Noah Richler looks back at his (de)formative teenage days in a Subarctic mining camp, where he cheated death, learned about lust and longing, and got his first taste of the ever-flavourful North. By Noah Richler

The Cessna pilot, a U of T professor who’d chucked it all in to fly in the bush, did a half-roll and I gripped the handle above my window, now the floor, and thought I’d fall out. On the mountain beneath us, above the snow line, I could see a stack of blue oil barrels and the tarps of a few tents.

“Home sweet home,” the pilot said.

It was June 1977 and I’d left my family and Nancy, my girlfriend, behind. It had been a druggy time in Montreal. Hashish, weed, cocaine and even heroin were all easy to come by, and an entertainment for a kid who’d been bored, as I’d been, at high school.

My father, the novelist Mordecai, had not been impervious to the signs and so, when Hank Madison, the Yukon’s Supreme Court judge, had visited with one of his daughters, whom I’d taken in the canoe through the wetlands near our house in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, I imagine some kind of entreaty had been made. I won’t ever know for sure, but my father was like that. He’d come to the North because he’d been considering a book about Martin Hartwell, a bush pilot who’d crashed with an Inuit boy, a pregnant woman and a nurse. The two women had died, and over the course of weeks the boy did too, and Hartwell, who’d busted his legs in the accident, resorted to cannibalism before he was finally rescued. Eventually, my dad decided not to write it. “No good will come of it,” he’d said, showing moral restraint that impresses me to this day. But what did come to pass was that my father fell in love with the North and was inspired to write perhaps his greatest novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here. And now, however indirectly, he was passing on that love to me through the gift of a summer job as a prospector’s assistant, the rewards of which I could hardly anticipate.

In Whitehorse, I was interviewed at the Cassiar Asbestos compound by a foreman who probably wondered what the hell the company was doing, letting a 16-year-old greenhorn, fresh out of high school, into his camp.

“You’ll need boots,” he said.

And so I went down to one of Whitehorse’s outfitters and bought a pair of rubber Wellingtons – with no steel toes or lining, because I didn’t know any better. And the pilot shook his head as the company foreman had done and flew me to the bush camp, where I sank in the spring snow up to my knees, and the black flies ate at my city-boy’s neck, and I realized just how ill-prepared I was.

There were eight of us in the camp, there to establish the viability of an asbestos find that had been made, some years before, higher up the flank of a neighbouring mountain. The landscape, so new to me then, remains imprinted upon my memory. The pristine lakes, with their turquoise water and white sandy bottoms, were like precious stones scattered by some delighted, giant God who knew few would ever see the trail he’d made. The Cassiar Range is a worn and rounded set of mountains that lies between the younger, higher peaks towards Skagway in the west and the Rockies to the east. I’d never seen so much sky as hung over them, in which storms were dashed across parts of the horizon like hastily painted brush-strokes, or been able to turn 360 degrees and survey mountains of different colours. Serpentine, a lesser form of jade, is the dominant rock in the Cassiars, and the mountains fashioned out of the opaque stone appeared to have been sorted into piles by that same giant God, so that one was black, another brown, another greenish-blue and another even yellow.

I won’t forget the motley bunch who worked for Cassiar Asbestos that summer, either. Ted, the geologist and camp boss, was a recovering alcoholic who, on the same flight that brought me in, made the near mutiny-provoking mistake of ordering no liquor for the camp.

There were four hard-rock drill miners. Big Ron was from Saskatchewan. He weighed about 300 pounds (bulk that came in handy, later) though his apprentice, Craig, was much younger and lighter. There was Jim, who’d immigrated to Canada from County Galway, in Ireland. He was trying to earn a little money for a new business in B.C., as the pub he’d formerly owned had failed. And there was Swiss Martin, whose mail comprised nothing but bills and who offered no clue as to why, and who was fond of taking a 12-foot length of rusted steel pipe and yodelling from the top of the mountain when the drillers called it a day.

The prospector, Dave, was a keen marksman who had an appreciation of the medicinal benefits of weed well ahead of his day. And there was myself, of course. Now, I seem like a stranger – young, keen, bold even, and with so little idea of how much was beyond my station. Debbie, an Acadian New Brunswicker from a litter of 13, was the camp’s solitary woman and the toughest of all of us.

