Guys, where are we?

I find myself struck by the mutability of this northern reach. Instead of arriving to an unknown landscape, of tundra and receding snow lines, my sense is of having experienced this place before.

Sitting on a bench, 500 or so feet past the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, on the shoreline I feel the most unsure. Part of my reason for coming here was to consider my youth in small town (village actually) West Kootenays and the weight of experience those years gave me. The slow turning of the Yukon River then, deep and deceivingly fast under the surface offers teleportation most effectively. Behemoth, that’s you.

Flowing north seems wrong, like backwards through some very cold time. Backwards to the awesomeness of fishing for Rainbow Trout on The Columbia River and the wretchedness of school bus stop beatings. Of terror and power.

The Columbia always seemed at odds with the dead landscape of Trail, rushing its occupants through to escape the ill will of the slopes poisoned by the massive refinery on the river’s shore. While Dawson and its architecture are rooted in the very specific lineage of gold (Trail was Lead and Zinc), it’s this, the landscape which is a chameleon, changing to accommodate my past, putting me a bit on my heels.

But unsurity is part of the residency experience – a challenge to produce something coherent when coherence comes only from the accumulation of these fractures.