Tuesday September 15, 1998 - BC

New Westminster - sunny and warm.

There was a little lake at the rest stop I had pulled off at the night before, I woke to see ducks there. Very peaceful and pretty. I stopped in the Osoyoos - Summerland area for groceries at one of the many well-stocked fruit stands. Then I stopped for lunch at the Hope Slide, a huge landslide just outside of Hope on the eastern end of the Fraser Valley. Then it was straight on to home, stopping only for gas in Abbotsford. On arriving in New Westminster I went uptown to arrange for a phone to be installed at my condo, then home to a nice clean empty apartment. Yohan plopped down in the entrance way and I don't think he moved for two hours. I on the other hand spent the rest of the day unpacking the truck. What a mess!

And so ended my four-month journey across the country and back. The only territory I failed to visit was Nunavut.

When I arrived home there was a letter from Laurene saying that I should call them right away as Ray had been diagnosed with lung cancer (again) and this time it was terminal. The breathing problems he'd been having in northern BC and the Yukon were the first signs of it, they had had to cut their trip short when Ray was airlifted back to Victoria. I managed to see him one last time at their home in Victoria.

Yohan was old (16 years) and not well, I knew before I set out on this trip that it would be his last. He died the following December. The vet thought he might have pancreatic cancer; that may have been why his liver was swollen when I took him to the Copper River clinic in Whitehorse. Josh eventually turned up. The police in Castlegar did track him down but they did not tell me his whereabouts, just simply that he was alive and well. Sam spent the full nine (eight?) months with Katimavik before returning home, he spent three months each in Quebec, Newfoundland and Ontario.

And that's the end of my travel tale.

Tuesday July 28, 1998 - Ottawa

Cloudy with rain.

Yohan's diarrhea is no better so I took him to a local vet. He diagnosed gastroenteritis and prescribed Pepto-Bismal and an antibiotic. I have to force it down his throat (the vet also prescribed no food for 24 hours) which is awful. He bites and snarls, he cut my hand twice.

Liz and I walked to the Market and had lunch at Bistro 615. We talked to a woman at the next table who was visiting from San Jose. We took the bus home and then later Liz drove me to Mexicali Rosa's where I was to meet a friend from Mitel for dinner. The friend did most of the talking, about her recent separation from her husband, how weird he was being, her fears of being laid off at work and her new house. I talked a bit about my own family. It started to rain really hard while we were there and since we were seated on the patio we moved indoors.

I phoned Liz to pick me up and she said I'd have to wait because she was busy. A bit annoying since it was her idea to drive me there in the first place, I could have just driven myself. Oh well.

Thursday July 16, 1998 - Edmonton

Sunny and hot.

I planned to leave Edmonton today. I packed the truck, injected Yohan and had a bath, but by the time I was ready to go it was almost 1 pm and I just lost momentum. So I am hanging around until tomorrow morning. Jim and Ali went for a barbecue at some francophone neighbours, and later Ali came and got me to come along. I think Jim was just a bit embarrassed to have his wife and ex-wife at the same time and place. I got to practice my very rusty French describing my trip to Inuvik.

I washed Yohan's blanket again. He was incontinent before our trip and I was giving him Ornade for that, but after his accident I stopped the Ornade so he's been dripping a lot and his blanket has gotten quite smelly. But the vet I saw yesterday said it was okay to give Yohan the Ornade so hopefully his blanket will not get so stinky.

Wednesday July 15, 1998 - Edmonton

Warm and sunny.

Jim had a doctor's appointment today so I stayed home and baked oatcakes for the trip. I burned them a bit but they're okay. When Jim got back we went to a couple of veterinarian offices looking for food for Yohan. We found a cheap place, Beck's, and I got them to show me how to do subcutaneous fluid injections for Yohan. The vet here says that to be really certain Yohan has kidney failure I should do more than one blood and urine analysis over 48 hours. He may simply be dehydrated, but I'll continue to give him the special dogfood to be safe.

I talked to my friend Liz in Ottawa and she told me about her cat dying of kidney failure. She was pessimistic about Yohan's chances for survival, but I think he is much better than she is thinking.

Jim took my truck in for the oil change and I cooked some rice and beans. We also went to the Street Performers Festival downtown and watched a guy swallow a sword and another guy on a loose wire juggling fiery batons. We had perogies at the festival.

I wrote to a friend in Vancouver about my trip so far:

"The scenery in BC and the North was pretty awesome, I took a lot of photos but they just don't do it justice. 

"Travelling alone has its good points and its bad. Mostly I like it, but sometimes it's lonely. I meet a lot of people, some of them I see for several days and then when we part company I miss them. But that passes. I like driving, and I like camping in out of the way places (which is surprisingly hard to do). But it seems like I spend a lot of time tending campfires, cooking, packing and unpacking the truck, and so forth. One day I did laundery at a laundromat in Inuvik and it seemed like such a luxury to have a machine do the work for me. Makes you appreciate the conveniences of civilization that give you time to do something other than just the basics of staying alive.

"My schedule is shot to hell, not flexible. I'm already so out of whack with what I thought I would be doing that there's no point trying to catch up. This country is way to big and has way to much in it to expect to see even half of it in 4 months. 

"The most stressful thing has been this business with Yohan; I still wake up in the middle of the night and check to see if he is still breathing. 

"This is just so different from anything I've done in the past couple of decades. I don't exactly go looking for adventures, they just happen. I never know when or how, so every day is new. Twice I've been stuck in lineups that lasted 4-6 hours (once for a river ferry that wouldn't cross due to high winds, once due to forest fire) that ended up being great social occasions, so it was actually kind of fun, not tedious at all. 

"I really kind of miss the North now, if I hadn't told a bunch of people back east that I was coming, I think I would have just spent the entire trip in the North. I heard a song by Murray Mclaughlin, who is not a favourite of mine, but he had a line in this song about how you can find the heart of Canada in the south, but its soul is north of the timberline. And I believe that."

Sunday July 12, 1998 - Edmonton

Windy and cloudy, clearing later.

