I have written about The Yukon sixteen months ago whilst reviewing some of the poetry of Robert Service and that also included some of my photographs of my time there in June 1995 with a friend paddling along the Yukon river from Whitehorse the same as Dorian and his wife Bridget would do four years later almost to the day. The difference is that Dave and I were doing it for fun and would leave Yukon by the end of the month, Dorian and Bridget were aiming to live there and had no idea how they were actually going to do this. It truly is wilderness, The Yukon Territory is 186,272 miles² (482,443 km²) which makes it big enough to fit in continental European countries Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark together with room to slot in Cyprus. In all that space only 35,874 people live there (2016 census) of which 25,085 live in the capital, Whitehorse. The next biggest place is Dawson (pop. 1.375) and that is where Dave and Bridget were heading.
The book starts in 1998 in Polperro, a pretty coastal town in Cornwall, England, which is heavily dependent on tourism and fishing for its local economy. Dorian had a shop selling his pictures called Amosart and Bridget was a newly qualified psychiatric nurse, life was finally becoming easier after years of study and hard work building up a viable business, but Dorian was becoming bored and longed for some adventure in his life. Then a few months later, over an evening meal of fish and chips.
I heard her sigh “I’m sick of this shit” and I sat up with heart pounding. “Are you?” I said. “We can make a change you know.” Bridge looked at me in away she had only started to do after qualifying as a psychiatric nurse. I took the plunge and told her about my now overwhelming urge for adventure.
When I’d finished and slumped back into my chair, she said “if you think about something too much, you just talk yourself out of it and never do it. We are only here once. Let’s go get some action! Can you pass the salt please?”
Six months later Dorian was on his way to Canada, chosen mainly as they had relatives there so could get help with choosing where they wanted to be. Bridget was to follow four months after when her contract finished. The one practical thing they had done in the meantime was take a week long course on woodlore and bushcraft with survival expert Ray Mears but as he says in his introduction to the book
If I’d known then what Dorian and Bridget had in mind. I would certainly have advised further tuition in bushcraft, pointed them at expert canoe coaches and a host of other instructors.
However ignorance is bliss.
Soon after arrival in Canada Dorian purchased a truck which he nicknamed Pricey, not because it cost a lot of money but the repair bills certainly did, and started to accumulate items needed to exist in the wilderness but on a very tight budget. This meant that as tents were expensive he bought canvas to make his own and soon discovered why tents were so expensive. He also bought a dog called Boris partly as a companion and partly to protect Bridget and himself from wild animals, something that Boris proved many times over the coming months and years that he was incapable of, being more likely to hide behind them if any animals approached, assuming that he woke up anyway. Dorian writes with self deprecating humour regarding their travails in the wild open Canadian countryside and their total lack of preparedness. The trip up the Yukon after Bridget had joined him showed just how wild the country was and how much they had to learn, for example to avoid having to live on soup they were carrying with them they really needed to go fishing but neither of them had ever fished and despite buying the equipment didn’t know how to go about catching anything. The passages describing their fishing attempts are really funny and you feel their elation when weeks later they finally catch something much to their own surprise.
After getting to Dawson they turned back and explored the possibilities of living by one of the thousands of lakes closer to civilisation but found that these were already inhabited or were the play areas of people from the nearby towns so eventually decided that Dawson was the place for them. This time Bridget would go on ahead and get settled and a job whilst Dorian would stay at Bridget’s relatives and get a job there to pay for much needed repairs to Pricey and get some more equipment. Eventually the two are together in Dawson, or at least on either side of the river as they eventually found a plot to build a cabin on opposite the town so whilst Bridget stayed in Dawson working as a waitress then as a support person for pregnant women, Dorian tried to build a cabin.
I won’t say any more about how this goes except that as you can imagine building a home from scratch when you have never attempted anything like this before, in a freezing Yukon winter (minus 20 degrees is a warm day) , on your own, largely in the dark as days are short that time of year was not a simple task. The book is full of details as to how they get along and amazingly they not only survive but thrive and Dorian is good at describing a scene so that it is easy to visualise.
The book was published by Eye Books who seem to specialise in first time authors, especially with stories to tell like this one and whilst looking to see if this book was still available found that Dorian has written a follow up where he gets ‘gold fever’ and I’ve no doubt that it is a funny as his first.
Ramblings on my bookshelves 