Goat Coat

A gift from the dog gods of Dawson. Delivered before a party at the well-funded Berton House;
Jeramy models the Goat Coat.

buildings

2 buildings from Dawson: a Generally typical single room dwelling and "The Pit" (open at 9am though only Canadian is on tap. It's better than Blue I suppose).

A few little drawings

The book continues in something like earnest. There isn't much new but here are a few sketches that're filling out pages.

Settling old scores

The new content on this blog is probably going to slow for a while as I'm starting to compile, edit, hack and otherwise muck around with what exists in the hope and plan of this project as book underway. With that in mind, there are some writings and artwork done earlier that I'm incorporating into this. Some of those stories are about my being a lame kid. While the writing still needs some editing, here, below is one piece with an illustration done last night. I'll leave the context hanging and just put the piece up as is. For your consideration:

.177

Really, who could blame ‘em? As a typical Canadian response to townhouses, strip-malls and snow banks, my parents began to take annual Caribbean winter vacations. Formerly family affairs, these getaways became parent only furloughs. More to the point, in their absence I became the house’s benevolent dictator, ruling over my sister and our dog Charlie with a gentle but power-hungry hand. Mum also left a freezer stocked with TV dinners for Shell and myself. The Hungry Man entrées an appropriate size to assuage her guilt at leaving us to trudge through dirty snow banks, dreary school days and each other’s company while she topped up on sun burns and pool-side margaritas. Surely though, she knew they wouldn’t be the only ones knocking back the booze.

I couldn’t care less about the basement shin-digs Shell invariably threw. She had her role as ne’er do well libertine and I had mine as curmudgeon in waiting. Still at the Peach Schnapps and sparkling wine stage, the carnage that might have been unleashed seemed minimal, but just to be sure I spent those evenings on the living floor with a machete. Watching horror movies with the crudely fashioned but sufficiently intimidating blade laying across my chest, the young’ns had to step over my display of passive canine territoriality to gain entry.

Dear friends of my sister,

Do not fuck around. I’m in charge of the house, the dog and the fridge full of food. Also, you might have noticed I’m working my way though a stack of boob-munching cannibal flicks, and I’m wearing tiger-striped camouflage pants.

Thanks, her older brother

On this night though, the party stepped up to 80 proof and the Crown Royal pulled the Byron skids in like ants to road-kill raccoon. Whatever the fuck went on below was of negligible interest to me, but Shell at least had the sense to try and kick out some of the more antagonistic skids before holes were punched into unfinished drywall. Muffled yelling rose from the basement and they came upstairs but, emboldened by the hard and sweet rye, wouldn’t leave the house. Pressing pause on Cannibal Ferox, maybe I threatened them with the machete.
“Okay guys, out you go.”
“Says who, you?”
"Me and Mr. Pointy, yeah. C’mon, take it down to the river or somethin’.”
“Dude, we’re not going anywhere. That machete has fucking tassels on it.”
“Oh, Jesusfuckingchrist, just go okay!”

And even though they did leave the house, it was only to gather at the parking lot’s battered dumpster to smoke and nurse their anger. Taking matters in hand, up to my second floor bedroom, Shell and her cohorts were left to stew over teen house-party-disaster yet to be averted. Flicking off the lights and climbing to the top of my bunk bed, I quietly lowered the window facing the parking lot, now with a clear line of sight to the dumpster.
Lying on my belly in the dark and reaching down, I pulled up the Russian air rifle – a memento of Montrose’s expansive landscape.

Tugging the barrel sharply downwards, the rifle revealed the breach and charged its single lung. Opening the ammo tin I plucked out a mushroom shaped .177 pellet. Popped it in the breach, closed the barrel and was ready to go. Clean and simple.

Rolling back to the window, I lined up my target in the iron sights. Partially exhaling and squeezing the trigger mechanism past the spring release, there was a click and a sharp pop as the .177, spiraling across the parking lot, hit one of the kids below the “O” of his DIO t-shirt. He yelled out, and in my darkened room I rolled away from the window feeling fairly pleased with my accuracy and also feeling adrenaline’s twitchy side-effect disrupt my attempts to continue my regulated breathing.

This is the skill and discipline that any trained killer needs to master.

Dogtown

In Toronto I don't have any friends who own dogs. While there's a large contingent of dog owners around, they're not in my world. I have a friend who walkes dogs for money but that doesn't count.

The Yukon, though, that is the domain of the canine. Sure there are cats, but they have fear in their eyes.

The first dogs on my trip north were my friend Monika's. She and her boyfriend Jonah were gracious enough to put me up on both legs into and out of Whitehorse. For their hospitality I offered a drawing of her youngest dog in trade. Being the procrastinating (and busy) fella that I am, only last night did I get around to doing the damn piece.

I'll ship it NorthWest later today, but here's the pixel version of the ink version of a dog that has been clocked at 50KmH.

More dogs

Below: Crodmo of the North's drinking buddy followed by a self-portrait from when I was feeling pretty rough.

wildlife art

After numerous Warsteiners in numerous other bars I thought it time to make a return to The Pit and see if it might offer more options for the teetotaler. It also seemed like time to part ways with the Hi-def quietude of The Downtown Hotel in favour of the effulgent drunks.

