Letters from Alaska

Gold fever struck the dreamers and discontented like a sign from God. John and Harley Young watched in dismay as their daddy packed his things, kissed their mother goodbye and set off for Alaska, his eyes shining with expectation and promises to return a rich man.

He reached his destination in 1898, Nana told me, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a determination to dig until Doomsday and a yearning for the easy life that would follow. He was a rough and tumble young man then, hard drinking, hard fighting, ambitious and with a family to support. It was no Sunday picnic, he wrote in his rare letters home, the cold was unforgiving and the nights empty, but each day was a new start and the strike would come any day, he was sure of it. He prospected alone and optimistically for months and then years while John and Harley did odd jobs and their mother took in washing and worked in the factory. By the time they reached their teens, he had been gone over ten years - they could barely recall his face and their pretty young mother had given up and grown old and bitter. When they were sixteen and eighteen, John and Harley signed onto a whaler out of Newfoundland and set to sea, faithfully sending part of their wages home each month and promising to be home by spring. The letters from Alaska had stopped by then, Nana said, no one knew why or cared enough to find out. Whaling was profitable and the boys did well, returning as promised in the spring, filled out and muscled from the labor, grown to manhood after a single voyage and both bearing an uncanny resemblance to the man who had gone to search for gold. But not in their eyes, their mother told Nana, They look like him but they have my eyes.

It was, people predicted, only a matter of time before John and Harley were compelled to search for him. They traced the letters from Alaska to the Klondike, then to Skagway and then to Dawson City. Fearing the worst, they prowled the saloons and dance halls, the hastily built and shoddy hotels, the brothels. They spent an entire whaling season following rumors and sightings but it came to nothing - the man who had left them, for all his dreams of gold and an easy life, had been swallowed up in a wilderness. He was in all likelihood, dead and buried in some forgotten mine camp, perhaps had drowned in the great ocean or fallen prey to an unfriendly knife fight over a claim or a prostitute or a cache of gold dust. They returned to Newfoundland and then headed for New Bedford,
dispirited and discouraged, giving up not being in their nature, and still wanting answers. They wanted to know that he'd at least intended on coming back, Nana said, that he hadn't just deserted them. Good riddance is what I say!

The last letter from Alaska arrived years later, too late for their mother who went to her grave hating the man she had loved and blaming herself for his wanderlust. It had been carried all over the Yukon by a gold miner who had made a deathbed promise to deliver it in person come hell or high water. It told of a mining accident and a man too injured to recover, a man who contracted pneumonia and eventually died in a makeshift Dawson City hospital. He wrote asking forgiveness, sending his love to his sons, trying to explain. He hadn't found much gold but he included a good sized leather pouch of shiny nuggets, worth a small but measurable fortune and he hoped it would make their lives a little easier as it hadn't his. Instead, John and Harley Young fought bitterly over the nuggets, John wanting to throw them into the ocean, Harley wanting to put them to some use. They eventually divided them equally and went their separate ways.

And that, Nana finished, is why dreamers are dangerous. The Young boys haven't spoken a word to each other in the last ten years and no good came of the gold. Mind me, child, there's all kinds of fevers and they're all the devil's work. They won't bring you a thing but sickness and heartache.

I fell asleep and dreamed of snow mountains and wild rivers, letters from Alaska, gold fever. My grandmother, for all her practical wisdom, common sense and good intentions, may have been right about fevers - but I was sure she was wrong about dreamers.