Dancing Across Canada

America

I choose the wrong line at the border. The cars around me are passing quickly through their checkpoints, while the ones ahead of me are held almost long enough to turn their engines off. Eventually it’s my turn, and I pull up and hand over our passports.

Where are you going? the young, male guard asks.

The Yukon, I tell him.

He asks why, and I give my quick speech – I used to live there, I was home visiting family for the winter, now I’m driving back, and my sister is coming.

What are you going back there for, to hang out with bears?

I can’t think of a quick enough response to his joke, and I break eye contact and mumble something about yes, there are lots of bears there…

And his tone changes.

Any fruits or vegetables? he asks.

Yes, I say, mentioning the groceries we just bought last night for dinner.

Any tobacco or alcohol?

I tell him about the small amount of pipe tobacco I have with me.

Any plants or seeds?

I look down at the little green plant my friend Kale gave me as a parting gift, sitting in a cup holder.

Yes, I say.

And do you have vaccination records for your dog?

This time I say no.

He hands us our passports and tells us we’re going to need to pull our camper into the bay so they can search it.

After locking Soul in a cage in the waiting area, we’re ushered to a desk to speak with an Agricultural Specialist. He starts going through the list of un-importable substances, of which we have many – planting seeds, cooking grains, citrus fruits, exotic vegetables.

And then he asks, any firewood?

Suddenly it occurs to me that these border guards might not look so happily upon the wood stove I’ve installed in my camper.

It’s a very tiny wood stove – it’s made for boats and RVs. And while there’s nothing that says it’s illegal to do this, there’s also nothing that says it is. In the Yukon, where there are a handful of camper vans driving around with smoke stacks rising from their roofs, this is a pretty normal thing to do. But when I talk about it in Ontario, people are a little weirded out. They’re concerned whether this is actually allowed.

The answer is, I don’t really know. But I did it anyway.

So when the agricultural specialist asks us if we have any firewood, I say no – but quickly also say that, well, we have some sticks, which is true. The stove is so small we’ve just been burning sticks we find lying around.

He asks why, exactly, do we have these sticks?

I look him in the eye, smile stupidly, and say because?

It seems better than announcing the presence of a wood-burning appliance inside my gas-guzzling motorhome to a roomful of government officials.

Then we get to the dog. I don’t have any proof of her vaccines, though I know she got them before I took her home from the shelter. But this isn’t good enough. Though I’ve brought her back and forth across the border before, this time they tell me she isn’t allowed into the states without these records.

It starts to look like we are going to be sent away. We’ll have to drive all the way up through Ontario, right back past our home.

We’re sent to sit and wait again while our guard speaks to his supervisor about the dog. I feel almost relieved - no one is going to search through the camper and discover the stove.

After a while the guard returns to tell us: they’re going to make an exception. But this is on my file now – I won’t be let into the states again without these records.  

And so the agriculture specialist heads out to search our vehicle.

Afterwards he goes over his list with us again, telling us everything he had to confiscate. We won’t be able to plant Amanda’s carrots, basil, or calendula. He took our okra and our limes. Our buckwheat, our tomatoes. And the plant Kale gave me.

Then he gets to the section on wood.

He pauses, looks me in the eye, and says, knowingly, I took your firewood.

Anitya, or An, or Little Orphan Annie

Two years later I am heading back across the country on the same long drive – this time with my sister, my dog, and a new camper.

After flying home to spend the winter with family in Ontario, I’m returning to the Yukon where I left Bert. To sell him. As cool as Bert is, I’ve outgrown him. I’m after a more practical vehicle I can drive (and attempt to live in) year round, a home big enough for both a bed and a table, a space I can work from and invite guests into. Bert was just big enough for me and for a while that suited me. But I’ve stopped feeling like I need to be alone all the time.  

I dream of a tiny school bus home and spend the winter searching for one. Mid-winter I go on a meditation retreat where I hear the same word every day: Anitya (ah-nee-chah). It means impermanence – it means the nature of reality is that things change. I leave the retreat joking that I will call my bus Anitya, because if anything has taught me about impermanence and change, it’s owning an old vehicle.  

But the bus never materializes. I don’t find what I’m looking for.

This is how I end up buying an old Chevy truck and a huge camper that sits on the back of it three weeks before I take off. It’s big and ugly but I’m grateful for the four-wheel drive and the extra space.

At the licensing bureau I wait eagerly to see what letters will be on my new license plate. That’s how Bertrand got his name – the BTND on his plates. This is how my new truck will find its name too. I’m handed my new plates and look down to see two letters – AN. The first two letters in Anitya. Or the girls name, Ann. The truck is even red – like Anne of Green Gables, like Little Orphan Annie. A redhead I rescued from a junky storage lot it had sat in, alone, for years.

After a frantic few weeks where my whole family helps me get my camper in shape, I leave for the Yukon in my expanded pack of wayward ladies: Amanda, Soul, An, and me. 

