A Rock Fell on the Moon Read online

  In August, Helen flies to Prince Rupert to meet his parents. Poor and proud of it, they greet this foreign-looking, foreign-sounding young woman politely and coolly. After a dinner of corned beef hash and boiled beans, the men retreat to the living room to listen to records on the phonograph, while Helen helps his mother Alice, a mouse of a woman with cobalt blue eyes, do the dishes. In the kitchen, Alice wears a net over her short tightly permed hair. A low coal fire smoulders in the small airtight heater attached to the stove.

  “So, Helen, Gerry tells me you are German,” Alice says, wiping a large oval platter.

  “No, no, not German, Mrs. Priest. I come from Russia.” Helen turns back to the sink and plunges her hands in the warm, soapy water.

  “Really? But German is your language, your culture. Can you cook meals men like Gerry like to eat? A roast beef with gravy and Yorkshire pudding?”

  “What is Yorkshire pudding?” Helen asks. “I have never, but I will try. Please show me the recipe.”

  Outside, the rain has let up. Steel grey clouds hang over the hills circling the town like a forever fog. The dark trees creep slowly down, trying with time’s help to someday push the town into the sea.

  “Can you bake a pie? Men like a good pie.”

  “I have never but I would like to try.”

  The next day Helen spends the afternoon in the kitchen and produces a grand dinner. Her Yorkshire puddings are light and fluffy, the beef not overdone. The apple pie is perfect. Gerry and his father praise her skills. That evening Alice washes and Helen dries.

  “Can you knit and mend, Helen?”

  “Knit? No, but I can sew and embroider and crochet.”

  “No, you will need to knit.”

  “Please give me instructions and I will try.”

  After the dishes are done, Alice gives Helen a ball of wool, a simple pattern and knitting needles. She catches on quickly, knitting and purling several rows.

  The following day, Alice leads her into their bedroom. She goes to a dark wooden dresser and opens the top drawer, rummaging and then pulling out a pair of brand new black lace panties and two lace-trimmed black garter belts.

  “Take these. You will need them to keep your husband happy.”

  On her final day, when the men are out, her future mother-in-law flings her final salvo: “Helen, listen to me. Don’t marry my son. If you do I can promise you one thing—he will break your heart.”

  Helen wants him more than ever, just to prove the old hag wrong.

  On October 13, 1951, Gerry and Helen wed. The ceremony takes place at Matsqui Mennonite Brethren Church, not far from where the Rempel family had welcomed Mom and Omi to Canada, and the reception follows at the Rempel family home. Helen borrows a wedding dress from their daughter Helene, who married the year before and is now Helene Klassen.

  Helen knew every guest and participant, even the best man, who was a Mennonite fellow Gerry had never met. In fact, other than his bride and her mother, the groom knew no one. His parents were invited, but begged off due to the travel expense and a visit from a distant relative. His two brothers didn’t attend. And neither did his two uncles, two aunts or a single friend. Indeed, his marriage was the first church wedding he’d ever experienced.

  Ten days later, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Priest arrive in Elsa, a small, rugged mining community, in the Yukon Territory.

  Chapter 4

  Elsa—The Silver King

  Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond

  We thought we knew cold but this was something cruel, sharp and cutting like a knife. The cold cracked our thermometer, and for the better part of a week the town shut down: no school, no mine, no coffee shop or cookhouse. Everyone sheltered indoors. For us children, this weather-enforced internment was the most excitement we’d had since Mr. Harper’s dog got eaten by a wolverine. When we scraped Jack Frost’s fingerprints off our single-paned windows we saw grey—the air thick and murky, silent and primed to kill. Too cold for human, beast, bird or even snow. Dad said it was 70 below and we weren’t so much as to poke our noses outside without wrapping two woollen scarves over our faces, thick enough to choke us. Then he filled a tin bucket with water, opened the door a wedge, and as a razor sliced into the room, Vona and I held our breaths and hid behind his legs. He flung the bucket skyward, and as the water droplets reached their apex and descended, they transformed into pellets of ice. Pointing at the glint on the ground, he said, “That is how your blood will look if you inhale one exposed lungful of outdoor air.”