Sheepishly, I asked the bartender what non-alcoholic options they might have. Having a fake beer in The Pit seems like going to a strip club because they have good chicken wings. Surprisingly, not only was there no Warsteiner, there were several options ranging from soft cider and Labatt Nordic to something looking way too similar to Warsteiner. I took the Nordic and sat down to watch Brazil vs. Côte d'Ivoire.

This, however, is just the back drop to an ongoing little quest of mine. While The Pit on a sunny Sunday reinforces my belief that early afternoon is the best time for a tipple (even if it’s a point five Labatt) I was here looking for wildlife. Like a German tourist Grizzly spotting up on The Dempster, I was on the spy for Crodmo of The North.

This aging drunk has an uncanny resemblance to what I believe South Eastern Crodmo might look like after a few decades of hard livin’. Just add age, bad teeth, a ponytail as well as a hockey jersey and a chipper demeanour and you have time travel version of my friend.

While everyone, myself included was glued to the game I snuck a couple of photos of the man in question and spent the afternoon drawing him. Here he is.

Keeping it social

Paraguay and Italy: 1 all.

I had the Sourdough Saloon (home of The Toe) to myself today... No Euros around except for when Paraguay scored and all of a sudden there appeared a German tourist with a point and shoot to take a photo of the goal on replay. And then he was gone. Another game another crappy Warsteiner which, it turns out, is the only non-alcoholic beer in this town. I might give it a pass tomorrow though I have, however, been considering the Warsteiner shandy option.

There was one other German who sidled up to me and asked, "Is this where Jack London drank whiskey?" I didn't know though I will ask tomorrow when North Korea play Brazil.

Today's production: 1 puppy, 1 backpack, 1 headstone. Tomorrow is a writing day but it also a back to the dump day to try and find a Yukon license plate for The Kid. I have some things to say about the ferry but not tonight.

I went out briefly tonight and walked straight into a conversation about the female equivalent of the bromance. I ordered a Warsteiner and did my part for gender specific lexicons but I should have just turned around.
Bromance, ugh. Let us speak of such things no more.

I just finished a tasty bowl of Corn Flakes and Life and am going to curl up in bed and watch an episode of Lost season 1. I do miss home but its markers, like cereal and Lost, as well as this blog, give me some sense of connection, false though they might be.

Grinding up, floating down

The intermittent rains of the last few days have left a richness in the air that makes running an intoxicating pleasure. Mary Mcleod Rd. is a steep grade that starts near the back of the residency house and works its way up the side of Dome Mountain cresting at the rambling cemetery grounds. Those first 5 minutes are a grind but suffering up the rutted road trumps any happy hour G&T binge down in the town.

A coyote does its own run along the treeline north of the newest burial plots as the grade slackens and Mary McLeod Meets Dome rd. signaling the start of the downhill reward that will eventually loop back along the riverbank and into town.

As I write this I feel a slight giddiness about these runs. Running on and off for 20 years now, those at the age of nineteen were far and away the toughest of my life. In that liminal year between civilian and soldier, teen and juvenile-adulthood almost all the running was hard, fast and without respite. Just completing a run was often challenge enough. Battle School was no place for the faint of will and the ability to disconnect body from mind was a crucial survival skill.

Like all infantry schools, the physical space of CFB Wainwright has a hard anchoring locus, often built around the imposing indifference of a parade square. From this block of flat blackness platoons head out into the training area, paved roads giving way to oiled hardpack and then dirt roads rippling across the broken grasslands – puffs of dust circling low on the ground as they pass by. The occasional truck or APC passes the platoons and the candidates do their best to not mentally project themselves into the easy living of the passenger seat or crew compartment.

Spittle gather on the edges of their gaping mouths as they suck in as much dust-filled air as possible, focusing their blurring vision on the feet in front of them.

But these long ago sufferfests are just a context. It is the unknown periphery of CFB Wainwright that I am thinking about as I turn past the jutting cliff face to my right and onto the hardpack of Dawson. The small, functional homes I’m passing have qualities kindred to the PMQs of bases across Canada. Those post-war family dwelling are clustered dots on the base’s edge and feel like a mirage when your days are spent humping gear and weapons, living in a crucible of adrenaline and ache.

On our rare day off we might venture a run through these unknown zones feeling like the outsiders we surely were. Children run around in the small fenced yards while lines of laundry are dried by winds heading east across Central Alberta’s expansive grasslands, the nearby Saskatchewan border their next marker. Like most prairie living, domestic life perseveres and almost flourishes in spite of and because of the harshness all around.

Again an outsider, I run along Dawson’s 5^th Ave. wondering, where is the parade square, where are the chin-up bars and the quartermaster stores, where is the hard, defining heart of Dawson? This far north there must be a hardness and the characters wandering the streets affirm my belief. Hardness here is in the hills and rivers around town, in the camps and mines that I’ll likely never see but it is also held in the knuckles and fingertips of the guys downing draft at 10am or happy hour (5-7pm) on their day off, perhaps their last day off for some time to come.

**

One foot in front of the other. Each running step gives the briefest moment where the body floats above the ground. One shoe hits the ground, both shoe and ground compress and the tiniest portion of heel tread is left behind, embedded in the oiled dirt of this town that continues to offer small and suspect glimpses into the past.

Before the fall (or jump up)

The boozin' is over. Soon I'll do some sketches of Tonic water bottles (the new beer) but for now an encapsulation of my first ten days. Most of my writing was done while nursing an afternoon bottle or pint so it had its merits.

Just so we are clear

I miss you S. Gerard.