Two hours into our drive, we stop in Sarnia before crossing the border into the States. We go into a Canadian tire to buy some maps. Half an hour later we come out to find An surrounded by firefighters, Soul barking frantically at them all, a police officer just pulling his baton back to smash through the window.

My engine had been on fire. Someone had seen smoke, flames shooting out from underneath, called 911.

It turns out the cable leading from my battery to my starter had been rubbing against a piece of metal attached to the exhaust. The heat had worn it down to bare wire, starting a fire and melting all the other wires around it. Somehow the fire put itself out before blowing up my entire vehicle. I got lucky.

Yukon Vegetarian

When I move to the Yukon I begin fishing again for the first time since I was a girl. I buy a cheap rod and spend my time casting into whatever lake my friends are going to. My first catch is a pike that makes me feel uneasy, yet empowered, as I learn to kill it and remove its guts. After a few more fish I begin to feel proud: I’ve finally taken on my responsibility as a meat eater. I eagerly anticipate hunting season.

Soon I start spending a lot of time with a beautiful Buddhist man, and it is like a light turning on in a dark room. Slowly, but steadily, a strong meditation practice develops. Morning and night my legs are crossed and my mind is stilled. Answers to confusing existential questions I’ve always struggled with, like “what is the point of anything?” suddenly seem uncomplicated.

And the stark simplicity of the Buddhist value Do No Harm strikes me as clear as the unblinking eyes of those fish I killed.

When I repeatedly bludgeoned them over the head while their bodies twitched and tried to writhe from my grip, I certainly felt like I was harming them.

My interest in hunting evaporates. I shrug out of fishing plans. And I find myself stricken with a moral dilemma: if I’m not willing to kill the meat I eat, am I comfortable allowing others to kill it for me?

To avoid hypocrisy I become a vegetarian.          

I spend my winter learning all the different ways you can combine grains and legumes and vegetables and end up with different dishes. By spring I’ve developed a stomach ulcer and I’m craving every piece of meat I see.  

Then I meet a man who lives in the woods and hunts for his year’s worth of meat and owns three guns which he often takes with him on casual hikes in case he comes across something in season. The first time we speak on the phone he tells me he’s cooking ground squirrel, which he uses for target practice but, not wanting to be wasteful, makes sure to eat afterwards.

On our first date he cooks us steak. It’s the first red meat I’ve had in months, and I’m able to eat the whole thing without aggravating my ulcer. I feel great. I start spending as much time eating dinner with him as possible, enjoying the freedom of digestion I feel with the hamburgers and short ribs he prepares for me.

One day he suggests I try shooting his gun. I agree, curious, wondering if my return to meat means I must again take responsibility for the animals whose bodies I use as sustenance.    

After a short safety lesson we choose a fallen tree for me to shoot. I aim, mentally prepared with memories of firing plastic guns in arcades. I pull the trigger and without warning the gun kicks back, hard, like a foot to the shoulder, a threatening rip explodes in my ear, the creek shatters where my bullet hits it, missing the log.

I quickly hand the gun back, terrified.

In the following days a new certainty comes to me. My body wants to eat meat. My mind doesn’t want to kill things. And here I am, spending time with a man who is respectful, thankful, spiritual about his process of taking the lives that feed him. He is happy to do so. He is happy to be the one raising the bludgeon, aiming the gun. And he is happy to share the food he finds.

Finding my Soul

Soul stands silent in a swirl of frantic huskies, staring at me. Tall, dark, and beautiful, she is the one I came to the shelter to meet. A Collie, or a Retriever, two years old or six, no one seems to be sure. But after taking her on a short walk, I am sure she is the dog I’ve been waiting for.

I started looking for my Soul after a breakup, inspired by my heartache and the symmetry I saw between that man and his dog. He was more than a man, he was a Man and His Dog, and their exit from my life left an absence the size of both of them.

I wanted this for myself. I wanted a dog like a fence around my yard, to strengthen the boundaries of my home, to extend the space that was mine. I wanted to be more than myself. A Woman and Her Dog, a clarity the shape of both of us.

So I bought a dog-training manual and began visiting the shelter every week. A year later I moved into my camper and, still dogless, continued searching as I travelled across the country. When I arrived in the Yukon I noted the location of the humane society and began regularly checking their website for new arrivals.

In the meantime I did a lot of other things. I built a home for myself in a very tiny camper, and figured out how to drive it 7,000 km while it constantly broke down. Then I figured out how to assimilate into a new city and find work for myself while living out of a vehicle in a Walmart parking lot. I started writing for a newspaper. I got bored of the Walmart and started culling a selection of near-wilderness locations around town that I could camp at. I lived off-grid and rent-free for six months. I began, and ended, an important, life-direction-altering relationship. I moved into a dry log cabin and learned to keep myself warm at 40 below with wood I taught myself how to chop. I started spending more time alone than I ever have. I stopped drinking almost entirely. I started meditating regularly. I made a relief-rich peace with the Christianity I was raised in.

At some point I stopped checking for dogs on the shelter’s website. I could no longer locate the strong need I had felt to find one.