  Although we liked school and missed playing outside with our friends, we weren’t miffed. School was good. The town was good. Home was best. We lived in a one-storey, three-bedroom, red cedar squared-log home known as a Panabode in a hiccup of a town at the top of the world. The map on our classroom wall proved it: pink Australia sat down at the bottom and we—pink too, like all the Commonwealth countries—were perched at the top left corner of Canada. If you went farther left you hit blue Alaska. And if you went a bit higher you’d slip over the North Pole and slide down the other side to Russia—where we knew life was worse than terrible. Somewhere on the far right of Russia, close to Alaska, Mom’s brother and Omi’s three surviving sisters and four brothers had disappeared. Dead or alive, we didn’t know. We did know they experienced cold as extreme as ours. But that’s where the parallels ended.

  We weren’t innocents. Along with spoonfuls of cod liver oil, we swallowed tales of Communist atrocities, near-death escapes from the evil nkvd and anti-starvation tips. Turnips could keep you going a remarkably long time. If you had some. But what happened when you didn’t? One night our grandmother divulged a story about Stalin-inspired starvation in the Ukraine that had gone on for so long that after eating all the dogs, all the cats, all the mice, all the birds, all the leaves off the trees, all the grasses in the fields and all the roots under the ground, people began eating each other. Hansel and Gretel was a welcome change.

  By the time we started school, we knew bad things could strike anyone at any time. Anyone “outside,” that is. Because we lived “up north,” in the land of smiles and safety, we were far removed from the threat of forced labour camps, diabolical dictators and atomic annihilation. Here we were well sheltered, well fed and well loved. We led a privileged life in one of the richest silver towns in the world. A town most people have never heard of, but one that in its heyday generated more wealth per capita than most cities in Canada.

  Elsa sat on the south slope of the McQuesten River Valley, 300 miles north of Whitehorse, a broad buckbrush, alder, aspen, willow and black spruce terrain spread out like a thick tweed on a high mountain plateau. Named after the sister of a lucky prospector, Elsa began in 1924 as a particularly promising mining claim among hundreds of claims in the silver-lead-zinc-rich Keno–Mayo mining district. By the 1960s it was the second largest silver producer in Canada, and at one point was the third largest in the world.

  Most people today, if they think of the Yukon at all, associate it with the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush that put the territory on the map. A remote version of the Wild West, the Klondike has been milked like a menopausal cow for more than a century: Dawson City Disneyfied; the silhouette of straggly men scaling the Chilkoot Trail appropriated as an icon for an SUV and the word “Yukon” stolen for another; a squatting goldpanner etched on the territorial license plate; and summer recitations of Robert Service’s Victorian-era ballads in Dawson for up to 60,000 tourists a year—that’s 2 tourists for every man, woman and child living full-time in the Yukon today. In his poem “The Spell of the Yukon,” Service attempted to capture the allure of a land forged like no other, although the “spell” works on certain misfits, misanthropes and malcontents only. (Yukoners today call those folks “the colourful 5 percent,” although in truth it’s closer to 95 percent.) Known as the Bard of the Yukon, Service wrote: “there’s some as would trade it/For no land on earth—and I’m one.
” Well, not exactly. Service spent only twelve of his eighty-four years there. Before his stint in the Yukon, he worked as a banker on Government Street in Victoria in a grand stone building now housing the Bard & Banker Pub. Later he frequented warmer, more cultivated climes in Paris, California and the French Riviera. He could afford it. His Songs of a Sourdough and other books of “Gunga Din” style verse (moulded after Rudyard Kipling) and his novel The Trail of Ninety-Eight sold like cheap wine. People couldn’t get enough of his cleverly rhymed octets and narratives of melodrama, pathos and rugged individualism, though the literati viewed his poetry as mere doggerel.

