It must have been twenty years ago that my sister Laura visited me in the cabin of fish camp in Nikiski on the shores of Cook Inlet in Alaska. She stayed a week or two and one night she insisted we all have a poetry slam. We were all to memorize a poem and recite it while wearing a black beret standing under the big top tent that stretched behind the cabin. I chose a poem by the famed northern poet Robert Service, "The cremation of Sam Mcgee", these are the only lines that I remember now.
"Strange things are done under the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold,
The arctic trails have seen such tales that would make your blood run cold.
The northern lights have seen queer sights but the queerest that they ever did see
Was the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge where I cremated Sam Mcgee."
Tonight it is midnight as I sit at a picnic table not one hundred feet from the shores of Lake Lebarge and although the sun set an hour ago I can still make out on this moonless night the mountains across this five mile wide body of water. I cannot however tell if the large white birds swimming close to shore are swans or geese but that says more about my birding skills than the level of light. I could tell though that it was a red fox and not an arctic fox that just was sneaking between this campsite and the next a few minutes ago.
The Yukon flows out from the end of this fifty mile long lake and this is where we will launch our boat and begin the next part of this trip. When we rolled into the historic town of Whitehorse I could feel my anxiety level rise, both Jeff and I were anxious about the state of the river and whether it would be too high or the current too swift to get the boat in the water. As it turns out the river is too low to launch in Whitehorse, the glaciers are slow to melt this year and the water is yet to come up, the word is that there is still ice at the other end of the lake at the outlet, another week or two says the local First Nation man named Surge who pulled up on his four wheeler with his grandson. Day one and we are already improvising the expedition plan. We will launch here, about ten miles downstream from Whitehorse along the shore of the lake, it is still shallow here and we will have carry our gear out to the boat through the freezing water instead of loading it here on shore and launching the whole thing. We will have to buy some waders to push the boat through the shallow water and ferry the gear to the boat but they may come in handy later. The guy camped down the trail says that the water is coming up fast and that in a few days we will be able to get the boat in. He also says that we are in for a great trip, in fact everybody says that.
Serguis A. Sawrenko
Jeff with Paul Tubb who joined us for breakfast