But one day my curiosity resurfaces. I go online to find a picture of a shiny black dog whose eyes pull at me.

When I finally have that feeling I’ve been waiting for – a startling sense of certainty backed by favourable behaviour reports from shelter staff – it has been over two and a half years since I began looking.

I initially name my new dog Solace – that is what she will be, my source of comfort, the solace in my solitude.

And so it is hard to describe the incredible dismay I feel when, after two weeks in my life, she runs up behind a man as he’s walking past our car, and bites him in the bum. He swears in pain, the dump we’re at enters a sudden strained silence, soon cut by the angry yells a woman is directing at me. The man is fine; more shocked than hurt, but I head home feeling like I’ve adopted a terrible monster.

What I’ve actually adopted with this dog is responsibility. My dog has an unknown history, rumours of abuse, and is entirely relying on me to teach her the rules of the human world. And she regularly challenges me to see if I’m up for the job. Many days – like that time she chased an older lady away from our camper, terrifying her – I don’t feel like I am.

Gradually, after many instances of yelling the peace-connoting word Solace at an implacable dog, her name shortens itself to Soul.

My dog doesn’t make me more than myself in the way I once wanted her to – I am learning what I look like without blending myself with someone else. But she does challenge me to be a leader. She asks me to take care of her.

Cabin Living

On the first day of November I drive twenty minutes out of town to a Yukon-style ‘suburb.’ It’s a cabin community, a small area in the sprawling wilderness where a collection of people have built their homes.

I turn off the highway onto a road that cuts through the forest towards the river. Occasionally driveways split off on either side, sometimes leading to wooded-dwellings with smoke curling from the chimneys, sometimes heading too far into the bush to see. White haired mountains loom over the whole scene.

It’s a long, winding, and very hilly country road, already coated with a thick layer of snow, and Bert doesn’t have winter tires. He slides dangerously, and the way in is mostly downhill. I begin to realize he probably isn’t going to make it back uphill to get out.

He’s here for the winter.

But I’m okay with that. Because I’m driving towards a huge chapter out of the book of my dreams.

After a chilly October of shivering in and out of my clothes inside a snow-coated Bert, waking to frozen water jugs each morning, and giving myself carbon monoxide poisoning with the ‘safe indoor heater’ I bought, I’m ready. I’m ready to start paying rent again, at least for a while. I’m ready to get a job to support my increased cost of living. I’m ready to tuck myself somewhere warm and comfortable for the winter.

As I get out of Bert and wander down a barely-discernable path through tall, thin, snow-heavy pines, my new home comes into view piece by piece through the slits between the trees.

It’s a small log cabin, all 16 x 16 feet of it hugged close by pines, a short walk from the Yukon river, with no neighbours in eye or ear shot. And it’s all mine.

The whole thing is so familiar, so recognizable, so straight from my fantasies. This is the fairy tale walking off the page.

I’m going to spend my winter living alone in a cabin in the woods.

I unload an armful of the firewood I cut myself a few weeks earlier (for which I learned how to use a chainsaw) strategically selecting smaller pieces that don’t need to be chopped (another skill I’ll have to learn – and quickly), and perform the act I will repeat countless times throughout my days here: I start a fire in my little wood stove.

To get water I put two big blue jugs on a sled and pull them over to my neighbour’s, where I fill them from a tap outside their house. When it gets too cold and the tap freezes (which it does, in the few weeks the temperature sinks to -40) I bring my jugs through a side door into their basement and fill them from the laundry tap.

I use this water for everything – drinking, cooking, washing myself, tons and tons of tea in a little pot I keep almost constantly simmering on the wood stove.

The jugs sit above a sink, which simply drains into a big bucket under the counter. I have to be very careful to remember to take this bucket outside and empty it before it fills, and overflows, and covers my floor in gross, old, dirty, smelly water. I very frequently forget.

Beside my cabin is my outhouse. Unlike most of the outhouses I’ve used in Ontario, which have a door on the front that makes one not want to breath while using them, mine is open to the world, while you sit you can watch the birds, the moon, smell the trees. It has Styrofoam around the seat, which, in the depths of winter, acts as an insulator, using your body heat.

I shower once a week when I go into town, sometimes at friend’s houses and sometimes by sneaking into the college gym.

I have electricity, but I don’t have Internet. I listen to my radio almost all day – it gets four stations.

I read a lot. I write in my journal. I cook. I meditate. I sit in front of the floor to ceiling windows and watch birds land on trees only three feet away. I cuddle with my neighbour’s dogs who often show up on my porch and bang the latch with their noses to be let in. Sometimes I’m invited to use my neighbor’s sauna.

And I tend my fire, my constant project. I learn how to keep it going through the night, so I’m not waking at 4 a.m. to stoke it. I often pause to marvel at how long the same fire has been alive, weeks at a time without going out. I become confident in my chopping skills. Sometimes it’s a daily chore; sometimes I chop enough for a whole week. Some days I get sick, and I haven’t prepared enough wood, and I have to bundle up and walk down to where the wood is piled in front of Bert, dig some logs out of the snow, carry them back to my axe out front of the cabin, and chop while my nose drips or my head pounds or my back hurts.