Yohan just sleeps, staggers and doesn't look well. He is pooping but only a little, he's still constipated.

I had a bath in Jim and Ali's huge bathtub, what a luxury! And I am doing lots of laundry. When I leave Edmonton, everything is going to be squeaky clean! The truck is clean now too, thanks to heavy rain and no muddy roads. Yay pavement! It is overdue for an oil change so I will have to do that while I'm here. Also some shopping and food prep for the next leg of the trip.

After sending out so many emails about Yohan I am now getting sympathy replies from friends. I sent an email to one friend and then almost immediately heard from my son that the friend's husband had just died suddenly. I felt kind of bad about having sent an oblivious email to her and sent her a message of condolence and apology for being so ignorant of her tragedy. But she responded almost immediately that she had appreciated my email and then gave me a description of how her husband had died. How shocking! And they were so happy together, it just doesn't seem fair.

I talked to Sam on the phone, it was good to be in touch. I have been carrying a cell phone "in case of emergency" but until a couple of days ago I had no cell phone reception pretty much since the beginning of June. And Sam did not have an email address so I had no way to contact him directly. Once I emailed a friend in Vancouver to ask him to phone Sam to pass on a message, but now has an email address so I will be able to stay in touch.

Jim and Ali were due back home tonight, but they had not returned any of Luke's calls and messages since I got here. Around 8 pm they arrived home from Fort MacMurray and were very surprised to see me. They hadn't had supper and neither had I so we went out to a restaurant. Ali had chili and Jim and I split a Greek/Mediterranean platter and had a local beer (Big Rock?).

Saturday July 11, 1998 - Edmonton

Cloudy, rainy, cool.

It was still raining in the morning and I had to setup a tarp to make breakfast. Yohan just lay in the rain looking pathetic until I could put him in the truck cab out of the rain. I left the campground around 10 am. Thanks to the rain the truck is now looking much cleaner than it has in a while.

My plan is to stay at my ex-husband's place in Edmonton. I had been emailing him to arrange this, and today I phoned but only got his voicemail. Sometime in the afternoon it stopped raining and I arrived in Edmonton around 3.30 pm. I tried phoning again, this time his son Luke answered the phone. Jim is out of town for the weekend, and Luke was not expecting me. I decided to go there anyway. Luke was just leaving the house himself but I managed to convince him to allow me to stay. There were three French exchange students, Annabelle, Vickie and Noidza, also staying there. I walked and fed Yohan and chatted with the students. Yohan had an unpleasant encounter with the cat Trouble so I shut him in Jim's office. Luke returned with some friends.

Yohan was restless and uncomfortable, he had seemed to be improving but now he wasn't. We slept in the truck that night.

Friday July 10, 1998 - Alberta

Alaska Highway Mile 0, Dawson Creek

Young's Point AB - cloudy, sunny, windy

I was up early and on the road by 8 am. Lots of road construction today. I stopped for gas in Fort Nelson and would have liked to taken the turnoff for the Liard Highway. But I have no clean clothes and am looking forward to my stop in Edmonton to do laundry. Yohan could use the rest break too. Besides I am already two weeks behind my schedule and I don't know if it's a good idea to get even further off schedule.

I stopped in Taylor just past Fort St. John where there was a refinery with a huge plume of flame. At the Visitor Centre there the woman at the desk kind of took the ball and ran with it when I told her I was driving across the country. She loaded me up with lots of brochures about the Yellowhead Highway, Dawson Creek, Newfoundland and a local campground on the Peace River. She advised me to stop in Hinton on the way to Edmonton, to stay at the local campground and to visit the Alaska Cafe and an art gallery in an old grain elevator in Dawson Creek. She said there was a Swiss couple at the Peace River campground building a raft to go down the Peace River on. She asked me about the Dempster since she said visitors often enquired about that.

Dawson Creek grain elevator

The sky was beginning to look threatening and I didn't really want to stop now so I continued on. I did stop in Dawson Creek to photograph the Alaska Highway Mile Zero signpost in the middle of an intersection. Yohan decided to stop to poop while crossing a road and the light was just turning red. He had quite the audience of stopped cars for that.

Pretty much from the start of the day I was out of the mountains and driving through rolling forested land. Then I started seeing cows in pastures, a first on this trip. By Dawson Creek I was seeing brilliant yellow fields of canola. In Dawson Creek the grain elevators were labelled "Alberta Grain Pool" even though Dawson Creek is on the BC side of the border with Alberta. The first oil wells appeared after crossing the border into Alberta. Now I was travelling through serious ranch country: grain, cattle, oil wells. The price of gas dropped dramatically, in Grande Prairie I paid 50 cents per litre of gas

I stopped to eat in a park in Grande Prairie and changed into jeans, it was starting to get cool. Around 10 pm I left Grande Prairie. The campgrounds have changed, they are mostly in town with no trees or privacy. There are lots of fast food places and strip malls and all very flat.

I decided not to go to Hinton because that would have added another 250 km to the distance to Edmonton and there were storm clouds in that direction.

I pulled in to Young's Point provincial park west of Valleyview just after midnight. It was now clouded over and quite dark, I needed my camp lamp to setup the truck for sleeping. Shortly after going to bed it began to rain, but I had ensured that everything was stowed in a dry place so I went to sleep.

Wednesday July 8, 1998 - Whitehorse

Wolf Creek campground - sunny.

I took Yohan into the Copper Road vet clinic first thing in the morning, and met Marina Alpeza, who owns the clinic. She is going to do two X-rays of Yohan to look at his rear end and his chest.

I returned to the clinic around 1 pm and Marina told me that they had done one X-ray of his rear end and did not see any broken bones. She would do the second X-ray in the afternoon and I should return around 5 pm for the results.

Aside from time at the clinic I mostly wandered around town looking at things. I also chatted with the folks at the Holodeck, who assured me that my dog was in good hands with Marina.

