
For the rocks that wait out there.
Seventy-five series, eight inches deep,
And tough as the northland’s hide;
No flats, no tears—but washboard stairs
Sent the truck in a sideways glide.
To Tuk we went, where the old world bent
To something strange and new;
I had learned cold tricks on the Arctic’s edge
When the snow was a deeper blue.
But the old pub’s gone, with its hourly rooms,
And the landscape’s green or brown;
And Inuvik, once twenty minutes away,
Is two long hours from town.
There were signs in tongues from a dozen lands
And official words in rows;
While wealth wore wheels in a modified car
And hardship stood in the snows—
Or the dust, this time, by the lodging house,
Where the panhandlers made their plea;
And homes that would shame an Alberta street
Stood tired for all to see.
At Dawson, the dredges had eaten the hills
With buckets of wood and steel;
One giant machine, in the Klondike green,
Made sixty-five million yards yield.
A tandem truck holds a dozen yards,
Which tells you the scale of the scar:
Miles of stone where the gold had gone,
Like coal-country waste afar.
We went where the Goldbottom miners worked
In the tailings, old and gray;
Through fourteen-hour shifts they chased what remained
Of the ancient paydirt’s day.
The small old dredges had taken the bulk—
Ninety percent, they said;
Then modern gear takes near all that’s left,
Though diesel eats gold instead.
Still the fever burns in the fourth generation,
Though no man grows rich with ease;
For there’s something deep in the gravel heaps
And the wash of the sluice-box breeze.
A promise of colour beneath the muck,
A glint in the northern clay—
And a family keeps at the stubborn ground
As their fathers did yesterday.
At Eagle Plains, midway up the road,
The petrol was dear indeed:
Two seventy-eight a litre paid
For every thirsty steed.
But bacon and eggs were rightly done,
And that made the cost seem fair;
While El Dorado in Dawson town
Was a place best left elsewhere.
The dinners ranged from costly poor
To terrible at great expense;
Sixty dollars for a plate of doubt
And scarcely a taste of sense.
Yet ketchup came in plastic bottles
Stamped with the name Heinz—
A small bright point in the culinary night,
Where hope and flavour decline.
There was salmon and ribs in Whitehorse town
That earned the price they took;
And a tiny beauty serving food
Who belonged in a storybook.
But the wisest meal on the northern trail,
When hunger has worn you thin,
Is something hauled in a freight-truck box
And warmed in a microwave tin.
So here’s to the run through muskeg and range,
Through valley and gravel plain;
To caribou lone, and bears twice shown,
And to dust on the windowpane.
To Dawson’s scars and Tuk’s far shore,
And a truck that held its ground—
Three thousand three hundred and six hard clicks,
And a fine wild trip around.
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