We met on Dupont Street in a spring blizzard, snow coming down aslant, and after that whatever you had fell apart, you left your husband, we took custody of your three-year-old son and drove north of Superior, camped through the prairies, up the Alaska Highway, getting closer, jammed together in the van twenty-four hours a day, four thousand miles to the Klondike River, islands of tossed gravel, broken trees, destruction wrought upon the riverbed, placer mines named Bonanza, Eldorado, Hunker, Bear, men moiling for gold, diesel, backhoe, pressure-sluicing, veins of quartz and gold escaping in all directions.
In Dawson City we sat on wooden sidewalks by the dance-hall and reflected on our relationship to the spinning world, animal, vegetable, mineral, Gaia, David Suzuki, The Whole Earth Catalogue, Harrowsmith, outdated technologies, the showpiece locomotive, the paddlewheeler, dredges tilted sideways on their own extrusions, the wooden Bank of Commerce, Robert Service, Midnight Dome, hodge-podge of streets, the entire modern town of 700, around the bend, Moosehide, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, salmon prized over gold.
Deceptively smooth the Yukon River, wrinkled with eddies, glacial-cold, scouring down from the St. Elias Range of mountains through broad-shouldered valleys to the Bering Sea, flow rate 227,000 cubic feet per second, twice that of the Mississippi, the ferry crossing twenty-four hours a day, flat-bottomed, rusted steel, capacity six cars, engine churning, grinding, spinning three-quarters of a circle downstream before pushing to the far side, prow slamming down on mud and grass and there we were, our van, our few contained possessions, to the east the Ogilvie Range, to the west, Alaska.
Alpine barrens, home of the marmot and the grizzly bear, gentian, bog-laurel, rose and poppy, yellow petals pressed between pages of your notebooks, fingerprints of pollen and road-dust, DNAs intertwining, two hours to the low bridge over the Fortymile River, girders there painted as blue-green as the midnight sky, never fully darkening in those high summer days.
Clinton Creek, company town, chrysotile asbestos, pale-white feathers dipping and rising like moths in currents of air, our aluminum half-trailer cinder-blocked for uncertainty high on a wildflower ridge, crocus, lupin, spruce forest falling away to a glint of river, grayling, bears in the back-country, bears in the yard, naiveté on our part as we placed decorative rocks of dishevelled asbestos on our bedside tables, vacuuming snowflakes of chrysotile as they drifted to the floor, seven miles away tailings from the open-pit mine crushed into the boreal forest, a gray-white avalanche of pseudo-snow hardening to the consistency of plaster, never melting, implacable, snapping trees in half, rerouting brooks and creeks and rivulets, smothering underbrush, the refined asbestos carelessly poured into bags, placed on pallets, trucked out of Clinton, broken out at construction sites in Tacoma, Tokyo, Taiwan.
Rogue fibres hitched rides on inspired air, tricking the genome, slivering into cells of lungs, throats, ovaries, twisting the helix, mitosis, cancer, mesothelioma, asbestosis, scientists, politicians, businessmen, accountants, too much evidence to ignore, after two years the mine was closed, our one-purpose extractive town depopulated to zero.
Whitehorse, White Pass, Skagway, BC Ferries, Prince Rupert, K’San, Prince George, Medicine Hat, Sleeping Buffalo, Bismarck, Fargo, Detroit, Montreal, an upstairs two-bedroom apartment, marriage, Schwartz’s, St. Viateur, St. Laurent, Ste. Catherine, Lewis Furey, Carole Laure, Fantastica, transit strikes, pregnancy, we were fully re-urbanized until one morning over breakfast we opened The Montreal Gazette and read that the Porcupine herd of caribou had migrated across the Yukon River for the first time in seventy-five years, propelled—so a naturalist said—by genetic memory, a survival mechanism implanted in DNA, dormant for five caribou generations, and although many had drowned, hundreds of bloated bodies bumping up against sandbars as far downstream as Eagle, Alaska, fifty thousand of the herd survived to clamber ashore at the abandoned first settlement of the gold rush, Fortymile.
Stressors north of 60 for caribou: tapeworm, lungworm, brucellosis, warble fly, slow exsanguination from the bites of a hundred million black flies and mosquitoes, wolves in packs, grizzly bears, frostbite, spring avalanche, golden eagles, pipelines, hunters on ATVs and snowmobiles, chemicals dribbled on highways, methane vaporizing from taiga, wildfire, deforestation, insecticides tasting like burnt rubber when fogged like mustard gas through the seven streets of Clinton Creek.