When I came back at 5 pm I had to wait for an hour and a half, the clinic was very busy with many emergencies. I was hungry, tired and anxious. By the time Marina came to see me at 6.30 pm I was in tears from frustration. She showed me Yohan's X-rays. His diaphragm was OK, his liver was swollen, and he was seriously constipated. His poop was backed up to his ribcage! She didn't know why his liver was swollen, it might just be the stress of his injuries. But when I asked she said that she saw no reason why I couldn't continue travelling with Yohan, that he would slowly recover from his injuries.

The clinic did up the bill for a grand total of $420. That included antibiotics, cortisone, a laxative, high fibre dogfood and copies of the results of his blood tests. They had sedated Yohan for the X-rays so when they handed him over he was too dopey to walk, I had to carry him out to the truck.

I went straight back to the campground. I can't remember what I ate, I was just so exhausted. But relieved that things appeared to be much better than I could have hoped for. I thought at the very least I would have to return to Vancouver, and that I was going to lose Yohan. But now it looks like he's going to be okay and I can continue on to my next stop in Edmonton.

Tuesday July 7, 1998 - Whitehorse

Wolf Creek Camp - cold and clear.

I went into the vet's office at 9 am this morning. They told me I would have to wait to talk to the vet because they were busy cleaning up Yohan. During the night he had pooped and peed in his cage and was a terrible mess, there was even poop in his ears. The vet came out finally and said this was a good thing, it showed that his digestive tract was still functional.

He said that I should come back around 11.30 am and take Yohan out for a couple of hours and see what I thought of his condition. I left to do some errands, in particular I checked my bank account to see if I needed to move some money around to pay Yohan's vet bills.

They gave me Yohan with the IV catheter still attached to his leg. He seemed wobbly and dispirited but looking better than the night before. They gave me a can of dogfood and said to give him a quarter can every hour.

Yukon River sternwheeler, dry-docked

I took Yohan for a walk in a park by the river where he pooped and peed again. Then we went back to Wolf Creek campground where I moved to a better site. He seemed hungrier now, he gobbled the small amounts of dogfood I gave him.

When we went back to the clinic they wanted me to keep Yohan overnight. The vet wanted me to feed Yohan special dogfood for kidney failure and they did up a bill for me which I am fairly sure is incorrect but I'll get that straightened out tomorrow. If all goes well they will do the X-rays tomorrow. In particular the vet wants to see if Yohan has a herniated diaphragm. I tried to give Yohan the special dogfood but he didn't like it. I don't blame him, it doesn't look good or smell good.

Tomorrow I will have to decide whether I am continuing this trip or not. I may be returning to Vancouver much earlier than planned.

Monday July 6, 1998 - Whitehorse

In the morning I just washed up and packed to drive into town, I didn't eat. I found the Copper Road Veterinary Clinic. The vet on duty was just temporary, and he was not encouraging. He said that in addition to whatever injuries he had from being run over he was also sick. The eye discharge that he had never really gotten rid of since Inuvik was indicative of a systemic infection and he was way too thin. he doubted that Yohan could handle the anesthetic that would be needed for doing an X-ray. He recommended that I save myself a lot of grief and expense and just have Yohan put down.

That just wasn't an option. I didn't drive all this way just to be told to put him down. So I thanked him and asked where the other vet clinic was, since I'd been told there were two clinics in Whitehorse. The vet backtracked. He said if I didn't want to put him down then the second option was to put him on an IV for hydration, do some bloodwork, and maybe give him a wopping dose of antibiotic for the infection. I agreed to that and left Yohan there. I went to the Taku Hotel for breakfast and then to the Holodeck Internet Cafe to check email. I also dropped off some camera film for developing.

Whitehorse tourist

After running a few errands I returned to Copper Road to find out what Yohan's status was. The vet said he thought he'd guessed pretty well, that Yohan probably has chronic kidney failure and so he's terminal. He may or may not pull through this crisis. But I opted for continuing treatment. They would keep him on the IV, give him some antibiotic and if he recovers enough for an X-ray, they'd do it. The vet guessed a broken pelvis and also a broken tail. He said the pelvis would heal itself but his tail would have to be amputated.

It was pretty emotional. The vet was clearly making a case for pulling the plug due to 'quality of life'. Yohan did look awful and he knew where he was and didn't like it. He never liked being in a vet's office. But the good news was that the woman who owned the clinic would be back the next day, and as the temporary vet put it, she had a way with old dogs, she could pull them back from the brink of death. So I left Yohan there for the night and then went to the Wolf Creek campground to stake out a campsite.

Whitehorse log hi-rise

After securing the campsite I returned to town and went to Whitehorse's brand new and very first Internet Cafe and Computer Game Parlour, the Holodeck, to see if I could get on the internet. No.

The Holodeck is run by a young man and his Mom, both dog lovers who sympathize with my situation. Most of the people here are teenage gamers, but there is the odd traveller like myself checking email. It's a darkened room with computers arranged in a circle of booths, each one with a headset and a joystick. Their Internet connection is tenuous, but I can live with it. It also has a tiny lobby area with a couch and a TV running endless Star Trek movies and TV episodes. So if no computer booth is available you can watch Star Trek to your heart's content.

While I waited for internet access I chatted with the owners about hotmail, ISPs, dogs and places to eat. They recommended the Taku Hotel which is where I had breakfast earlier in the day. They said it had good basic restaurant food at reasonable prices.

In the evening I returned to my campsite and did a major cleanup of the inside of the truck, repacking everything. I screwed down the bedframe sections so they wouldn't slide around on rough roads. I also rearranged the cab of the truck so that Yohan would be sitting in the front not in the space behind the bench seat.


I'm not sure what I'll do now, I am reluctant to go home but maybe I should.

Sunday July 5, 1998 - Lake Laberge

Lineup for Fox Lake fire convoy

Lake Laberge - windy, sunny and hot

It was cool, cloudy and smoky at the Yukon river campground and I couldn't sleep. I was up at 5 am and feeling like Yohan was doomed and I couldn't bear to be alone without him. but he got up and walked around, peed and ate some which cheered me up; maybe he'll make it after all. Ray came by and helped me get Yohan into the truck and I left around 7.30 am without saying goodbye to anyone.