But there is truly nothing like the feeling of a little home of your own kept warm with a hearth.

Symon 

When I move into my housesit I extend an offer to a number of friends from home: come visit. I have all this space! One of my favourite and most trusted friends accepts my offer.

Symon arrives at the end of August, fresh off a four day Greyhound bus ride from Toronto. He’s excited to be in a Territory for the first time, and I’m excited to show him this new Northern part of the world I’ve been calling home. We plan to spend the two weeks he’s here adventuring as much as possible, and reading and writing and baking bread around the house whenever we’re not. 

I anticipate all this like the return of a fond memory. Symon and I have lived together before. We loved each other for two years, moved to Toronto together, made a home for ourselves in a tiny apartment there, and then broke up. We ended up continuing to live together for two months after our split. It was a terrible time that I have always felt hugely grateful for.

Sharing tragedy is bonding. It’s a classic narrative trope – a dog dies and two lovers are brought closer together. In this case we had died, the unnamable thing that lived only between us. We were with each other through our own death.

That was over two years ago and much has changed, but my feeling of kinship with Symon has not. He lives in the heart’s trusted inner circle called: Family. 

So when, after a few days of total immersion in each other’s company, we have our first fight, I am both surprised and not surprised. There are only a handful of people I trust enough to fight with, and they all have names like Sibling, Parent, Friend Since Kindergarten. 

But there seems to be something else here. A tension older than our sudden close-quarteredness. Something that has been sleeping since we last spent this much time together. A ghost. 

In anger, Symon gives me these words: there is a difference between centering yourself and becoming self-centered. 

After a few hours apart Symon bakes a peace-offering bread, I cook an apology soup. Our animosity dissolves. But the ghost doesn’t. In the coming days and weeks we continually return to this place of injured communication.

Near the end of Symon’s trip, to culminate our days of hiking and nights of Bert camping, we plan a longer excursion. We head into the wild of Kluane National Park, land of looming snow-peaks, where grizzly encounters are not at all rare. It’s a part of the Territory I haven’t seen yet, and Symon has all this new backpacking gear he’s been waiting to use. Neither of us has done a multi-day hike in years. We’re totally pumped. 

We arrive at the trailhead way behind schedule, but we have a hard time caring. The sun is out, we’re well fed, the world is absolutely beautiful. We gear up. We take a lot of photos of ourselves. Then we begin the hike up the creek bed, into the fold of the mountains.

It’s slow going. The bed is all round stones, every step uneven and shifting. In many spots the creek is too high to cross, we have to take our shoes off and wade through the very swift, very cold water. 

But still we seem to make it to the halfway point in good time. We congratulate ourselves with a long lunch break. Eat brie and drink straight from the mountain-descended stream. We can’t stop marvelling at this private beauty we find ourselves in.

Soon it starts to rain. We cover our bags, put on full rain gear. The creek bed starts to slope upwards more dramatically. The sun suddenly seems to be dipping behind the mountains.

It’s an unmarked trail we’re on, but the directions we read ahead of time were simple: hike up the creek until it splits. Keep to the right. This is where the real climb starts. At the top: a small and secret lake awaits in the hug of a mountain.

When we reach the split in the creek we are surprised to find it is not a simple fork. The creek now has five prongs. We’re confused. Do we take the first split to the right? Do we venture further, to the last split, and keep right there? 

It starts to hail.

We quickly choose an option: keep right at the first fork. We start up. The ascent is ruthless. We gain elevation along with a vantage of the other forks. We begin to doubt our choice. After a brief hail-pelted discussion, we head back down.

We weigh our options. It’s past dinner and I am weary. I don’t think I can hike up another wrong creek bed without eating. Plus, our light is failing. Symon wants to keep going. I don’t think I can. It isn’t exactly a fight, but I end up winning. We set up camp where we are, with plans to continue in the morning. 

When we wake up it’s still raining. We peer up at the creek fork we now think is the one we want. A fog sits heavily upon it. If we go any higher we won’t be able to see where we are. And we’ll still be sitting around in the rain. We decide to stay put. We spend the day inside our tents, taking turns reading out loud to each other, playing a lot of twenty questions, creating our own game out of stones. We don’t fight once.

The next day we hike out, happy, rested, a new sense of peace growing between us. The sky clears, the fog lifts. We can see where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. The ghosts of the previous storm are gone. 

Impermanence 

At the beginning of August I move into someone else’s house and start living with their dog. I'm housesitting, something common in Whitehorse. When people go on vacation, they let other people stay in their homes. Often just to keep an eye on the place, sometimes to take care of pets and plants. A typical housesit is around two weeks long, but mine is going to be a little longer. For two months, as the Yukon summer ends and the temperature cools into fall, I will be generously provided a rent-free roof over my head. And a dog to play with. 