  In truth, the Klondike was a flash in the pan, a frenzied three-year boom and bust that cost hundreds of lives and enriched only a fraction of the 100,000 desperados who set out for the north, drawn by tales of gold just waiting to be plucked, practically underfoot. But after a spasm of placer mining—the exposing and flushing of precious metals in sand and gravel streambeds—the easy-to-get gold was gone. The wealthiest spent their fortunes in a flurry of excess and died penniless. By 1899 the vast majority of gold seekers had fled to juicier sluice boxes in Alaska and BC. Once the largest city in western North America north of San Francisco, Dawson had dwindled by 1903 from 40,000 to fewer than 5,000. By 1912, it had shrunk to 2,000 people and was inching toward ghost town status. If not for the federal government’s decision, in 1959, to make it a National Historic Site and pump millions of dollars into restoration, it may well have become a ghost town. In fact, for almost two decades—the 1920s and ’30s—the entire territory, an area the size of Texas, took on a haunted quality as the population sank to around 4,000.

  But as the gold rush lost its lustre, placer mining underwent a metamorphosis. By 1906, the Yukon saw its first industrial placer mine operations. These highly capitalized ventures used dredges to move massive amounts of earth, and cannons to shoot highly pressurized jets of water, which dislodged rock and sediments to root up the gold. Such indefatigable gold seekers had the financial backing to persist, and they soon scattered east and north to the Stewart and McQuesten Rivers and deeper into central Yukon to Duncan Creek and its tributaries. There they did indeed find placer gold but not in the amounts hoped for. Instead they encountered a high mountain plateau, lit gentian and rust in the fall, and rimmed with snow-topped peaks, gently flowing streams and slopes of quartzite masked by distinct layers of glacial deposits. This was a far different landscape than the wide, delta-like Dawson country lying at the confluence of two large rivers. Here, prospectors eyed hills where fortune of a different flavour ran through the bedrock in undulating veins. The best could recognize rock protrusions that hinted at another precious metal—silver.

  Early prospectors named two prominent heights of land Keno Hill and Galena Hill. Anywhere else in the world, people would call these summits mountains. Keno Hill rises to 6,480 feet and beside it the broad tabletop of Galena Hill reaches an elevation of 4,389 feet. Back then, pre–global warming, permafrost permeated as far as 262 feet down on the north slopes of these hills. The word “keno” refers to an old-time gambling game and so befits any mining venture. Galena is a shiny silver-coloured mineral containing mostly lead and sulphur, and is distributed abundantly in the earth’s crust. Only in a few places, however, does it also possess high concentrations of a silver mineral called tetrahedrite, and in only a fraction of those cases is there enough tetrahedrite to be valuable. The early prospectors in the Keno–Galena Hill region spied just such rock in exposed surfaces, a find that led to the discovery of buried, silver-rich veins that would usher in a whole new era in Yukon mining history. For most of the twentieth century, these two mountains relinquished much of their prehistoric payload, allowing generations to thrive in one of the most remote, extreme and majestic places on earth.

  Where most people see rock, rubble and dirt, prospectors and geologists see float, overburden, outcrops and other signposts pointing to promises of another Eldorado. Geology is a hands-in-the-dirt science, and this particular geology necessitated guts, time, brawn and dogged determination—and the financial means—to tough it out. In the early days, hardrock mining was a wretched enterprise. Apart from the endemic silicosis and lead-arsenic poisoning, men were routinely mangled, blasted, crushed, concussed, suffocated and frozen. Alcohol and lots of it may have been the only way to put up with that existence, even if it hastened the inevitable. Men concocted brews from any carbohydrate available, including flour, molasses, rice, raisins and dog food.

  Excavating, crushing and transporting millions of tons of boulders and rock demanded heavy equipment, mills and concentrators, and all the grinding apparatus needed to process massive amounts of ore. Even though the precious metal in question was silver, not gold, those involved deemed their sacrifices worthwhile. And it was silver, not gold, that carried the Yukon into the modern mining era. But not just any kind of silver. In order to compete with less isolated silver mines in places like Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Cobalt, Ontario, Yukon mines needed ore rich enough to make up for the far greater transportation costs. Silver from the Elsa–Keno area was of an extremely high grade, routinely assaying over 200 ounces per ton.

  Close to a hundred years ago, silver discoveries on Keno Hill proved so promising that New York tycoons the Guggenheims—who also had their fingers in the Klondike goldfields—bought claims and working mines there. By 1918, the mountain was a patchwork quilt of more than five hundred claims. In 1923, there were a thousand. The area was gripped by a full-scale silver stampede. Throughout the 1920s, Keno City and the surrounding creeks and hills were crawling with thousands of people. Today, mining on a much smaller scale has resumed in the area, but with Keno’s year-round population at ten or so, the town teeters on the brink.