At the Dawson Visitor Centre they said that there was a fire on the Dempster which is where all the smoke was coming from, and that the road to Whitehorse (the Klondike highway) was open. Once I passed the junction with the Dempster the smoke cleared.

Bear by the side of the road

I had put Yohan on the front bench seat instead of behind where he usually sat. Sometime after we passed Pelly Crossing he was struggling to change position so I reached over to help him. In doing so I swerved the truck into the steep-sided ditch on the side of the highway. There was no shoulder on the side of the highway, just a 4-5 foot embankmenty down to the ditch, overgrown with 2-3 foot high bushes. I thought for sure the truck would flip over and Yohan would be killed but amazingly I just ended up driving along the ditch because I never took my foot of the gas pedal. Which I did now.

I came to a stop and looked around. The ditch was about one car-width wide and the embankment was too steep to drive back up onto the road. Also it was deep enough that anyone driving past on the road would never see me. I decided that my only hope was to keep driving along the ditch in hopes of finding a spot where the embankment wasn't too steep for me to drive back up onto the road. I drove slowly along the ditch, hoping there wouldn't be any boulders in the way, which I wouldn't be able to see anyway because of all the bushes. I tried a couple of times to get up the bank but bottomed out each time. Finally I found a spot where I could drive back up onto the road.

As soon as I was out of the ditch I stopped and put the flashers on. I got out of the truck. I was shaking from nerves and Yohan looked bug-eyed scared. I'm sure he thought I was trying to kill him! I checked under the truck to see if I had done any damage but I couldn't see anything obvious. So when I was a little calmer I continued driving until I got to Five Finger Rapids. there was a big mess in the back of the truck from my episode in the ditch, mainly a blackened cast iron frypan that slid around all over my clothes. I checked the oil and the transmission fluid levels and the tires. Everything seemed OK and there hadn't been any suspicious engine noises so I carried on.

Around 4 pm I reached the lineup for the convoy through the forest fire at Fox Lake. It was very long. Apparently they had let a few cars through earlier in the day but things had gotten worse and they were debating whether to let anyone through today at all. I could see thick smoke and trees burning on a ridge west of the highway. Waterbombers circled. They carried containers of water that they dumped on the fire, but it just looked as if they were dumping thimblefuls on a conflagration. The RCMP said that the smoke on the road was too thick and they didn't know when the next convoy could go.

Some people turned around and left the lineup. I looked at the map. There were two other routes to Whitehorse, one involved backtracking to Dawson and heading to Alaska and the other also involved backtracking but not as far. The word was that there were fires on that road too, no one knew if you could get through or not. In any case it meant 2 or 3 days of driving even if the road was clear. Fox Lake is just north of Whitehorse; if I could get through Fox Lake I would be in Whitehorse in an hour or so. It did not seem worthwhile to try another route.

Fiddlers entertain the lineup

So I waited, we all waited. There was a travelling group of child fiddlers in the lineup, they moved slowly up and down the lineup playing their fiddles. They were from Whitehorse, returning from a tour of Yukon towns. I talked to a nurse from Haines Junction and told her about Yohan. She gave me a plastic glove and showed me how to squirt water into Yohan's mouth by snipping a small hole in one finger, filling the glove with water and then twisting it closed and squeezing it. It took two of us, one to hold the glove and the other to hold Yohan's mouth open. He didn't want to drink.

I was wearing my Great Northern Arts Festival T-shirt that I bought in Inuvik and it turned out that the woman who founded that festival was in the lineup. She didn't live in Inuvik anymore but said that seeing me wearing the T-shirt made her proud of what she had done. I also met a guy who was transporting an airplane and a tank full of fish. The airplane had foldup wings and sat on a trailer along with a big plastic tank of fish. Apparently if you stock an otherwise unoccupied lake that does not have native game fish in it, it's yours. So he had a lake picked out and was going to fly in with his tankful of fish to claim his lake. He has lived in the Yukon for 20 years, working construction in the summer and spending his winters in Costa Rica.

After waiting about 4 hours we got the word that they were going to start the convoy through the fire. We had to drive single file and maintain a constant speed close enough to the next vehicle to be able to see it through the thick smoke. Of course you had to keep all your windows closed tight. The smoke was like a very heavy fog and there were blackened tree skeletons and grey ash on the ground. There was no underbrush. Occasionally there were unburnt patches and also plumes of smoke and fire shooting up from the ground. It was like a scene from hell.

A squirrel that had been run over by the vehicle in front of me was still squirming on the road while its mate streaked back to the ashen forest. I couldn't stop. It was just misery everywhere.

I don't know how long it took to drive through, it was just too shocking to see what a forest fire looks like from inside. In any case it was too late to get to the veterinary clinic in Whitehorse so I stopped at the next campground on Lake Laberge, just north of Whitehorse. I would have to take Yohan in next morning. I fed Yohan and cleaned up and went to bed without supper, I was too nerved up to eat.

A helluva day!

Saturday July 4, 1998 - Dawson

Yohan isn't moving. He drank some water yesterday but won't take it today. I did manage to get him to eat a little rice and milk at breakfast. I thought maybe I would walk into town and buy some canned dogfood for him. The camp operator came by to collect the fee and she said that there was indeed a veterinarian in town and gave me his name. She and her boyfriend operate the campground in the summer and then spend the winter at their cabin the bush mushing dogs. There are so many dogs in town, every night you hear barking and howling from across the river.

Ray and Laurena are at the site across the road from mine, I asked them to keep an eye on Yohan while I walked into town. It would be faster that way if there were lineups for the ferry. At the Visitor Centre I asked about the vet. He has a pager but no phone number, so they paged him and I left a message for when he called back. I bought the dogfood and checked again at the Visitor Centre for a message from the vet but there was nothing so I returned to camp. I stopped to talk to Ray and Laurena briefly and then returned to my site, where there was a man looking at Yohan, who had moved himself from the tent where I left him over to the truck. It was the vet! I was impressed that he arrived at my campsite before I did!

When he saw me he said, "This must be the patient."

