Welcome to the jungle

I’ve been out for a month and everything has gone mad in my absence. The plants in the yard have grown by feet. Our poor lettuce, beans and peas in the garden are struggling for life amidst towering fireweed and a carpet of chickweed. Our trails are lost to a swaying mass of greenery.

The water trail

Homer is the only thing that has got smaller. He is blowing his winter coat at long last, after suffering nearly 3 months of 30 degree heat and just in time for autumn. He’s always behind the curve, poor thing.

Watching butterflies instead of changing his coat

The dense foliage hides all manner of things. We had a grizzly bear behind the outhouse last week and couldn’t even see it. Luckily Homer pointed it out with a few loud barks. All we could see was trashing greenery and if it weren’t for the prints on the beach we’d have had no idea what the visitor was beyond a very large thing (see footnote).

Neil has not grown or gone mad despite being home-alone for a fortnight. He has set up a consultancy business, which posed a few problems when he had to attend meetings in Vancouver. Getting there was challenging enough.

Sunny Vancouver, a rare moment off shopping

Then we had to buy him a suit and find a barbers. And he had to remember to shave, and then we realised he didn’t have any smart shoes, or work shirts, or a work bag. It was a bit of a faff to go from bush woodsman to communications consultant in the space of one day, but we spent 10 dreadful hours in Pacific West shopping centre and we did it.

High flying businessman outside, err… Wendy’s

The meetings went well and he got lots of work, almost enough to pay for the suit, but then where do we keep all this expensive urban clobber? If we leave it in the cabin it will stink of wood smoke. Not cool for a high flying comms and marketing expert. And the mice might get to it. Nibbled cuffs do not say, “Trust me, I can guide your business through this difficult change process and I am worth my high fee”. 

The only place suitable is our cache. Yes, really. In the old days, trappers stored their furs and supplies in these caches. The tall stilt-like legs, wrapped in tin, stop bears, squirrels, mice and other pests getting to the valuable goods. The roof keeps everything dry. And so modernity reaches as far as the Yukon and we are storing a Hugo Boss suit and some shirts from Ted Baker in ours, along with our empty jerry cans in case of bears. How times have changed.

We pulled off Neil’s incredible transformation but might yet be struck down by our failing internet. Bob, the lovely internet guy in Dawson has given us a new tria arm, 100 feet of new coaxial cable, a new modem and still our internet faints like a Victorian lady at the idea of sending an email and checking Facebook at the same time. We have tried raising our dish higher with wood pallets (yes, it’s all highly technical here) as our line of sight to the satellite isn’t good.

In order to stop the modem overheating we are now running it in the cold cellar. Traditionally a cold cellar is used to store fruit and veg, to stop it freezing in the winter and keep it cool in the summer. Ours now contains state of the art digital equipment in yet another modern twist on a very old design.

Internet from the cold cellar

If we can’t stop the internet failing, Neil won’t be able to work remotely. That’ll be the end of his business and he’ll have to use the suit for gardening and plant beans in his shoes as they’ll be no good for much else. We are hoping it is the intense heat that is affecting the signal and that things will improve. We are suffering a heatwave at the moment, as is just about everywhere else in the northern hemisphere.

Washing naked in the river

Shocked family passing in a boat

By the afternoon we can do nothing except plunge naked in the river then doze in our camping chairs dreaming of all the things we should be doing. Like weeding the garden perhaps.

Beans, lettuce and chickweed

Most of our plants did not survive being left to fend for themselves in the heat. According to The Boreal Herbal*, the native greenery that thrives in our garden is edible and we can feed ourselves quite ably from the land. Don’t believe a word of it.

Cutting fresh salad leaves with a brush axe

We tried lightly boiled fireweed shoots and a rose leaf and chickweed salad. New fireweed shoots taste like asparagus, the book boldly asserts. Rose leaves and chickweed make a great salad. Do they fuck. There’s a reason people cultivate domestic crops instead of sweeping up weeds from the earth.

Roses

Weeds are bitter and nasty and just because you can eat them doesn’t mean you want to. The book has herbal remedies for everything from headaches to asthma. Judging by the salads, I wouldn’t ditch the inhaler just yet. So we’ve forgotten about being all herbal and self-sufficient and reverted to earning cash and buying stuff from the store.

Traffic on the river- the paddle steamer

We made our first journey all the way to Dawson City by boat this summer. It’s about 36 miles upriver. Usually we head 16 miles downriver to collect our truck and then drive in 40 miles over the mountains. A waste of time and fuel but it is so unbearably cold by late summer we can’t cope with being in the boat a minute longer than we need to.

Met these lasses on the beach travelling the Yukon River in style with their pink flamingo

For the moment, we are taking advantage of the heatwave. Homer came too but, without the truck, we have nowhere to leave him so he had to learn to be a dog about town.

A 90 pound husky that has been trained all his life to pull a sled is not the best companion for walking on a leash. I got yanked from one end of town to the other having to high jump the rope every few steps as he lurched to either side of the pavement. Almost every tourist that passed felt the need to enquire if he was part wolf and then take a photo.

Homer, Yukon wolf dog! Only ten bucks for a photo with him

Homer is an old fashioned trap-line Alaskan husky or “village dog”. You don’t see many now. Most mushers prefer smaller sled dogs as they are faster and less prone to injury. Homer is big, with long legs but he’s nowhere near as big or as smart as a wolf. But he enjoyed being The Star of Dawson City for a day and it all went to his head.

Dopey dog amidst the lupins

The next evening, he decided to run off into the woods, we think, after a young moose. He has never left the yard without us before. Chasing moose is dumb, unless you are a wolf and despite what the American tourists tell him, Homer is not. A moose can pound a dog to a pulp. Also, it is not OK to live in the bush and allow your well-fed, veterinary cared-for pet to hassle the wildlife. And most importantly, hunting season starts this week and we don’t want our winter’s meat chased back up into the bloody mountains. So Homer is back on his chain not running wild with the wolves.

Our subsistence lifestyle. Not one grayling so far this year

We have not entirely given up on our dream of subsistence living. Once the weather cools we will start moose hunting. It is 30 degrees out there today but autumn is not far away. The rose leaves are beginning to tarnish, and the flowers have turned to hips, some yellowing already and some almost scarlet. 

Roses in bloom. They produce luscious pink flowers for about an hour a year and aside from that they are a prickly pain in the ass

The raspberries are ripening and the high bush cranberries are beginning to swell and deepen in colour. Perhaps we will stick with being foragers not farmers. Berries is the one crop we can rely on here though we must share them, very respectfully, with our local bears. Most likely our large friend behind the outhouse had come to scoff raspberries. He can have as many as he wants, we shan’t argue and there are plenty to go round.

Temporary lapse of concentration in the office

And with Neil working this hard we’ll soon be billionaires and can helicopter in Sicilian lemons and fine wines from Bordeaux. Stuff the raspberries.

Footnote:  For anyone who doesn’t know, you can tell grizzly tracks by the imprint of their claws in front of the toe. A black bear’s print looks all cute and cuddly with no fearsome claws going on, though they not quite as cuddly as they’d have you believe.

*The Boreal Herbal is actually a very good book. It’s by Beverley Gray. Look it up, but for heaven’s sake don’t try the salads.