A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  Later that afternoon, outside a Mayo café, a posse of men swarmed over the back of the White Pass truck, helping themselves to several chunks of rock. The next morning Pike scrutinized the samples, turning them over again and again in his hands. Perplexed and increasingly apprehensive, he called his geologist, Al Archer, and the next day drove up to Calumet to see him.

  “Know what this is?” Pike said, thrusting a fine-grained, silver-grey chunk of raw ore into Archer’s right hand.

  Without any hesitation, Archer replied, “Do I? I know exactly what it is. And I know exactly where it comes from—the Bonanza Stope in the Elsa mine.”

  By that point, the WP&YR truck had chewed up the more than 250 miles between Mayo and Whitehorse, along with two other heavy-laden semis that had failed to come to Pike’s attention. In Whitehorse, their loads of sacked ore were packed onto two White Pass and Yukon railcars and carried over 110 miles and one international border through a mountain pass to Skagway, Alaska. There, once transferred to the 4,000-ton SS Clifford J. Rogers—the world’s first container ship—the ore sailed 1,645 miles down the British Columbian coast to Vancouver. At the West Indies wharf in North Vancouver, the sacks were once again pilfered and samples stolen—this time at the behest of a Vancouver-based consulting geologist named Aaro Aho—before traversing, again by rail, 722 miles to their final destination, the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO) in Helena, Montana.

  Over the following month, Pike would be frantically preoccupied and would learn a great deal, all of a highly suspicious nature: three WP&YR trucks had picked up ore from a loading site on Duncan Creek Road, out of sight of Elsa; the drivers were directed to take Duncan Creek Road straight into Mayo, thereby bypassing Elsa completely, but one driver got turned around and stopped at the Elsa Coffee Shop for directions; the ore in question supposedly came from a group of claims called the Moon claims, a patch of scrub in the hinterland northeast of Keno; and, once smelted, the silver released from that ore would fetch more than $160,000, easily half a million dollars in today’s currency.

  Most disturbing and indeed infuriating to Pike, the ore shipment was registered to Alpine Gold and Silver Mines Ltd., a company he’d never heard of. When all this information and more was relayed to UKHM vice-president and managing director P.N. Pitcher in Toronto, alarm begat action. In early July, Canada’s chief mining inspector, A.T. Jordon, visited Elsa. Shortly after, the head office of UKHM contacted the RCMP’s General Investigation Service in Toronto. The Mounties, in turn, called the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, which ordered ASARCO to hold off smelting the two railcars of ore pending an investigation.

  On August 6, Inspector J.L. Vachon of the RCMP’s Whitehorse detachment announced an investigation into the odd ore shipment, which he believed was stolen from one of UKHM’s premier operating mines.

  The next day, an unidentified Whitehorse RCMP spokesman hinted that the theft was the work of “a skilled international ring.”

  On August 10, criminal charges were laid against the registered shipper of the ore, owner of the Moon claims and former chief assayer of UKHM—my father, Gerald H. Priest.

  chapter 2

  Unexplainable

  We aren’t spliced according to the law.

  They were a couple in contrast—a maddening mismatch. Not exact opposites, but different to such a degree that friends wondered why it took them so long to see the inaptness. Perhaps it was love-lust. Or simply a blind need nested so deep it hid like a slow-growing cancer from their consciousness. At least that may explain the long-lasting attraction and part of the impending disaster.