The vet, John, examined Yohan and took lots of notes. He listed all the bad things that might be wrong with Yohan, but without labwork or X-rays he couldn't tell for sure. The nearest X-ray machine was in Whitehorse, over 500 km away. But he said that it was amazing that Yohan survived the shock and that gave him hope for Yohan's survival. he recommended that I get him to Whitehorse as soon as possible for X-rays, and to keep him hydrated. Also, he said I should go to the Copper Road Veterinary clinic in Whitehorse; he said there were two clinics and Copper Road was run by a woman who was very good. He said Yohan's best hope was her.

He was very kind but he left me feeling quite depressed about outcomes. I had supper with Penny and James and prepared to leave first thing in the morning. In the news they said there was a forest fire at Fox Lake which is on the way to Whitehorse. In the evening we could smell smoke which I thought was from the Fox Lake fire, I hoped that wasn't going to be a problem. I wanted to get to Whitehorse in time to get Yohan into the vet clinic before it closed for the day, and I hoped that if I left early in the morning I could make it.

Friday July 3, 1998 - Dawson

Downtown Dawson

Yukon River - sunny

I am enjoying just doing nothing, "another day in paradise". But my plan is to leave for Edmonton tomorrow morning. I regret leaving the north, the long days, the wilderness. Laurene said that they may call Alaska "the last frontier" but there's hardly any wilderness left there. There's an awful lot of RV drivers who just want to talk about road conditions, like their whole trip is about the road conditions. And there's a woman in site 20 who sells paperbacks and tapes to bored RV'ers.

I took the ferry across the river and drove into town to do some shopping for my trip tomorrow. Ice and a few other things. Then I got in line for the return ferry trip across the river, hoping to spend the rest of the day just hanging out at the campground. It was a long lineup because a lot of people want to go to Alaska for July 4th, mostly Germans and very big RVs. A lot of us were just standing around chatting while waiting for our turn on the ferry crossing, Yohan crawled under a van to get out of the sun. Then the ferry arrived and started boarding, the lineup of vehicles started moving forward.

Suddenly I heard Yohan yelping, he was scrambling out from under the van that had just run over him. The woman driving had not seen him there, she was very upset when she realized what had happened. I didn't know what to do so I tried to get him back to the truck, he was obviously in a lot of pain and limping badly, he could walk but I had to lift him into the truck. I didn't know whether I should stay in the line to get onto the ferry or get out of the line and see if there was a veterinarian clinic in town. The man in the truck behind me had a local phonebook, he looked for a veterinarian listing but there was none. So I decided to stay in the line and get back to the campground, it took another 30 minutes to get there (I'd already been in the lineup for 90 minutes).

Yohan could walk a bit, his eyes were bugging out of his head and his tongue and gums were really white. Penny, who is a nurse, took a look at him and said he was in shock. I had a tent that so far I had never needed but I dug it out of the back of the truck and spent a half hour trying to figure out how to set it up. I thought it was the only way to get Yohan out of the sun.

My plans are now changed. I will stay on here in hopes that Yohan improves, but I don't think moving him is a good idea. I bought beer while I was in town, I'm glad I did because now I really need one.

Thursday June 25, 1998 - Inuvik

Igloo Church in Inuvik

Chuk Camp - sunny and hot

Yohan seems better; he ate the chicken I saved for him and is walking around.  But even though it's a bright sunny day and Yohan is better, and I'm having all these adventures, I'm having a 'blonde day' (Liz's term; she apparently does not think highly of blondes). Clem and Liz play cribbage (they have a cribbage sticker on their van) so I might suggest a game to them tonight.

Liz is also having kind of a blonde day because they had signed up for a tour of Tuk today, but they got bumped from the flight. Liz is pissed off. They are going tomorrow, if the tour people don't screw it up. We went up the Chuk viewing tower to look at the Mackenzie Delta. We could see the Richardson Mountains, but not Aklavik.

Liz at the Viewing Tower

I went into town to send some more email, wrote to one friend about how discouraged and lonely I was feeling. Then I went to the Visitor Centre to enquire about fishing, and the guy there sent me to Moe's Stationery next to the Cafe Gallery. He also told me the latest news about the Dempster; it will be closed until July 2nd, a week from now. They will be escorting people out of Eagle Plains tomorrow, but you can't get there from here because the Arctic Red River ferry is shut down due to debris in the river coming from the south.

The Utilidor connecting Inuvik homes

This will be the longest I have stayed anywhere, and not by choice!

Ran into "Greasy Stick" and a German woman at Moe's and we chatted for awhile. His real name is Joel and she is Judith. I gather they hooked up at the dinner theatre last night. He said he was going to Alaska in his van. He plays fiddle and says he hopes he is retired.

After talking to Moe about a possible fishing trip I went back to camp. Liz invited me to have a beer and later supper, it was nice. A guy who came up the Dempster after it was closed down dripped by to show us photos of the washouts. Pretty incredible, the road is definitely shot to hell. Someone said it was on the CBC news today.

Looks like I'll have to do a laundery, I am running out of clean clothes. I'm not real happy about being stuck here but really it is an opportunity to catch up on things I meant to do but haven't done.

Wednesday June 24, 1998 - Inuvik

Sign on the road into Inuvik

Chuk Camp - cloudy and cold

I slept in, had a nice hot shower in the camp washroom and a late breakfast of oatmeal. I paid for a second night (still $10!) and drove into town in the afternoon. At the Inuvik Visitor Centre I learned that the Dempster Highway was closed until at least Saturday or Sunday, maybe longer. I visited the Cafe Gallery and the Library where I sent a bunch of "Stranded in Inuvik" emails to friends in the south. At the front door of the library was a sign asking you to take your shoes off before entering. Apparently so many people track in gravel stuck in the treads of their boots or runners that it was making a mess of the floor. You get one hour free per day of internet time, but it was a slack time so the librarian seemed amenable to bending the rules. I could stay on the computer until someone showed up wanting to get on.