Phenomena inserted into the human genome by the experience of our ancestors: the collision of neutron stars, a billion years of buckling of the earth’s crust, asteroid hits, the sound of calving icebergs, déjà vu, nostalgia, migrainous auras, epilepsy, foreboding, firepits, arrowheads, Darwinian adjustments, behaviours otherwise inexplicable including self-destructive practices, acts, delusions.
Fortymile, it was our habit when skiing there from Clinton Creek to separate in the twilight darkness of midafternoon, encircle the mostly-intact cabins, approach each other and interlock skis, touch foreheads at thirty-five below, ice-encrusted our balaclavas, silent the stars, a thousand miles of snow on every side, arpents de neige, aurora borealis snapping audibly against the northern sky, ice cracking, willow branches cracking, thermos of tea frozen.
In Montreal, reading the news, we felt at one with the Porcupine herd of caribou, acknowledging wryly that our genetic memory seemed to be next to zero but theirs was locked in, forged by a thousand years of scraping at permafrost, bog, barren, lichen, moss, lingonberry, one four-legged shaman or wizard lifting her head and, shivering brain-afire, stepping into the mica-filled current, the whisper-whispering of it, fifty thousand following her, and how surprised they must have been to see the changes wrought at Fortymile since last they visited, log cabins dessicated by the desert heat of Yukon summer, charred by lightning-strike, by human carelessness, sod roofs collapsed, doorways bent and cracked, how high the grass and thistle had grown, slow the bees in goldenrod and saxifrage, tangled the rose, unchanged the whiskeyjack, the raven, the cicada, the line of shoreline alders as they stepped fastidiously upstream through shallow rapids to Clinton Creek, to the soccer pitch we left behind, the baseball field, the arena scraped to permafrost, school dismantled, houses hauled away, browsing for days puzzled but unconcerned, passing our trailer-site where the crocus and lupin flower had been, for us, spring-loaded, high above that river of gold.
Our baby had colic. We took turns walking the floor, holding him as he cried past midnight, slow-dancing, his unhappy chest on yours or mine, neighbours unable to sleep, banging fists against the adjoining wall. Sorry, sorry, we said inaudibly as outside muffled plows moved through drifts, through otherwise-impassable streets, snow falling on the mediaeval turrets of the hospital where you gave birth, on the English poets of Crescent Street, on Joyce’s living and the dead, snow falling even deeper east of St. Laurent where French was spoken so rapidly we could not understand, snow on troubadors singing in praise of winter, on the election of the Parti Québècois, Côtes des Neige a blur of white horizontal, and in the vestibule of our apartment we brushed snow from our clothes as once we brushed asbestos. We walked upstairs, cooked dinner, read books to the children, put them to bed, turned off the lights as snowsqualls, flurries, blizzards laced the windows, 2426 Park Row West, sirens from Sherbrooke Street reverberating to some local, personal vulnerability.
Floorboards creaking, slow-dancing, sorry, sorry, our species’ dire concerns, the moratorium on cod, draggers, clear cuts, sewage, whatever else we have done to North America since 1492, the Porcupine herd a signifier, Rachel Carson, silent spring, our children’s children herded together forty years from now, standing by some turgid, stinking river green with algae, mist on the lowlands, waiting dumbfounded for a signal to cross.
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The story behind the story:
“Genetic Memory” is the only pure piece of nonfiction I’ve written. It describes how my wife and I met, travelled to the Yukon Territory, worked in an asbestos mine, and subsequently moved to Montreal. Written in prose, in paragraph form, I nevertheless submitted it to The Moth Poetry Prize in Ireland (10,000 Euros!), where it was shortlisted (0 Euros!) by judge Claudia Rankine. It’s very personal, but it’s placed in a bruised world, where we are all threatened by climate change and an environment degraded by avarice and thoughtlessness (ours included).
Nicholas Ruddock is a Canadian physician and writer. He has published three novels and a short story collection in Canada, most recently Last Hummingbird West of Chile, 2021. He has won the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, the Carter V Cooper Prize, the Bridport Prize in the UK twice. He has been shortlisted so many times that he is now only five feet tall, including the Toronto Book Award, the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, The Berlin Reader Short Story Award, the Manchester Metropolitan University Short Story Award, plus others.
“Genetic Memory ” was previously published in The Moth.
HeaderPhoto by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash.
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