  He was 6 foot 1. She was 5 foot 2. He wanted to be older. She yearned to be younger, and lied about her birth year to everyone, including emigration officials. She outlived two husbands. He predeceased two wives. He was fair with a high forehead, fine, swept-back honey-brown hair and eyes big and blue as a northern sky. She was brown-eyed, gypsy-eyed, with dark arched eyebrows, light olive skin and a waterfall of blackness cascading over her shoulders. Where he avoided the sun, she worshipped it. Where he was indolent to the point of squalidness, she was enterprising and exact. Her best colour was scarlet, his dove grey. He shunned the modern world. She embraced it. Born in a city, he was happiest in the bush or a town the world forgot. Born in a rural Russian village, she was happiest in a metropolis offering a decent opera and a symphony. He was a devout atheist. She was born and raised a Mennonite, although the brand never took. She saved every letter, card and note he ever sent her (257 letters and 26 cards, plus 3 Canadian National telegrams). He tore up or burned almost every one of hers. Before they met, she had had a capital-L hell-raising, heartbreaking, action-packed, screen-scorching, passion-packed, thrilling, explosive, rollicking, rough and raw Life. In Technicolor. Until she entered, he’d lived a sepia-toned existence—narrow, dreary, punctuated by a strained home life, fleeting friendships, a lacklustre stab at university and tedious work in underwhelming jobs for two-bit mining companies in remote small-town BC. If not technically a virgin groom, he was so emotionally. At their October 13, 1951, wedding in a Fraser Valley Mennonite church, he knew only the bride—no family, no friends, no acquaintances. His best man was a Mennonite fellow she’d asked to stand up for him.

  They were Gerald Henry Priest and Helen Friesen, Dad and Mom.

  I was born August 29, 1953, at the Mayo Clinic, not to be confused with the famous medical practice and research centre in Rochester, Minnesota. Actually, it was the Mayo Hospital in Mayo Landing, Yukon Territory, but “Mayo Clinic” has a better ring. Today, the village—named after mining explorer and former circus acrobat Alfred S. Mayo—is simply called Mayo and has a population of about 230, mostly members of the Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation. The settlement is now a rag of its former self, its only claim to fame recording the hottest and the coldest temperatures in the territory: 97 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 below respectively. The two-storey wood-sided hospital where I arrived was torn down soon after and the replacement hospital was eventually downgraded to a nursing station. But at the time of my birth, Mayo was hopping. The centre of administrative, economic and social activity for the district, Mayo had more than eight hundred permanent residents and was the transportation hub connecting UKHM workers and their families with the “outside,” and bringing powerful political, financial and industrial leaders to the rainbow’s end.

  Back in the day, Canadian Pacific Airlines operated bi-weekly DC-3 flights from Mayo to Whitehorse, where you could connect with CP flights to Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as to Seattle and Fairbanks, Alaska, via Pan American Airlines. All this at a time when there were fewer than ten thousand people in the Yukon Territory, an expanse larger than the state of California, and bigger than Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany combined. Today there are about thirty-five thousand residents, far fewer than at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush. The territory’s small population and vast wilderness appeal to summertime tourists, frontier types and a few low-density fans. Three-quarters live in Whitehorse, the territory’s capital and only city. The Yukon of the 1950s and ’60s was a very different place. Our family—Mom, Dad, Omi, Vona and I—were five of nine thousand people. In Elsa and its sister settlement up the hill, Calumet, we were five of six hundred.

  Dad was born August 27, 1927, in Edmonton, the middle son of three boys of poor, decent and undemonstrative—in a WASPish kind of way—parents. His relationship with his elder brother Bill was tainted with jealousy from an early age, when Dad concluded Bill was his parents’ favoured son. His younger brother Ronnie was a quiet, gentle soul who always lived a somewhat shadowed life. The family never recovered from the Depression but proudly bore their scars and dents, forever identifying with the underdog. Owning their own home remained a pipe dream their entire lives. Gerry’s mother, Alice May Russell, was born in Minnesota, and family rumour had it that her father Bertram disowned her when at eighteen years old she left home to
marry the man she loved. Gerry’s father—born in England—was a printer, and like his father before him refused to upgrade his skills. As newspapers advanced from hot metal to cold type, the family drifted from one small BC town to another, fleeing technological innovation. Occupational nomads, they rented modest dwellings in Nelson, Powell River, Prince Rupert, Revelstoke, Kitimat, Williams Lake, Kimberley, Maple Ridge and Slocan City, to name some of their short-lived hometowns. From Edmonton, where Gerry attended elementary school, the family moved to Nelson to join his paternal grandfather, who also worked as a printer. Apparently, my great-grandfather came from a long line of sailors but hated life at sea so vehemently that he quit the navy and settled in the mountains. His grandfather, our grandfather insisted, sailed against the Spanish Armada with Lord Nelson.

