It’s a curious thing to live all four seasons in Dawson for the first time, starting with the slow fade of summer into an impossibly fast autumn, which has you waking up to snow drifts in October.  The winter, which can have you marvelling at its beauty in the morning and on your knees that night, settling into the endless darkness, and watching for the bleed back into the 24-hour blush sun. 

I had returned to Dawson after a tumultuous year, having spent the summer before in the frantic reality of working too many hours and living too off the grid, intoxicated by the midnight sun, with an attitude I could probably do this forever if I really needed to, but also of just barely hanging on to the world. I lived in a bus in the plain splendour of Guggieville, and I biked “home” every night to that old 70’s bus, as the sky faded from its blush into the early morning twilight. 

I would repeat this pattern many times throughout my time in Dawson. The Yukon certainly tested my limits across the board, the limitations of what I could call a home, and how easy it was to do that, and how no matter what I always felt on the precipice of something, as if everything underneath my feat could break and I would slip just below the surface, I was under the spell. 

The winter I decided to stay the Yukon had been preceded by one of the most chaotic and debilitating times of my entire life. I was looking to escape what had become an increasingly unmanageable and shambolic existence, and to me the natural conclusion, one that I would come to, for better or for worse, was to pack up and get the hell away from my current situation, a conclusion that also was not infrequent.

So I started again in Dawson City, first living in the recently abandoned tent encampment in Guggieville, it was the end of August, and fall had taken hold, at night I would sit on the wood slat outside, and breathe in the cold air, already seeing my breath, in the deep blue of night, watching as headlights illuminated the dirt road, and beyond this, it was too dark to see my hand, stretched out in front of me. A few near misses biking without lights later, I made a concentrated effort to move into town. A week later the first snow would fall, where I ended up in a one room converted arts and crafts studio, watching as the world froze over, and my little home by the Ninth Ave became an Island. 

As the first cautious signs of spring started to appear, and people peeled back the layers of winter, and the electricity of impending summer filled the air, and almost overnight the sun hung in the sky until 9 pm. I started what would become a ritual for the rest of the summer, climbing to the top of the rocky lookout, over the Klondike highway. Sometimes sitting knees pulled to chest, watching the river rush past, sometimes slipping up quietly, after much of the town was asleep and I was plagued an eerie insomnia, indistinguishable from the real thing, my pulsing heart after a long day, or the effects of having no night. 

Often, while in one of these moments, I would pick some of the small plants and flowers that lined the rocks, carefully collecting to them, and setting them out along the windowsill of the wood-shop I now found myself living in. I was creating an altar, but I was not quite sure what it was to. Particularly, I would gather the sage, which was abundant and geometric. In August, almost a year to the day I had arrived, I packed my backpack, the one that had made the trip up north with me many times before. I looked over at things still to consider. The night before I had collected all my small Yukon treasures, including my now bundled sage from the lookout. I contemplated keeping them, but instead I walked up one more time to the rocks and set them down, quietly watching the moon rise over the trees across the water.