Author: Leah Johnson

My friend Duncan, who has been spending time gold-mining up in the Yukon, read our blog and was inspired to write a post:

 

The Yukon, Canada’s best kept secret. More land than you could shake a stick at but try to buy some? A place where the land is still wild. Man has claimed part of her for himself, but there are still so many places left to be tamed. Mother nature is often cruel and with out mercy. Winters I am told can make it near impossible to leave your home and madness to attempt a road trip. Yet I am more comfortable here then I have been anywhere else I have ever been in my life.

I came up here this July on a by chance job through a high school cook. I new little about the man I was going to work for and I knew even less about mining. I had got a job in a Klondike Gold Mine. It was a 3 day drive and bang on 2700km from doorstep to doorstep. I pulled my camper trailer all the way from Alberta with enough clean cloths to go a month, work cloths ready for anything from 20 above to 30 below. I was ready… or so I thought.

The first night when I showed up, there was a wide array of people sitting around having some rum after work. People from all up and down the valley. An old boy Gregg who had been coming here since he was a kid with his dad, he has been running the show for a few years now. Two employees of a very large outfit up the creek and my new boss and some of my co workers. The first thing my boss said to me was “ Welcome to our living hell! What do you think?” with out even hesitation I said “It feels like home already”

We were up and working by 7am…ish. (I like this already) I had been warned that the first few days were going to tough but it was the way it had to be. They were repairing the undercarriage on an older D9 dozer. Tracks were off and it was sitting at an odd angle on top of some large timbers. I was given the grinder, pry bar and hammer and was explained that I was going to be pulling all these old track pads off and installing them on the new rails, ten feet away. Each pad new ways well over 125lbs. These weren’t, thank god they only weighed a whopping 110lbs. There were 86 in total and each one had 4 bolts that had to be hand torque to 1200ft/lb. I started at a sprint and by noon I was making no sweet time and I was gassed. Completely out of work form from last 3 months of traveling and the double fisting that goes with that.  It took me 3 full days to get them done. Everything else has been easier since then.

Since I have been here my tasks have not gotten that much easier really, it’s all grunt work and I love it. It doesn’t really matter who you are when you come here, everyone does their time, gives the needed effort, meets the given demands or you just won’t earn the better paying, less stressful jobs.  The Yukon itself is somewhat like that, reward out for effort in. It’s just a matter of do you have what it takes or not. I don’t even know if I do.  Keeping in mind less people have tamed the riverbeds then the Yukon has eroded away and washed them away as if they were never here. The old camps and machinery left as if they were ready for the next shift that never came. Sluice boxes still sitting where they were, how many years ago when their masters took the mats out for the last time. One more cleanup, just one more, I know we’ll find the pay again. To walk away with pockets turned inside out. The few that have done the jig and came out with a fortune in the fall.

In the Yukon you can still stake land claims. I don’t know all the details nor will I try to sound like I do. But I will say what I know. You can stake land claims for different kinds of development. There is placer mine, which is deposited soil from erosion down to a set depth of the bedrock. Another is hard rock where the bedrock is the gem and ore rich material uneroded and undisturbed. You can also stake timber claims and agriculture claims. The catch is that you have to do the work. Easier said than done. Roads are not provided, they must be pioneered to get to areas that are not staked and developed. Work claimed must be proven and a certain on the dollar amount of work must be done each year to hold the claim title or it can be staked again. You cannot re-stake unworked claims two years in a row in the same name. If you are going for rich land that someone else is interested in, then you better be there at midnight when the claim becomes available because it might not be in the morning.

This is what I want to learn about this winter. I had wanted to stay here this winter but it has not worked out that way. This will be my winter project. I want to learn about and ponder the idea of staking my own claim one day, and maybe the land will embrace me, or erode and wash me away like it has so many others up here. Either way I want to try

The idea of returning to the farm, the place where I grew up, had been roaming around in my brain for the last couple years. I pictured it frequently, often romanticized to be ‘the great return’. It had replayed many times; sometimes I was alone, sometimes with my mom or sister, but most often it would be with a faceless person I had decided to marry. I would both share my greatest joys, as well as the birth place of my deepest demons and childhood struggles.

 

My dad sold the farm in 2006, following my parents’ separation in 2002, a few years of drought, and BSE. I hadn’t spent much time out there since my mom and I moved into town in 2002, when I was 12. I didn’t feel much of a sense of loss of the farm until I did my last walk through in 2006, right before the home quarter officially changed possession. To be honest, I had nearly hated farming and the farm for years. I associated it with conflict: the wars between my parents, between our work and the weather, and between my family’s economic situation and the markets, all of which rarely if ever seemed to work compatibly.

Last week, I was chatting with my dad and I mentioned how him and I should make a mini-roadtrip out to the farm to see it. He didn’t know that after years of internal work on myself I finally felt ready to make peace with it. I was ready to love the land I grew up on, certain I was finally strong enough to fight off any emotional triggers that still linger in my brain. Before I knew it, the trip became a family expedition including myself, dad, sister, brother, my brother’s girlfriend, and one of her friends.

To my surprise, my dad told me that we still own 130 acres of the once 400 that was our farm.

We first took a look at the home quarter, now owned by a young family; a couple with four kids under the age of six. It’s now a small hobby farm with horses, pigs, turkeys, and chickens. A far cry from the 200 head of Black Angus we once had. As I chatted with the wife about the country, farming, why her and her husband decided to leave the city and get into this lifestyle, I couldn’t help but imagine the children running around the yard as little ghosts of myself and my siblings. It made me feel nostalgic and comforted that another generation of children would grow up learning how to garden, that kittens, chicks, and puppies are far better toys than anything at Toys ‘R’ Us, that dirt is meant to be played in and not sterilized, and that meat comes from animals and not just from the grocery store.

After seeing the home quarter, we went up the hill onto the land that’s still ours and made a fire. I wandered around the trees and field, looking at all the old spots we used to play in. One particular spot was the old combine that we used to use as a jungle gym. By the time my family owned the farm, the combine already had a tree growing through it, which somehow added to its charm and attraction in my imaginative little brain. I also walked around picking up leaves that had fallen on the ground, crunching them between my fingers and bringing them to my face to really inhale the smell of fall.

Sitting around the fire, target practicing with a .22, playing on bales, laughing as a family, I realized new memories were being made. A new history was being written in my head with my family and the land. It was no longer just the site of conflict, but now also the picture perfect autumn day I had with my family and the ground beneath us. We later drove away toward town and my dad mentioned trying to sell the last 130 acres once again, and in my brain I heard a little voice scream “please don’t.”

With her permission, here is an email received from a Calgary viewer of our website:

 

Just checking out your site, recommended by a member of the ndp rural caucus. Sounds like just what we need more of, and want to recommend a book I’m currently reading for your book list.

Its called Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to create local, sustainable and secure food systems.

Its American but there’s an amazing amount of work being done down there and its author makes the point that we have to embrace complexity, echew simple or simplistic solutions, there are many parts to the transitional space.

What I’m reading on eliminating waste right now is very eye opening and full of potential.

I would like to subscribe and follow what you are doing as it sounds dialogic.

I’m convinced until we have the time to listen to each other, we won’t have the attention span to listen to the spirit of the land.

Thanks, Mary Nokleby

In the past I’ve had conversations with friends about intimacy and human connection, be it connection with a friend, partner, parent, and the feeling of thirst that accompanies it. The natural ebb and flow of life is such that there are times when you’re so well connected with others that your thirst nearly disappears– as well as others when you may grow lethargic, unspirited and dull, from going too long in an extended state of thirst. Sometimes the thirst becomes so strong that when a hug or embrace is received, you envision your bodies melting together because somehow, only the joining of blood vessels, bones, brains, and hearts will satiate the thirst that has developed.  Every hug becomes an opportunity to join hearts.

Lately after morning runs or evening walks, I stop to take a moment to do some sun salutations simply to stop, breathe, be present. I repeatedly find myself in child’s pose, with my hands extended in front of me, my forehead firmly on the ground, and my knees folded below. The image shifts. My brain forms the image of roots extending out of my forehead, deep into the ground, connecting to the heart beat taking place below me. I become part of the living body of the land, in a form of intimacy that is seemingly so simple. My thirst for connection resides.

As I receive a hug that I never had to wait for.