John Sayles: A Moment in the Sun

In the drawing Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty stand side by side on the shore. We see them from behind, but know, by their dress, whose pensive vista we are sharing.

There is a breeze coming in, the flame from the Lady’s torch, held tentatively at her hip, blowing toward us slightly. The vast ocean stretches before them, and the sun, rays crepuscular on the rolling waves, is only a sliver above the far horizon. Filling the darkening sky above and dominating the page is a question mark.

We are looking west.

We can’t see their faces, of course, can’t tell if they are seeking adventure, longing for treasure, anticipating unknown horrors. That will come later.

Hod is the first on deck to see smoke.

“That must be it,” he says, pointing ahead to where the mountains rise up and pinch together to close off the channel. “Dyea.”

There is a rush then, stampeders running to the fore and jostling for position, climbing onto the bales of cargo lashed to the deck to see over the crush, herding at a rumor as they have since the Utopia pulled away from the cheering throngs in Seattle, panicked that someone else might get there first. Store clerks and farmers, teamsters and railroad hands, failed proprietors and adventurous college boys and scheming hucksters and not a few fellow refugees from the underground. Hod has done every donkey job to be had in a mine, timbering, mucking ore with shovel and cart, laying track, single-jacking shoot holes with a hand auger. He knows how to look for colors in a riverbank, knows what is likely worth the sweat of digging out and what isn’t. But the look in the eyes of the men crowding him up the gangplank, the press of the hungry, goldstruck mass of them, five days jammed shoulder-to-shoulder at the rail of the steamer dodging hot cinders from the stack, half of them sick and feeding the fish or groaning below in their bunks as the other half watch the islands slide by and share rumors and warnings about a land none have ever set foot on — he understands that it will be luck and not skill that brings fortune in the North.

Though skill might keep you alive through the winter.

“Store clerk outta Missouri, wouldn’t know a mineshaft from a hole in the ground, wanders off the trail to relieve himself? Stubs his toe on a nugget big as a turkey egg.”

“You pay gold dust for whatever you need up there — won’t take no paper money or stamped coin. Every night at closing they sweep the barroom floors, there’s twenty, thirty dollars in gold they sift outta the sawdust.”

“Canadian Mounties sittin up at the top of the Pass got a weigh station. It’s a full ton of provisions, what they think should stand you for a year, or no dice. Couple ounces shy and them red-jacketed sonsabitches’ll turn you back.”

“Put a little whiskey in your canteen with the water so it don’t freeze.”

“Hell, put a little whiskey in your bloodstream so you don’t freeze. Tee-totaller won’t make it halfway through September in the Yukon.”

“Indins up there been pacified a long time now. It’s the wolves you need to steer clear of.”

“The thing is, brother, if you can hit it and hold on to it, you float up into a whole nother world. Any time you pass an opera house west of the Rockies, the name on it belongs to another clueless pilgrim what stumbled on a jackpot. This Yukon is the last place on earth the game aint been rigged yet.”

If the game isn’t rigged in Dyea it is not for lack of trying.

There is no dock at the mouth of the river, greenhorns shouting in protest as their provisions are dumped roughly onto lighters from the anchored steamer, shouting more as they leap or are shoved down from the deck to ferry in with the goods and shouting still to see them hurled from the lighters onto the mudflats that lead back to the raw little camp, deckhands heaving sacks and crates and bundles with no regard for ownership or fragility, and then every man for himself to haul his scattered outfit to higher ground before the seawater can ruin it.

“Fifty bucks I give you a hand with that,” says a rum-reeking local with tobacco stain in his beard.

“Heard it was twenty.” Hod with his arms full, one hand pressed to cover a tear in a sack of flour.

“Outgoing tide it’s twenty. When she’s rolling in like this—” the local grins, spits red juice onto the wet stones, “—well, it sorter follows the law of supply and de mand .” Hod takes a moment too long to consider and loses the porter to a huffing Swede who offers fifty-five. Left to his own, he hustles back and forth to build a small mountain of his food and gear on a hummock by a fresh-cut tree stump, crashing into other burdened stampeders in the mad scramble, gulls wheeling noisily overhead in the darkening sky, little channel waves licking his boots on the last trip then three dry steps before he collapses exhausted on his pile.

When he gets his breath back Hod sits up to see where he’s landed. There are eagles, not so noble-looking as the ones that spread their wings on the coins and bills of the nation, eagles skulking on the riverbank, eagles thick in the trees back from the mudflats. He has never seen a live one before.

“They’ll get into your sowbelly, you leave it out in the open,” says the leathery one-eyed Indian who squats by his load.

“I don’t plan to.”

“Better get a move on, then. That tide don’t stay where it is.”

The man introduces himself as Joe Raven and is something called a Tlingit and there is no bargaining with him.

“Twelve cents a pound. Healy and Wilson charge you twice that. Be two hundred fifty to pack this whole mess to the base of the Pass. We leave at first light.”

It is already late in the season, no time to waste lugging supplies piecemeal from camp to camp when the lakes are near freezing and the goldfields will soon be picked over. All around them Indians and the scruffy-bearded local white men are auctioning their services off to the highest bidder. One stampeder runs frantically from group to group, shouting numbers, looking like he’ll pop if he’s not the first to get his stake off the beach.

“That’s about all the money I got,” says Hod.

The Tlingit winks his good eye and begins to pile Hod’s goods onto a runnerless sledge. “Hauling this much grub, you won’t starve right away.” He tosses a stone at an eagle sidling close and it flaps off a few yards, croaking with annoyance, before settling onto the flats again.

“Eat on a dead dog, eat the eyes out of spawn fish, pick through horseshit if it’s fresh. Lazy bastards.” Joe Raven winks his single eye again. “Just like us Tlingits.”

The Indian wakes him well before first light.

“Best get on the trail,” he says, “before it jams up with people.”

Hod rises stiffly, the night spent sleeping in fits out with his goods, laughter and cursing and a few gunshots drifting over from the jumble of raw wood shanties and smoke-grimed tents that have spread, scabies-like, a few hundred yards in from the riverbank.

“Any chance for breakfast in town?”

“The less you have to do with that mess,” says Joe Raven, “the better off you be.”

As they head out there are eagles still, filling the trees, sleeping.

The eight miles from Dyea to Canyon City is relatively flat but rough enough, Hod’s outfit loaded on the backs of Joe’s brothers and wives and cousins and grinning little nephews, a sly-eyed bunch who break out a greasy deck of cards whenever they pause to rest or to let Hod catch up. Fortunes, or at least the day’s wages, pass back and forth with much ribbing in a language he can’t catch the rhythm of. Hod struggles along with his own unbalanced load, clambering over felled trees and jagged boulders bigger than any he’s ever seen, saving ten dollars and raising a crop of angry blisters on his feet as the trail winds through a narrow canyon, skirting the river then wandering away from it.