  Gerry finished high school in Nelson and enrolled at the University of Alberta to study chemistry. He didn’t last a year, and signed up for a short course in assaying techniques. Unlike my mother, who couldn’t stop talking about her past, he rarely shared his memories of early life. All I know I gleaned from his letters, a few documents, brief conversations with his aunt, and my memory. Chances are, before he met Helen, he never ventured outside western Canada, though he claimed otherwise. I heard vaguely of one early girlfriend in Nelson, named Nancy, who died young in a car crash.

  Dad grew into a quiet, clever, well-read and well-spoken young man. He could exude the aura of a refined gentleman, the kind who dined at the Ritz and presided over high-level business meetings. Or carry the role of a maverick leading a pack train of horses through a winding, high-peaked pass. But most of all, when his guard was down, he squirmed in his own skin. He was a fretter and a finger-kneader. Only his full, well-formed lips betrayed a sensitive and petulant temperament that was so out of step with his time. By nature, he disdained parties, crowds and gatherings of more than three or four people and was most himself when seated at a kitchen table with a dog at his feet, a cup of coffee or a freshly rolled cigarette in hand and one agreeable companion across the divide. Preferably female.

  We learned early and often that he had a snarky streak bordering on cruelty. Was that a gleam in his eye? Or a glint? A smile? Or a smirk? When I was two or three, he could trigger my tears by scowling in my direction. As my chin began to quiver and my lips crumbled, Mom would say, “Stop it Gerry!” and he’d throw his head back and guffaw, then lean over and kiss me. Most often, however, he was witty, affectionate and spectacularly original. An enthusiastic playmate, he would give us “the works,” which entailed tickling us till we screamed for mercy, giving us rides on his feet and on his back, and taunting us to come and get him. We charged straight on, scrambling all over his towering body, one scaling the heights to his shoulders and the other hiking up his legs while grabbing his outstretched arms. We’d bend down and put our hands through our legs and he’d flip us ass over teakettle from behind. Come winter, he’d throw us full force into bottomless snowbanks over and over until he was gasping for breath.

  We were six and seven when the town got phone service. There was no one to call but—surreptitiously—Mom would dial 27 (his office) and hand the heavy black receiver over to us. “Hell-ooo,” a male voice cooed. “This is the Big Bad Wolf. I am so looking forward to eating… pork tonight.” We quivered with excitement and just the right amount of fear. He loved to play practical jokes. Once he dared Mom to swallow a teaspoonful of Tabasco. She did, and after the choking and coughing subsided she spat in his face. But she wasn’t finished yet: she squatted down, crossed her arms and kicked her legs straight out, executing a furious rendition of the “hopak,” the Ukrainian Cossack dance, before she collapsed in a fit of breathless giggles.

  Vona was fidgeting and fiddling with a wiggly tooth. Dad swung her up on the bright yellow Arborite kitchen counter, “just to take a look.”

  “No, no. Promise you won’t pull it!” She squirmed and pulled her head away.

  “I won’t pull it. I promise,” he said calmly, looking her straight in the eyes. “Now, open up and let me see.”

  Slowly she leaned a bit forward and opened her mouth wide.

  “Ah, there’s the culprit,” he said. “And a wicked brute he is. Now I’ve got a little string here and I’m going to lasso that bad fellow.”

  “No, no! Promise you won’t pull it. Promise!”

  “I won’t pull it! Okay?”

  Carefully manipulating the string, he gently tied it round her tooth, all the while listening to her muffled pleas.

  “Now,” he said. “I want you to look out the window at the stars in the sky and count to three.”

  “Wha? Why? You won’t puhl? Righ?!”

  “I won’t pull it. Just look at the stars and count to three.”

  Vona slowly turned her eyes toward the window and mumbled, “Onth. Thwo. Thee.”

  Yank.

