Bad Singer by Tim Falconer

Author:Tim Falconer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2016-05-02T16:44:34+00:00

Track Ten

“Wordy Rappinghood”

Dawson City, Yukon, is built on myth. By 1898, two years after the discovery of the first gold nuggets in a nearby creek, more than thirty thousand people made the mind-boggling trek to what they considered the Paris of the North. The most popular route meant hiking the Chilkoot Trail from Skagway, Alaska, to the Yukon River before travelling downriver to Dawson. More stampeders turned back or died than made it—and most of those who reached the Klondike discovered the easy-to-find gold had already been found. The exodus started in 1899 with another gold rush in Nome, Alaska, but Jack London and Robert Service stoked the Yukon legend with stories such as The Call of the Wild and poems such as “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” And ever since, people have trekked to Dawson City to reinvent themselves.

In the last two decades, this town of 1,300 full-time residents—1,900 if you count the surrounding communities—has been pulling off its own reinvention by opening the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, or KIAC, and then the Yukon School of Visual Arts. It also hosts annual music, film, and arts festivals. A quarter of the residents now work or volunteer in the culture sector. In the spring of 2012, I headed there—three flights, so not that treacherous—to be writer-in-residence at Berton House, the childhood home of Canadian popular historian Pierre Berton. I wasn’t planning to reinvent myself as a singer, but I hoped that if I became more serious about practising, I could at least start to get a little bit better.

If you research Dawson before you go, you’ll read about a bar called The Pit, characters such as Caveman Bill, and the Sourtoe Cocktail Club, which tourists join by drinking a shot of whisky with a human toe in it. Yes, it’s true, the place is fun, but while I often patronized The Pit and once visited Caveman Bill’s home in the west bank of the Yukon River—it’s surprisingly comfortable—the Dawson I fell in love with is not the cartoonish one I’d read about. Still, Dodge, as some locals call it, is a funny place. I arrived at the end of March, as winter was loosening its grip, and though there wasn’t much traffic, when I crossed the street, cars stopped at least thirty-five feet back. I found this endlessly amusing because back home in Toronto, pedestrians are lucky if drivers slow down before running them over.

Dawson’s signature sight is the massive scar on the slope at the north end of town. Many generations ago, the Hän people saw a stretched hide drying in the sun and called it the Moosehide Slide, but when I look at this rare geological feature, I see The Rolling Stones’ mouth logo. Which is fitting given how important music is here. The Dawson City Music Festival, which predates KIAC by two decades, has hosted many top Canadian acts and some international ones, including one of my faves, Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Not just the town’s biggest event of the year, the festival begat a generation of community and arts organizers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.