Wild night at the Red Onion

The bus from Whitehorse rolled into Skagway late afternoon. It was knocking on the end of September, and the small city's streets which, I presumed, would over the summer months be thronged with tourists disembarking from the cruise liners docked at the quays, were largely deserted. I did not mind this, and rather relished the opportunity to walk the wooden sidewalks unjostled.

Skagway became the place it is thanks to the gold rush, where it was a vital stopping post for prospectors, en route to the gold fields in the Yukon. I had read Pierre Berton's lively history of the gold rush ("Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush", which I would recommend to anybody), and already had a vivid image of the place back in its lawless gold rush days, over a hundred years before.

The modern Skagway was an odd combination of clean parodies of its own history and general tourist tat, and it was with some surprise when, after quite a bit of searching, I finally found Jeff "Soapy" Smith's Parlor (a grand name for an abandoned wooden shed) on Second Avenue. "Soapy" Smith acquired his nickname by being the master of a particular confidence trick - you sell cakes of soap, wrapped in paper, and demonstrate to the punters that you have wrapped dollar bills - sometimes up to a hundred dollars' worth - under the paper of some of the bars. You then sell perfectly normal soap for a dollar a piece, with the punters hoping to get one with the money. Except that the one with the money is never available to the ordinary punters, only to confederates, who demonstrate their "successes", to urge others to buy in.

In the early, lawless, days of Skagway, "Soapy" Smith realised that there were easier ways of making money from the gold rush than by the hard work of mining for gold, and set to work mining the prospectors, instead. To this end, Jeff. Smith's Parlor offered, for a premium, to send messages back to the loved ones left behind. The only problem with this being that "Soapy" Smith's Parlor did not have a connection to the telegraph lines - at the time, there wasn't one, this far north. Before he reached is inevitably bloody end in the summer of 1898, gunned down on Juneau Wharf, "Soapy" Smith was in charge of his own militia. When I visited it, his Parlor was boarded up, in an overgrown yard behind a wire fence, a somewhat sorry memorial to a dastardly, yet undeniably colourful individual.

That evening, having found some food in one of the few restaurants that was still open, I wandered back towards the quay, where the ship that was to take me back south down the Inside Passage was waiting, and sat in the bar of the Red Onion Saloon. As it boasted, albeit in a slightly coy way, it had been a brothel, back in the city's "glory" days, but it had obviously become the contemporary city's local.

Over a beer or two, I watched the summer workers, who would also be joining the ship heading south, as they celebrated their last night in town. It felt like the end of term, as kids who had made friends whilst they worked the summer season said their goodbyes to one another. They partied with a slightly sad air; former strangers who had been thrown together for a time, had fun, maybe even fallen in love, but who knew that they might never see each other again.

In the gent's, somebody had written a short poem of Emily Dickinson on one of the walls. Later, from the bow of the ship, as I watched the city's lights fading off into the night, it seemed to me to match perfectly the wistful mood of the evening:

So set its sun in thee,
What day is dark to me—
What distance far,
So I the ships may see
That touch how seldomly
Thy shore?

Yukon, if you want to

The woman sitting next to me on the plane flying into Whitehorse tells me she knows the mother of the person I’ll be staying with. The chances of this seem wildly remote, until she tells me that she thinks the population of Whitehorse is around 20,000. The plane itself is relatively small, and the interior reminds me of a seaplane I had seen not that long before in an aeronautical museum. It’s a disconcerting first impression, given that, unlike a plane in a museum, my life is rather depending on this one working properly.

As we near our destination, the pilot announces that it’s 4 degrees Celsius outside. The woman next to me says that she heard it snowed last week, and the mountaintops weren’t covered in white – as they are now – when she left two weeks ago. From the air, Whitehorse looks like a grubby collection of ramshackle sheds, nestled against a grey cliff, on top of which sits the airport. We circle the city before coming in to land, and I can see that, further out, it is indeed ringed by snow-topped mountains.

Even stepping out of the plane and onto the telescopic walkway, the air is noticeably colder. The small band of fellow passengers and I walk through the tiny airport to collect our bags. As I realise that, for some reason, it reminds me of a Swiss railway station, in the blink of an eye, the rest of the passengers retrieve their luggage, meet loved-ones and disappear out of the door. I wander outside too, to look for a taxi, and all of a sudden can see my breath. It’s very cold; to me, at any rate. To residents who experience the place during the winter, when it gets down to minus forty, this might just be slightly cool.

Also waiting for a taxi are an English couple, now resident in Phoenix, Arizona. She’s very friendly and chatty, but he’s a bit cooler, and not just in a physical sense. It seems that their visit here is his idea, but she does not appear to be wholly convinced by the plan, and is not reticent about this. I suspect she may have made this clear to him a few times, which might explain his defensiveness.

Eventually, just as I am running out of readily-accessible warm clothes to put on, a taxi arrives and the couple get in. The taxi driver offers me a free ride with the English couple to their hotel, and from there to the B&B where I’m staying. Although the English guy’s expression makes it clear that this is the last thing he would like, my only alternative is to stomp about in the cold outside the airport, tying to keep warm until the taxi can return, so I eagerly accept the offer and jump into the front passenger seat.

Even waiting overlooking the airport car park, it’s clear to me that Whitehorse has a charm of its own. My first reaction that it’s bleakly beautiful, although it also looks like one of those places where, no matter what people may do, it’s Nature that calls the shots.