There are two campgrounds in Inuvik, Chuk Camp on a hill overlooking the town and Happy Valley camp right in the town. I was told that I picked the right camp because Happy Valley is very buggy, Like Caribou Camp that I visited yesterday. Because Chuk Camp is on a hill it catches the breeze and that keeps the bugs down.

Yohan is unwell. He doesn't want to eat and just doesn't look healthy. I left him in the truck all day. When I returned to camp I spoke to Liz and Clem about Yohan, Clem wanted to examine him. Clem is a retired gastro-enterological surgical assistant (GSA) with, as he puts it, a 'psycho' knack, which among other things apparently means he understands sick animals (and humans). I brought Yohan to their campsite (I drove over) and Clem 'examined' Yohan. He was extremely gentle, Yohan appeared to pour his heart out to him and said that Yohan was very sad, very anxious, but the worst thing wrong with him was his age. Clem's wife Liz thinks Yohan is just having a bad arthritis day. Clem thought that as long as Yohan was drinking water he would probably be okay.

As a consolation to all of us who are "stranded" in Inuvik, the town invited us to a special dinner theatre production. The play was called East Three, it was about the history of Inuvik which was originally called East Three. Inuvik was created to replace Aklavik which was prone to flooding. Engineers surveyed six potential townsites, three on the west side of the Mackenzie delta and three on the east side. East Three was the final choice. Kind of symbolic because this area is the meeting place of three races: Indian (Gwich'in), Inuit (Inuvialuit) and European-descent.

I went to it with Liz and Clem, there were people there from both campgrounds. The play was very good and there was also a skit using members of the audience as the characters in the skit.  Liz got to play "Pearl", the man in the next campsite to me played "Bubbles" and a guy from San Diego played "Greasy Stick".

Liz hammed it up something fierce. In fact at one point she took the story line in the opposite direction than was intended, leaving the narrator speechless. Had everyone in hysterics. "Bubbles" told me later that he was going on a 2-week canoe trip with several other people who were in the audience that night, and that he was probably stuck with that name for the duration.

Dinner included caribou meat balls, roast musk ox, white fish and arctic char, I saved a bit of chicken for Yohan. All in all a great evening of local culture and meeting people.

We are all signing up for various tours and activities, a favourite at Chuk is the trip to Tuktoyaktuk. I would have liked to go but you have to fly in and I didn't want to leave Yohan at the camp that long. Instead I asked around about getting a guide to take me fishing on the Mackenzie. You have to have a guide because it is a huge delta with many channels and you can very easily get lost. I figured leaving Yohan for a couple of hours would be okay, just not all day. He could sleep in the truck.

Monday June 22, 1998 - Dempster Highway

The Arctic Circle - rain

It rained all night and didn't stop in the morning. I got breakfast ready, packed up and ate in the truck cab on my way into Dawson. I stopped at both the Dawson and NWT visitor centres for water and information. At the NWT centre they gave me information about driving the Dempster and where to buy gas. My plan had been to stay in the Dawson area, drive the Top of the World Highway to the Alaska border and then start the Dempster the next day. But with the rain I thought there would be no point in driving the Top of the World as I would be unable to see the view, so I may as well go straight to the Dempster. And there was a rain warning for the Dempster too---50 mm---rain all day.

View of Dawson City from the Midnight Dome

But first I drove around Dawson up to the Midnight Dome and down to Bonanza Creek. On the summer solstice you can see the midnight sun from the Dome, you cannot see it down at the town level.

Giant dredge used to mine the gold, seen from on top of a huge pile of dredge tailings

Dawson is about the size of Whitehorse but most of the buildings are original. The roads are dirt because of the permafrost. I passed Jack London's cabin but didn't see Robert Service's place. On the road to Dawson are miles of tailings—long gravel worms spit up by the huge dredges they used to dredge the local creeks for gold.

Bonanza Creek

Prospector's cabin and antique dredge

I saw one old dredge at Bonanza Creek and of course the spot on the creek where gold was first discovered. Boy did those guys lay waste to the territory! I had this weird feeling abou the Gold Rush hype and now I know why. The history of the BC coast, the First Nations and later European settlements was interesting, but this is a history of wanton destruction.

After getting gas at a cardlock facility I set out on the Dempster. Even in the rain it is spectacular. Almost immediately trees disappear and you are surrounded by bare mountains and valleys. This is the Ogilvie Mountain Range

My truck at the base of the mountains

Ogilvie Mountains

I stopped at the Tombstone campground (named for Tombstone Mountain, which I could not see due to rain and fog) for lunch in a picnic shelter, where a group of German tourists were being guided by a German woman from Nelson. She said they come here for 3 weeks of hiking and canoeing in the wilderness. Tons of Germans come here; they live in a crowded country, have 6 weeks of paid vacation and a yearning for wilderness. Every week a flight of 300 Germans arrives in Whitehorse. Not a few end up settling here, the German guide was one who came as a tourist and stayed to become a guide. All the German tourists crowded to one end of the picnic shelter and I was at the other end alone, until the guide came over and struck up a conversation.

I drove on.

I saw this sign that said "scenic view", so I pulled in at the next turnoff, but all there was was a camper. It was pouring rain, and there were two grizzled heads at the door of the camper. I got out of the truck to ask them if they knew where the heck this "scenic view" was. They didn't have a clue, but one of them said "maybe it's us" and then invited me in for coffee. Seemed like a good idea, since there was too much rain for viewing scenes anyway. Mick and Al, and their dog Rosy. Mick is a teacher from Oregon (grades 6-8) due to retire in 6-7 years and Al is a geology prof from Tacoma Washington. They were on their way home from 5 days fishing in Inuvik.
Had a nice time chatting about all sorts of things. They recommended a campsite in Inuvik, and told me about a gravel pit just north of the Arctic Circle which was relatively bug-free for overnight camping and recommended a particular type of bug bite salve available only in Inuvik. I finally left there around 6 pm. They said I should be sure to stay in Inuvik till it got sunny again so that I could see the south part of the highway in its true glory. I finally dragged myself away from there and headed north on the Dempster.