My last morning in Bert I wake in my usual way: to the beauty of the Yukon landscape, just outside my window. I am sadder than I expected. Why would I want to wake any other way? 

I arrive at my housesit and let my new dog, Pippin, out of her crate. She goes into the backyard but stands there, looking at me. I start bringing a few things from Bert in to the two-story house – some clothes, some books. They take up very little space. I decide which of the bedrooms I’ll sleep in. I choose one of the three bathrooms to use. Pippin comes in from the yard and spends the rest of the day sitting on the couch, staring at me. 

I quickly begin to resent Pippin. She is a well-trained dog – trained to live on someone else’s schedule. I’ve been living schedule-free, my inner rhythm guiding me. No responsibility. And I feel homeless without Bert. The return to ‘home’ as a static base I must return to every night feels like a jarring shift into reverse. 

One day I take Pippin fishing with some friends. I let her off her leash, and she wanders into the woods, stopping to smell everything. Every few minutes I call her, worried about losing someone else’s dog. Every time she stops what she’s doing, comes to the edge of the woods, lets me know where she is. Every time I let her wander a little longer. When my friends try calling her, she ignores them. When they try petting her, she ignores them. I only need to say her name once, and she’s at my side. 

I realize what’s happening: I’m her person. I’ve never been a dog’s person. 

It feels like this: we trust each other.

At night Pippin politely waits for me to invite her up onto the bed. She sleeps curled into the curve of my knees. In the morning she shimmies up to the pillows and licks my chin. I wrap my arms around her. We fall back asleep.

I begin taking pleasure in the routine of our regular walk through the woods near our house. Pippin’s love of this forest, her forest, is contagious. I start to build my own relationship with it as I learn where each trail leads, how to identify the different berries it grows, watching it change as the leaves begin to light with the fire of fall.

I introduce Pippin to Bert, and she soon knows him as our Other Home. I can take her anywhere and she’s happy to lie on Bert’s bed, or wander in and out of his back door, alternately exploring and checking in on me. 

When we walk out into the newly white world after the first September snowfall she runs into the powder like the arms of an old friend.

She’s even with me when, due to circumstance, I’m forced to try my thumb at hitchhiking for the first time. 

The night before my housesit ends I find myself scrambling to gather all the bits of my things I’ve scattered about these past two months. I can’t imagine it all fitting back into my truck. 

Sharing Space

Two weeks after meeting Duncan in Dawson City, he unexpectedly calls me on the phone. His boss tried to kill him with a sword and he needs to leave town immediately. Can he stay with me? 

Duncan hasn't met Bert. He knows I live in a camper, but he doesn't know what it looks like. He doesn't know that Bert's ceilings are just the height of my head, that his bed is exactly long enough for me to sleep on my belly with my toes touching the walls. 

I don't want to say no, but it's genuinely hard for me to say yes. Duncan is six foot four (and three quarters). I don't know him very well. He's just been mysteriously chased out of a small Northern town with a sword. But mostly, I don't want to share my space. My days are spread between writing at the library, using internet at the cafe, showering at the campgrounds, peeing at the Walmart. Bert is my one personal corner of the universe.

Duncan hitchhikes down from Dawson and I pick him up behind the Tim Horton’s, smiling in his overalls. He puts his two big bags in the back and I drive us to one of the places around town I like to camp.

Right away he starts unpacking, asking for good spots to keep his things out of the way. He adds his food stash to mine. He hunches over Bert’s stove to cook us dinner, starts the dishes right after. He graciously folds himself to fit into the little space I have to offer. 

The next day Duncan and I go about my regular routine. At the library we work quietly across from each other, pause to share jokes. When I stop to fill my water jugs he’s out the door unscrewing the lids before I am. He watches the way Bert and I do things and is careful to do it that way himself. A comfortable rhythm quickly develops.

We end our days early, driving out of town to cook dinner by the river and fish and read in the sun. My normally largely solitary time fills easily with Duncan’s generous and unintrusive presence.

Before long I realize there is another reason Duncan has come to Whitehorse. And though he's slipped so seamlessly into the intimacy of Bert, I know it’s a space I can’t continue to share with him.

Early on a Monday morning I drop Duncan off on the side of the Alaska Highway in his overalls, shouldering his two big bags. I watch a few trucks pass him, ignoring his thumb.

Northern Exposure

My first skinny-dip comes among a swirl of firsts. It happens in Atlin, my first time in that pretty city, in my first month of living in the Yukon. It’s my first time taking my clothes off where strangers can see me, my first time standing tall and nude in the unshielding bright of day. 

It’s also my first time introducing my flesh to Northern waters.

The woman I am with has done this before, has done a lot of things I haven’t. The stretch of beach out front of my camper is totally exposed to the road and all the music-festival goers walking along it, but she easily tosses her clothes aside and is in the water before I finish hesitantly removing my socks. 

“It’s cold!” she yells, surfacing, “but good!”