  In 1921, a Montana-born man was sent by Alaskan gold mining interests to explore the area. He was so taken with its silver potential he built the foundation for decades of long-term investment, exploration and prosperity in the Keno–Galena Hill area. Livingston Wernecke was a mining engineer and geologist with surplus skill, dedication and enterprising spirit, enough to form the Treadwell Yukon Mining Company. His Wernecke Camp, a settlement on the mid-northwest slope of Keno Hill, included bunkhouses, a machine shop, a mill, a mess hall, teachers, medical facilities, a recreation hall with a pool table and bowling alley, and family homes. It was more than a camp, it was a community, and the overture to what Elsa would become: an industrial worksite where women and children were not only welcomed but also considered necessary for employee contentment and company success.

  For Wernecke—an exacting, educated and shy man—almost no mark of civilization was missing from his town, seen in contrast to nearby Keno City, which descended into all-night drinking, fighting, gambling and whoring. The Keno scene attracted some miners for a time but it also cost the lives of both men and women. In the 1920s and ’30s, a stable of eight women with names like Vimy, Vancouver Lil, Jew Jess and Silver Fox worked the saloons and brothels of Keno City. Most worked for organized vice rings based in Vancouver and at least one of them, Silver Fox, was murdered.

  Wernecke had a piano and a dairy cow hauled up to his mid-mountain abode. In her 2009 profile of Wernecke, Whitehorse author Jane Gaffin writes that the Wernecke Camp was located “in a pleasant grove of scattered spruce, overlooking a panorama of colourful sunsets. Lightning streaked over the McQuesten River Valley and caribou wandered among the log cabins and frame buildings occupied by the staff and their families. The setting was akin to having heaven served on a platter.” No doubt the occasional reindeer roast also graced the plate.

  But like all divine repasts, this one didn’t last. The Depression, plummeting silver prices and the eventual depletion of most of the accessible, high-grade ore on Keno Hill forced Wernecke to shut the mill in 1935. The town was abandoned only eight years after its birth.

  When I was about four or five, my Dad took Vona and me on an overnight outing to Wernecke Camp. It was a rare adventure,
given that we were daughters and not the sons Dad so desperately wanted and did not get. After her first child, a girl, doctors ordered Mom not to have more as the pregnancy revealed trouble from a childhood encounter with a serious disease. She disobeyed, however, and I arrived, another great disappointment. To some.

  While most buildings in Wernecke had been dismantled or left to time and weather’s whims, as is the Yukon way, some homes were eerily intact. We peered in the windows of fully furnished rooms, some with the kitchen table set with tablecloth, silver (of course) cutlery and china, all covered with a fine layer of dust. I imagined that little green men from Mars, as we called aliens in those days, had come down and snatched up all the people, forbidding them to take any belongings. The doors had no locks but we were not allowed to enter or touch a thing. “Someday,” Dad said, “the people may return.”

  By the mid-1920s, attention shifted 12 miles west to Galena Hill where a Swede named Charlie Brefalt discovered promising silver veins. One discovery he named Elsa, after his sister. A second, straddling two claims, came to be called Hector–Calumet. Legend has it that Brefalt was out grouse hunting when he accidently stumbled on a rusty vein of ore among the bushes that would later assay at a startling 3,000 ounces of silver per ton. More likely, however, his find was due to nothing more than the usual toil and tenacity of area prospectors. Years later, a vein in the Elsa mine would contain silver concentrations more than double that. Buildings were soon erected at the base of Galena Hill near the Elsa adit—the horizontal entrance to the mine—and in 1935, Wernecke moved his mill to Elsa, where it crushed 150 tons of ore a day. Two years later, he constructed a 14,200-foot aerial tramline from the Hector–Calumet mine near the top of Galena Hill to the Elsa mill below. His company bought options on the Galena Hill claims, and as silver prices rose, so did Treadwell Yukon’s prospects. His spectacular rise to success ended abruptly, however, in 1941, when he died in a small plane crash off of BC’s coast.