At the Maintenance Camp I let a semi pass me, I didn't like having his big truck looming in my rearview mirror. A while later I passed Engineer Creek camp and the road by this time was extremely muddy from all the rain. Almost immediately I saw the semi with its flashers on parked on the side of the road. I pulled up behind it and walked forward. There was a huge mud slide with whole trees embedded in it across the road. The mud and rocks were still coming down the slope on the left side of the road, I think the mud slide was 2-3 feet deep and very wide on the road. There was a camper stopped in the road on the other side of the mudslide. The driver of the camper had a chainsaw and was trying to cut some of the trees, then the semi truck driver was chaining the trees to the camper and the camper guy was backing his camper away from the mud, pulling the trees out.

The semi, the camper, and the mudslide

Then the camper guy came across the mud and said to me, "Looking for adventure?"

After pulling the trees out the mud subsided a bit but was still pretty deep. The semi driver said he'd drive through first to make tracks and then the camper should go and finally me. The semi drove through and stopped on the other side, then the camper came through and continued south and finally I drove through. The mud was about a foot thick now but the mud in the semi's tracks was not as deep. I hit some stuff in the mud, probably tree debris, but no harm done. The semi truck driver told me to go ahead of him. I think he waited about a quarter of an hour before he set out, I never actually his truck but it was nice to know that it was there in case anything went wrong.

It was hard to see anything. The road was bad and I had to really concentrate but there was no visibility to speak of. At one point there was blowing snow. I stopped at a view point to use the outhouse, but there was no view. I passed through miles of burned trees in what appeared to be muskeg. Around 10 pm I began to see breaks in the clouds to the north. The coffee with Mick and Al was keeping me going, not to mention not wanting to stop due to the rain and mosquitoes.

Around 11 pm I pulled into Eagle Plains, the halfway point on the Dempster. There's a motel, a bar and a gas station. I got gas and then drove around behind the motel to park and feed Yohan. There was no rain but swarms of huge mosquitoes. When Yohan got out of the truck to eat the mosquitoes swarmed his eyes, there were dozens of them right in his eyes. I rubbed some bug dope on him and while I waited for him to eat I tried to put some netting up inside the back of the truck.

Shortly after leaving Eagle Plains I saw a pull-out and a sign for the Arctic Circle crossing. However I did not want to stop due to the mosquitoes. Mick and Al had recommended that just past the Arctic Circle there was a gravel pit that was good to camp in because it was very windy which kept the bugs down, so I was keeping an eye out for that. They said it was on the side of a hill, you have to drive off the highway and around the hill before you see it. I got there just before midnight. I could pull in and park out of sight of the road, up on a ledge with a view of the surrounding land. I could see the Richardson mountains in the distance, and it was very windy and relatively bug-free.

I wrote for a bit and didn't go to bed until almost 4 am. It is now daylight all day and all night so I have lost all sense of the time of day. I think I lost track of what day it is some time ago as well, so I feel quite disconnected from the usual measurement of time passing.

Sunday May 31, 1998 - Little Qualicum Falls

Leaving Horseshoe Bay on the ferry to Nanaimo

Little Qualicum Falls, BC — sunny and warm

This time I made it out the door at 10 am, the truck already packed and ready to go. However I arrived at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal just as the 10.30 ferry to Nanaimo was leaving so I had to wait for the 12.30 ferry. I was the second car aboard. Crossing the Georgia Strait I saw porpoises. On arrival at Nanaimo I hit the highway and drove to Parksville, where I turned off for the Little Qualicum Falls Provincial Park to set up camp for the night.

I was travelling with my 16 year old dog Yohan, a Border Collie-Nova Scotia Duck Toller cross, in my 1991 red Chevy S10 truck. I bought the truck in 1994 because I really wanted a truck, and in 1996 I bought a canopy for the back of the truck so that I could use if for camping. My first test run was the following year, 1997, to drive from New Westminster where I lived to Toronto where my eldest son was getting married in October. Yohan came with, and he was a good road trip companion. Part of the impetus for my 1998 trip was to go out for one last trip with him and to go to his birthplace near Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Not that he would have cared but it appealed to my romantic side. The other impetus was that I had turned 50 the month before and I felt I needed to do something to mark the occasion. I convinced my employer to give me a 4-month sabbatical to do it.

Nanaimo ferry terminal

I constructed a bed in the back of the truck from wood that previously was used to build a bunk bed set for my sons when they were little. The bed was just high enough off the floor to be able to store Rubbermaid plastic containers that I kept my camping gear and food in, there was also space for a small battery-operated bedside lamp, a suitcase of clothing and a bunch of stuff that I thought I would use to entertain myself on the trip: some painting paraphenalia, some books and my banjo. As it turned out I never touched most of that stuff, I never sat around wanting to entertain myself. Yohan sat on top of stuff I stored behind the bench seat of the truck cab in a space large enough for him to lie down if he wanted.

Little Qualicum Falls was beautiful, as are most BC provincial park campsites. At a neighbouring campsite I met Bill O, a former QA engineer for the government in electronics. He retired at age 53 and was writing a fantasy novel. We talked for a long time, in particular about trout tickling, something I had never heard of. He could put his hand in the water and make movements that attracted trout fish to investigate, and then was able to stroke their sides which apparently they quite like. This is trout
tickling.

I didn't get to bed until quite late and did not sleep well due to the heat and mosquitoes. I had made screens for windows and for the back hatch of the truck canopy, but there were still cracks that the mosquitoes could get through. This was a constant battle on my road trip, to try to get those cracks blocked sufficiently to keep the bugs out. I was only partially successful and hot summer nights were a trial.

May 1998, and a play

Middle-aged Yohan, in Ottawa

Not only is this month the fiftieth anniversary of les événements de Mai  it is also the twentieth anniversary of a personal sort. In 1998 I went on a four-month road trip across Canada, managing to visit every territory and province except Nunavut. I travelled in my 1991 Chevy S10 truck with my 16 year old dog Yohan. He died a few months after we returned from that trip. He was a good companion for road tripping and I knew he probably wouldn't survive the year, being so old. It was my fiftieth year and I felt I needed to do something to mark it. I managed to convince my employer to give me a four month sabbatical and took off toward the end of May. I kept a journal, I wrote emails and I took a lot of photos. When I got home again I packed it all away and focussed on my dog's last days. Then I moved on in my life.