I follow her into glacial-fed Atlin Lake, my feet turning to slippery, useless cubes by the time I am deep enough to do anything that might look like swimming. I dive forward, arms swinging around to enter the water before me, a graceful moment before the freezing water locks my body into a tight-jointed shock. I leap up, disoriented, my limbs not knowing what they are supposed to do to get me back to shore.

Afterwards, dripping dry in the sun, I feel something has been won. Surprisingly, it has less to do with the older couple walking past and smiling at my unashamed public nudity, more to do with offering the unyielding northern elements my own thin flesh. 

My second skinny-dip comes only a week later, at a different music festival. This time more comfortable with the idea, more aware of what to expect, I nonchalantly remove my clothes on the bank of the Yukon, even warning a neighbouring river group of my forthcoming nakedness. Once again my dipping partner, more experienced than I, has entered the water ahead of me. I follow unruffled, expecting the cold, expecting to lose my senses.

And I do – the Yukon River, if any warmer than Atlin, is not by much. But again the frantic dash back to shore is no defeated retreat from battle. It’s a glorious, albeit awkward, homeward march. I’ve met the elements as they come, in the most basic way I come. 

By the time I find myself skinny dipping in Hidden Lakes after a sweaty hike on a warm, plus twenty-degree day, I think I know what I’m in for. Like always I seem to be the last one to take my clothes off, the last one in the water, postponing the inevitable shock of the cold.  

But this time my friends’ admonitions of “it’s not that bad!” actually prove true. The water is totally not that bad. It’s still colder than anything I would have considered swimmable growing up in Ontario, but by Yukon standards, it’s almost warm.

Instead of turning me so numb I forget I even have a body, let alone a naked one, this lake tingles just on the edge of freezing, awakening every nerve ending, leaving me keenly aware of the water touching each part of me. 

I paddle around on my back, heart open to the sky, pale skin meeting the sun, adding my wild body to the natural Yukon landscape.

Working with a Field Biologist

Since arriving in the Yukon I have very deliberately avoided finding a steady job. Not that I haven't needed the money. While living rent-free has greatly reduced the amount of income I actually need, I've still been more poor than ever in my life – watching my savings dwindle down to their last dollar, deciding between one apple or one orange for the week. Before this I didn't know that grocery shopping could be stressful. I didn't know how strongly I would desire to return favours to the friends who have fed and bathed me. 

Especially as my 'poverty' has been some kind of stubborn choice. I could easily pick up any kind of work if I wanted to. But I've liked the pressure of living on the edge of survival, and I've liked having the space to try out other ways of making money. 

Like field biology.

I meet Kim over dinner at a friend's, but I already know who she is. I've seen her house, an individual-sized, portable cabin she decided to build herself at a turning point – turning away from a traditional career path and towards a self-sustained living relying on the fruits produced with her own hands. 

When I first saw her home, she wasn't in it. She was alone in the bush for upwards of a week, paddling a series of lakes, doing some sort of research. I was captivated by the idea of this absent woman, her personal-sized home, and most especially, her solitary work. 

After hearing that I'm in need of money, Kim mentions she's in need of a research assistant. Does it matter that my degree in English Literature and years working as a waitress in no way qualify me for such a job? As long as I can paddle and follow instructions, no. 

This is a great example of what has really come to be my experience of the Yukon. It's true, there are substantially (substantially!!) fewer people up here to compete with for opportunities. But the people that are here are welcoming, willing to teach, willing to share what they know about life and how to live it well.

I work with Kim on two separate overnight trips through Snafu and Tarfu lakes, just north of the BC border, canoeing full days through sun, wind, rain. We're studying otter latrines, sections of shoreline that see repeated otter use. There are talks of developing a conservation area around these lakes, and the purpose of Kim's research is to determine why otters establish latrines where they do. These areas aren't important solely as communal washrooms, they're also otter communication hubs.

Our time is split between two kinds of locations: latrines, and 'test areas', which are randomly gps selected. We gather data at these test areas (how many trees, how tall is each tree, what is the ground cover, how much of the shoreline is visible, etc) to compare with the same data previously gathered at the otter latrines.

At each latrine a motion-sensor camera has been installed, hoping to determine if the same otters habitually use the same latrines or if usage is more revolving. Here we get to review these cameras' secret, strangely voyeuristic-feeling footage – eagles, lynxes, lots of rabbits, sometimes bears, the knees of moose too tall to fit in the frame.

Kim is also a wealth of knowledge on canoe strokes, making camp, skinning and filleting fish, animal tracks (including some large mother bear paired with smaller baby bear prints near our camp...), and plant identification. I feel more like her student than her assistant.

But it is work, in the end, long days of paddling that are as tiring as they are rewarding.

A few weeks later I open my email to a money transfer from Kim, and suddenly find myself, for the first time all summer, excited to go grocery shopping.

Killing My First Fish

The day I kill my first fish I eat a tuna sandwich for lunch. I’m on a bush excursion assisting a field biologist and on our lunch break, which we take on a log on a marshy edge of Snafu Lake, I open a can of tuna I purchased at the Superstore and spread the flaked bits of meat between two slices of bread. 