  Gerry’s intellectual air was accentuated by large, thin wire-rimmed glasses set on his finely formed nose, and below a smooth, broad forehead that at twenty-six years of age already showed signs of expansion. By thirty, his receding hairline was firmly established, giving him an even greater appearance of braininess. But it was the age of John Wayne, and he boasted a macho side too. A broad tattoo spread out on the upper side of his right forearm. A long-horned steer with droopy eyes—Texas, it said in the wavy banner below. I would sit on his lap and stroke the outline of the creature beneath the filigree of his fair arm hair. He could make the steer move by twitching his arm muscles.

  “Have you been to Texas, Daddy?”

  “Yes, dear,” he said placidly. “Before I met your mother, I travelled around Texas, Colorado and Wyoming and even Mexico, where I picked up a bit of Spanish. But it was too hot and dry for me so I bid ‘hasta la vista’ to all my senoritas!”

  We heard and knew far more about the western American states and even Mexico than any part of Canada, despite the fact that the farthest east he’d travelled had been Alberta and the farthest south Seattle.

  Trained at a basic level in chemistry and employed as an assayer—someone who determines the mineral content of ore—Gerry’s real passion was to be a mountain man. With a horse to ride, a pack horse to haul the gear, a taciturn companion and a tree-lined trail. During four summers (1958 through 1961) he lived his dream, negotiating passes, canyons, creeks and rivers through the Rocky Mountains—once from Sundre, Alberta, to Revelstoke, BC, and another time from Sundre to Nelson, BC—on horseback. It was the Kodak era, when ordinary men and women developed a skill and passion for photography. Self-taught, Gerry evolved into a better-than-most amateur photographer, snapping, developing, printing and enlarging his own large-format black and whites. For colour, he preferred slides and 8 mm home movies. Other than mountains and horses, he focused his lens on his wife and young daughters.

  Music in the form of lone-note folk melodies, work songs, sea shanties, classic cowboy songs and old ballads was a constant. He whistled, yodelled, played the guitar and piano by ear—chording grandly with his left hand, trickling arpeggios with his right—and sang, his tender tenor caressing the high notes. We cherished his serenades, especially when he attached a head contraption to his mouth organ, as he called it, that allowed him to pick and strum the guitar and suck and blow on the harmonica all at the same time! Why hasn’t he been discovered by Hollywood yet, we wondered. His favourites ranged from “Whoopee Ti-Yi-Yo” to “Green Grow the Lilacs” to “Beautiful Brown Eyes” and, in a family of four females, “I Got No Use for the Women.”

  I got no use for the women.

  A true one will never be found.

  They’ll stick with a man when he’s winning,

  And laugh in his face when he’s down.

  Mom was born November 24, 1924, in what was at the time southern Russia and is now the Ukraine, although that may change any day now. Named Lolya, or Helen, she was the second child and only daughter of Maria Reger and Abraham
Friesen. She had an older brother Peter, and a younger brother Alexander who died of diphtheria at eighteen months. Her parentage was from a long-established, large colony of Russian Mennonites, an Anabaptist sect that, in the late 1700s, traded Prussia for southern Russia when Catherine the Great offered them expansive tracts of black gold in exchange for religious freedom and exemption from military service. Helen, however, never considered herself a true Mennonite. God knows she tried, and revered Jesus as the wise one, but she was never baptized—and full-immersion adult baptism is a must-do in the Mennonite Brethren faith. After years of quoting slips of scripture and memorized Bible stories, she sadly concluded that when it came to the meaning of life, “Nobody knows.” Over the years, she increasingly turned to classical literature for explanations of human nature, particularly Dostoevsky, Hardy and Tolstoy.

  When her family moved away from their large extended clan in the Ukraine to Ebental, a small village in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, Helen mixed with more Russians than Mennonites and her agnosticism deepened. As a young girl, she aimed to one day defend Mother Russia as a fighter pilot. But German was her mother tongue and heritage. And in 1930, when her mother learned that her parents, sisters and brothers had been loaded in cattle cars and shipped to Siberia, two children dying along the way, the Soviet regime became their enemy. For Mennonites and other victims of Stalin’s holocaust, the Caucasus region was no safer than the Ukraine. Three years later, her father collapsed and died at the age of thirty-five after learning he was to be brought before the NKVD, the Soviet secret police and forerunner to the KGB.