I always intended to do something with all that material but it seemed like a daunting task so nothing happened. Yesterday I revisited that idea and hauled out the photo album and journal. I went through my saved emails and transcribed them to Word documents. At the time I was using a now-defunct email program, Eudora, so transcribing was a bit finicky. But it's done now. Then I went through the photos. At the time I thought labels were not necessary, my memory would suffice. Hah! In the journal I at first noted whenever I took photos so that looked promising, but apparently I soon dropped the practice due no doubt to unwarranted trust in my memory. Some of them are obvious but a lot are not.

Youthful Yohan, in Wolfville

Anyway, what I hope to do is post some of this material on the days that correspond to the journal entries. I don't know how far I will get, it's a lot of transcribing and scanning of photos. I may end up doing some of it retroactively. The most memorable part of the trip was from Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island to Inuvik near the Arctic Ocean and back to Whitehorse in the Yukon. During that time I came close to losing Yohan which was traumatic. I would have cancelled the whole trip and headed back to New Westminster where I lived if that had happened. One veterinarian I took him to recommended that I let him go and I simply couldn't do it. But he survived and in some ways the rest of the trip was a postscript to that moment.

Old Yohan, in Toronto

What got to me yesterday was looking at photos of Yohan. For some reason I had consigned all the photos of Yohan to this album so for years I wondered why I didn't have any pictures of him, I forgot that they were in the 1998 Road Trip album. But there they were, especially a favourite taken when he was still a mature but healthy beauty. After he died I missed him a lot, I used to dream of his return for years after. In fact those dreams did not stop until I got Hapi, my current doggy companion.  When I looked at these old photos of Yohan I felt very sad. Not because I missed him but because I didn't. I had forgotten him. I looked at those photos and felt nothing, and that made me sad; that it was so easy to forget someone.

The feeling of sadness stuck with me for the day. In the evening I was ushering for a Stage Prophets musical, The Children of Eden. It was a joyful musical but I had a hard time feeling joyful. A friend of mine was responsible for costume design and the costumes were truly imaginative and amazing. the first act was about Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, the second act about Noah and the Flood. In both acts a host of animals participated, from mice to elephants, alligators to ostriches. The giraffes in particular were applauded. I do have to say though that the musical did not portray God ("Father") in a particularly positive light. he seemed a tad vindictive, who justified his actions as the exigencies of fatherhood. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it was definitely an enjoyable performance. Not exactly a cast of hundreds, but pretty darn close.

FYI, the photos of Yohan here are clips from other photos which I did because I had apparently "lost" all my photos of him. I'll try to scan some of the better photos of him from that old 1998 road trip photo album.

CAPS OFF

truck in the garage undergoing major repairs. all my friends are urging me to get rid of it and i am coming round to that conclusion but i spent last night going thru all my photos of the truck and realize i am now in serious mourning. since yohan is gone sadly the truck is my biggest relationship going and giving that up is not easy. i really must get a life...

i bought this truck in 1994, it is a 1991 4-cyl automatic chevy s10 with an extended cab and bench seat in the front. in 1996 i added a canopy, a cover for the truck bed so that i could turn it into a camper for long trips.

my first long trip was in 1997, i travelled in october from vancouver to toronto and back for my eldest son's wedding. i remember that i spent my first night in the back of the truck in the crows nest pass in the rockies, the temperature went below freezing and my water had ice on it in the morning but i survived nicely in my sleeping bag under the canopy in the back of my truck. i still had yohan then, he survived nicely too. breakfast was a cold affair, cold cereal eaten with gloved hands on the side of the highway.

my next big trip was a four month odyssey travelling from vancouver to inuvik to newfoundland and red bay labrador, and back to vancouver in the summer of '98. i managed to visit every province and territory except nunavut, i'm not sure there is or was a road to nunavut. yohan accompanied me on that trip too but met with a serious accident in dawson city (of yukon gold rush fame) in which he was run over by a camperized van. he survived but i very nearly didn't, it was a very traumatic episode. when he was in the dog hospital i spent a night contemplating his death and wondering what to do next. by morning i knew the whole trip was cancelled if he wasn't coming. he survived and we continued our trip, but the writing was on the wall and i had the grim task of putting him down a couple of months after we got home. i still miss him.

1986, yohan in his prime:


1997, yohan in the news (if you click on it you might be able to read the text):


1997, somewhere in saskatchewan, our first road trip:


since then i've done a few more trips on my own without yohan, including a trip to atlin bc in 2000, the furthest north town in bc. you have to go up the alaska highway into the yukon and then turn back into bc to get there. i went to tennessee in 2006 to spend the summer at the farm.

i wish i had been keeping a blog all that time because i have rather lost track of all the trips i made, i know i went to toronto and nova scotia once or twice during that time and probably about half my trips were made through canada or the us. the first time i travelled in the us i was afraid, i had heard so many horror stories about travelling the us that i thought it was unsafe. but after the first trip i put most of those fears to rest and very much enjoyed the change of scenery and many different routes you could take. in canada there is only one route, the trans-canada, and after you've done that a few times it gets old.

so i've had the truck for fifteen years, it's a part of my life, a part of me. turning that page is really really hard and i am not sure i can do it. the mechanic who is working on my truck disapproves, he believes it is a solid truck, he calls it an iron workhorse, and it could be kept going forever. my friends say that is not true, it will just get more and more expensive and unreliable, and with the kind of long distance driving i like to do, it is just not up to the task anymore. i have no expertise in the matter, i don't know who is right, i just know that it really hurts to give it up.

1997, fall in the kawarthas (ontario):


2000, heading north to the yukon:


2004, on the enchanted highway in north dakota:


2006, at the farm in tennessee:


2006, visiting toronto:


2008, winter in toronto:


2009, summer in nova scotia: