Lawrence is driving us the seven hours to Dawson City where we are to spend our quarantine days. Us is Cat, a law professor from San Diego and myself; we both tested positive on the same day. Lawrence has had Covid twice and says he only gets stronger each time. He refused to be vaccinated. He doesn’t trust the government. In his community, he says, the government did a lot of immunization in the 40s and 50s that had bad effects. For much of their history government actions have not been beneficial to indigenous communities. In that context, I’m sure, it is hard to separate the little that may possibly be good from the overall bad.
We leave shortly after 5pm in a lashing downpour. Lawrence has just come off work in the garage. His work pants and red hooded jacket are patched with mud and dust. He’s about 5’8”, slim and is always in rapid motion but, unaccountably, gives the impression of moseying along. He seems to be in perpetual amusement at the state of the world, his stubbled, handsome face often breaking into a grin that carries a hint of boyish mischief.
He’s a Gwitchin, originally from Old Crow, deep in the northern part of Yukon, not accessible by road. For the past few years he’s been living a few kilometers down the road, just off the Dempster in a makeshift tepee he’s built himself. His kitchen is an outdoor lean-to, a canvas cover spread over wooden poles. A small food cache sits on ten-foot stilts. It hasn’t prevented a bear ransacking his stores. He laughs when he tells us that story. He has a lot of stories. Bears figure in a few of them.
A grizzly kept haunting his site becoming more dangerous. Eventually, Lawrence had to shoot him. The bear skin graces the floor of his tepee. Another time a black bear with her cubs came looking for scraps in his kitchen. Lawrence watched from his bed, delighted by the bear’s antics. He says that the black bear was very fastidious, not like the grizzly. She took what she wanted for her cubs and didn’t make a mess.
He tells us another bear story. He was off in the woods and heard a cracking sound. He could tell it wasn’t a moose. Then he saw the grizzly coming for him. He ran to a nearby tree, didn’t know how but scrabbled up twelve feet. The bear tried to climb up after him but was heavy and kept falling but wouldn’t give up. Lawrence scraped the trunk with his boots trying to get leverage to climb higher. In doing so the shavings fell into the bear’s eyes irritating it to the point where it gave up and lumbered off.
I ask him how he manages in the tepee in the winter. He says everything gets frozen solid. He has two wood stoves in there and then it takes a couple of hours to thaw everything out to the point he can make his dinner and get to bed. He laughs.
Before he returned to the Yukon he was a diamond driller working mines in Canada and all over Mexico. He hints at a rough and tough life. On the bookshelf in his tepee alongside Louis L’Amour and Clive Cussler are three thick volumes, Commentary on the Old and New Testament. On the dashboard of his truck under a dangling mink pelt hard by beef jerky and a can of Muskol is a pocket-sized Christian Worker’s New Testament and Psalms. He’s open about his faith.
“I was a sinner. Christ cleansed me, got rid of my sins. He was our sacrifice, our substitute. When I think of the past and what I’ve done Christ comforts me. The guilt goes away.” He tells us that the elders recount a time in the distant past when a man with a dog team came through the community. Neither the man nor the dogs had or needed food. Much later when they were taught the scriptures they realized that the man was Jesus.
Lawrence keeps revealing different aspects of himself: as a father, as a man engaged with his heritage and community, as a critical observer of the contemporary world. Most of all, his profound knowledge of the natural world in which he lives and thrives shows itself in a stream of gestures and gentle exhortations. He points out geological formations, animal habitats, the life cycle of plants. Most of all he delights in the beauty of his world, telling us to look at the way the clouds gather over mountain ranges or the shifting currents of a river or how the sun lights up the horizon.
At one point he is taken by a moment of sorrow. I ask him whether he speaks Gwitchin. For a second a shadow falls across his face. His mother was taken off to residential schools. She was beaten if she spoke her language so even later, as an adult it was too traumatic for her to recall her mother tongue. Then he’s off telling us an anecdote, that is both self-mocking and pokes gentle fun at the ways in which white people have given names to natives.
“I was called Lawrence ‘Running Water’. I kept asking the Band to add a pipe from the water main to my place. They were taking their time. I decided to do it myself. I started to drill into the mains [because of the permafrost they are above ground]. The water was flowing at great pressure. When I burst through it was like I hit a gusher. I couldn’t plug it. The whole area was flooded.” Lawrence laughs at the memory.
It’s after midnight when he leaves us at our hotel. He has to turn around and drive straight back to Eagle Plains to be at work by 8 am.
On the road with Lawrence
Mr. Running Water sounds like he had the tap running all the way to Dawson City - a silver lining if I have your "mission statement" right. Also on the bright side is that you get to see all the geography you would have experienced in the saddle, given the almost (?) continuous daylight. Hopefully you will be blessed with an equally enlightening driver for the transport (?) to Whitehorse. Glad your Covid experience was gentle.
Oh Tom
So very sad to read of your fall from the saddle and of your Covid setback. But it is the journey that makes the story and the descriptions of your encounters and musings of life on the road are spellbinding. Keep’em coming. Wish I could be there with you. Stay safe and keep posting. You are an inspiration