An hour or so later, casting off a reedy shore on another edge of the lake, I hook a fair-sized pike. It struggles, but not as much as earlier, bigger ones I’d hooked and failed to land. This one makes it to shore and I stand there, letting it circle my boots, unsure what comes next. The biologist is somewhere in the woods behind me, taking a measurement, and I yell, tentatively, “I’ve got one…”

She runs out, grabs the line, yanks the pike up onto the bank. She looks at me as she hands me the light wooden club she uses to whack the fish. “Are you ready for this?” she asks.

Earlier in the day I had revealed to her the limited extent of my fishing experience: when I was a girl I caught a lot of fish with lures my dad baited for me so I didn’t even have to pierce the worm. He would twist the hooks from their mouths while I went off to play, and later they would reappear in a significantly different condition on a plate set in front of me at the dinner table.

Once, though, I wanted to keep a fish that must have been too small. Despite my father’s advice, I was determined – this fish should be our meal. He told me he would only keep it if I watched while it was killed. I would know, forever after, what I was asking him to do.

There is a memory in my mind I can press play on like a video: two men stand around a fish placed on a wooden stump, framed against a blue and sunny Northern Ontario lake. One holds the writhing body in place; the other raises a bludgeon and lowers it, again and again. Blood flies everywhere.

The memory is surely more dramatic than the actual event, but this moment has remained my closest encounter with death. 

It occurs to me shortly before today’s catch: I’ve never killed anything. I’ve never looked at something alive and used my own hands to make it dead.

As I try to keep my squirming pike still with one hand and hold my bludgeon in the other, the biologist warns me it might take a while to die, that it might struggle when I hit it, and that it might keep twitching even after it’s dead.

I say a quick thank you to the fish, and then awkwardly club him between the eyes. He stills. I hit him again, to be sure, and kind of miss, hastily apologizing. Still he is calm in my hand. I take out my knife and slip it into the spot I’ve just hit with the bludgeon. There is almost no blood.

“He’s dead,” says the biologist.

With her direction I slit open my pike’s belly, pull out his guts. I learn what each piece is as it appears – the liver, the float bladder. I scrape out the spinal goop with the back of my thumbnail. The next morning I skewer him on a stick to roast for breakfast.

It isn’t until I do this with three more fish that I understand how easy on me my first was, how gracious he was in his death.

There have only been four nights since arriving in the Yukon that I did not spend sleeping inside Bertrand, but it feels very different from having spent six weeks inside the same apartment. July has been a mobile month, so though Bert and I have rarely separated, we've also rarely parked in the same place. Bert is through and through my private abode, my safe space, but his skin is thin, and the outside world seeps easily in.

This is largely what drew me to van dwelling - a desire to live closer to the earth, to weaken the boundaries separating me from the elemental world. Everyone carries some special memory of a rainy night in a cabin or tent, how close the rain drops sound, how protected you feel in the womb of a small dwelling. Every night is like that in Bert, whether it is the closeness of rain, wind, bird calls, or humans.

This means everywhere we go feels a little different, as my home is always influenced by the environment I park it in. 

We've volunteered at two music festivals - one in Atlin, a gorgeous town in Northern British Columbia boasting the world's highest fresh water island mountain range, the other in Dawson City, infamously referred to as the Vegas of the North. We've fished for Salmon in Alaska, which is, I am sure, the most beautiful place on the planet. We've soaked in naturally occurring 'hot springs' that are about as warm as lakes in Ontario. We've skinny dipped in daylight and moonlight in water so cold it confuses you. We've spent sunny afternoons washing our dishes in mountain-rimmed lakes, mornings dancing in secret camping spots overlooking blue-green canyon waters. We've peed outside more than ever before in our lives.

Hunting for Morels

A year after the forest fire, anarchy blooms in the Little Salmon Carmacks bush. Free-growing morel mushrooms attract transient seasonal workers from all over the world, forming camps with no one in charge. As I plan to leave on a mushroom picking trip into the Yukon wilderness this is what locals press me to be wary of – not the bears I might run into, but the wild humans. We’d all read the recent news articles about rampant disrespect of both forest and reserve: the all-night parties, the tactless trespassing, the litter trails. 

My new friend Lori and I arrive on a Wednesday morning late in the season. Most of the excitement has died down as the mushrooms have become harder to find, but there are still pickers who have been here since the start, as well as food stands, boat taxis, and morel buyers.

The camp we pull into is sprawling, tents wind through the trees housing pickers from across Canada and the US and even the Czech Republic. Many of these people have been living here together since the season began, though they arrived separately. What brings them to this spot is a young man with a powerboat. For $30 a day he will take you across the river to the burn, and pick you up again in time for dinner. 

Lori and I use this camp to launch the canoe we brought, feeling a little like competitors trespassing in what has clearly become a bush community. But we receive anything but territorial rebuff, are rather welcomed as newcomers, offered picking tips, and invited back for the campfire. 

We cross the river and enter the burn, unsure what areas are picked over and what might already be in second growth. We do what a lot of pickers do – pick as a crew, pooling everything.  

On our first day we’re lucky to find a few good patches, mostly spots previous pickers have missed under fallen trees. It’s a lot less picking and a lot more bushwacking, but we still make enough for gas plus a little extra, satisfied we’re at least on a work holiday that will pay for itself.

Back at camp that night we’re ushered into the elaborate communal kitchen that’s been set up, where pickers take turns using the fire and propane stoves to cook their meals. Buckets that were filled with mushrooms during the day are overturned as seats. Beers are passed around. There are shared condiments and water jugs and even a garbage and recycling system, into which I sort the few pieces of litter I came across in the burn. Most of us start drifting towards bed early, worn from the long hours of hiking.

Our second day we’re not so lucky, gathering little more than a fuller appreciation for how picked-over much of the burn has become. We also end up getting turned around in the bush, unsure how far we’ve walked from our canoe, and accidentally stumble onto a Little Salmon Carmacks settlement widely marked with No Trespassing signs. We’re embarrassed, but a waiting boat taxi makes nothing of it, and as our pockets are empty graciously offers to float us back to our canoe for free.

There is a semi-serious joke in the Yukon that everyone comes here running from something. As the initial high of fresh mountain air settles into the familiar dust of daily life, it is becoming evident that I, too, have been running, and from the most classic monster: myself!

And surprise, surprise, I'm still here. I'm with myself every morning when I wake up inside Bertrand to the sound of cars and shopping carts, I'm here when I rush to get myself dressed and across the parking lot into Walmart before I pee my pants, I'm here when I spit my toothpaste into a smelly mason jar I will later sneak down to rinse out in the river. I'm here when I continually fail to meet simple writing goals I set for myself, I'm here when it takes me hours to accomplish daily tasks like washing dishes, I'm here when I, again, trip over the absence of that past lover.

I'm here when I hound myself for my perceived inability to be as happy and productive and social and hard-working and funny and talented and loving and thoughtful and on and on as I think I should.

But what does feel different, in this place that is (geographically) about as far away as I can get without leaving the country, is my complete conviction that my home-honed tools of self-avoidance will no longer work for me. And that feels like a remarkable opportunity.

I'm also here in the many moments graced with the peace of simplicity my lifestyle allows. Like when Art, my very sweet and sincere fellow van-dwelling friend, knocks on my door at 10pm with a litre of sherbet he's left out to melt and a straw in his hand and says, I made you a milkshake.

Nights Thirty Eight and Thirty Nine

Bert and I leave Whitehorse on our first post-arrival road trip, to volunteer as driver support for a bike race from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Haines, Alaska. It's a 240km bike race up and down mountains in a very strong headwind and through an international border. I sit inside Bert for most of the chilly day, leapfrogging our biker through the race so he can stop and refill his water or change his clothes.

Up until now Bert and I were hesitant to cross the border, thinking Bert might seem like a bit of a target with all the little places he has to hide things. But the day of the race the guards are barely glancing at passports, making it very easy for the racers and the drivers to move through. 

Bert and I also take the opportunity of a new sleeping situation to dance again, stopping early in the morning before the race begins to boogie on a pull-off. This highway drive into Alaska is without doubt the most beautiful of our entire trip, foggy and enchanted.

It feels good to be on the road again after a stationary week in town. The best part of living in a mobile home is that my home is, well, mobile. I can go anywhere and never leave the house. This was a great source of comfort on my trip, but a harder feeling to grasp when living in a parking lot and trying to settle into a new community.

Nights Thirty + 

Bert and I have made it to our final (for now) destination: Whitehorse, Yukon. We're living in the Walmart here. This parking lot is more scenic and has better access to nature than any home I've ever had. It's surrounded by mountains and sits across the road from the raging Yukon River. Downtown is an easy bike along the river, as are multiple trails leading up mountains and down canyons and past lakes. Lots of places to dance.

My first new friend in Whitehorse is Art. He finds me examining various 'stop-leak' solutions in Canadian Tire the day I arrive, as it looks like Bert's head gasket has developed a small leak. He ends up driving me around town, showing me where I can shower for a buck, where I can print my resume, where I can fill my water jug. I slowly discover that Art is one of MANY neighbours I have in this parking lot. 

Art lives in his truck. He doesn't have a bed or curtains or any of the fancy stuff I've got. His truck is filled with work equipment he needs for the job he soon hopes to find, so each night he shifts things into the front seats so he can lie down in the trunk, and each morning he shifts everything back.

Most days Art wakes me with a knock on my camper door and invites me over for breakfast. He serves me coffee in a large paper McDonalds cup and cooks us four eggs each with a thick hunk of onion and a cheese slice. He fills me in on the parking lot gossip, rumours about the price-per-pound for mushroom picking, the latest junk the guy living in the wood-stove van is collecting (radiators, it seems).