My first morning, in the mess tent, Debbie took orders for supper. She was my height, which is to say small next to the others. She had thick, dark hair, a gleam in her eye and curves that her baseball cap, lumberjack shirt and baggy pants couldn’t hide. I noticed she was missing a tooth. If I’d been any older I’d have realized just how attractive she was; that she was an example of what the French call jolie laide.

“Steak tonight,” said Debbie and then, turning to me, “How many you want?”

“One is plenty,” I said, a good boy raised in a family of five children ever mindful of the work his mother had to do. “I can share if you want.”

Silence in the tent.

“Ron?”

“Three.”

That night I watched, wide-eyed, as Big Ron separated the rounds of tenderloin from his three jumbo T-bones and threw the remainders in the bin. “What you lookin’ at?” he said.

Within a few days I started to eat heartily. Fourteen hours of work in the mountain air will do that for you. More to the point, I learned that the way to go about eating the heaps of meat that were our nightly routine was to wolf the meal down in 10 minutes, saying nothing all the while – and then take a toothpick and trade stories for an hour or two. Foolishly, the first of the four times that I was nearly hurt, I grabbed the initial toothpick and mentioned it.

“I thought I was a goner today,” I said, recounting how I’d taken a mid-afternoon trip to the outhouse at the edge of the bluff 50 metres from camp, perched myself on the one-holer, and heard the unmistakable growl of a bear. I’d looked down between my legs and there at the bottom of the pit, eight feet down, was the head of a grizzly.

It was my first bear story. I was excited and a little proud. Wasn’t that a mistake. The others stared at me deadpan for a minute and then reached for the toothpicks themselves. That night, I was put in my place as the banter went on for a few hours and I was made to understand that what had happened to me was nothing at all. I learned that, with this table of seasoned Northerners, I needed a better story, and until I was in possession of one my place was to listen.

A few days afterwards came my next scare. One of my jobs was to burn the camp’s trash with leftover gas from the oil barrels by the landing strip, so that our friend the grizzly stayed away. Daydreaming, I took the swill from a barrel of helicopter fuel instead of heating oil. Blithely, I threw the fuel over the embers of a fire that wasn’t quite out. With a loud ripping sound it ignited and burned an instant fiery trail back to me. Suddenly I was holding a bucket of flames, and the fuel on my gloves and pants was burning, too. I turned and ran towards Ted, who was working on the generator nearby.

“I’m on fire!” I yelled, “I’m on fire!”

Ted was crouched over the generator and looked over his shoulder at me. “Yup,” he said.

I rolled in the dirt and put myself out and, having learned a thing or two about octane, went back to my job. That night I said nothing. I didn’t want to have to listen for five hours this time.

We were getting on, Debbie and I. Occasionally, if we found ourselves alone that summer, we smoked a bit of weed together and played gopher hockey in the wooden storehouse. This entailed putting a couple of cans for goals at opposite ends of the pantry and each of us taking a broom and using the pantry’s resident gopher as a puck, calling it a day when the stunned rodent lost its energy and didn’t scamper quite so well.

I liked Debbie because she was tender towards me. And there was an inkling of sexual possibility, I suppose – not at all threatening, because it was ridiculous to contemplate. She was, after all, an older woman. I mean, what was she, 20? Twenty-three? As for me, I was spoken for by Nancy, far off in Montreal. A hopeless romantic, I’d been writing regularly to Nancy, and now I was learning to watch for the letters I’d hand to Karl, the helicopter pilot, to see if he had posted them or if they were still, a week later, in his shirt pocket. Writing letters was a surreptitious way for an intimidated son to write in a family with a novelist at the head of the table, and so in the camp I got in the habit of writing her practically every day, sharing stories with her and, having learned the trick of embellishment from my camp elders (borrow a little, when your own bear story doesn’t quite do), exaggerating some.

Though writing to Nancy kept me sane, and though Debbie may have taken me under her wing, it was Big Ron who saved me from my third brush with death. I’d been driving with Jim in the company pick-up along the narrow, sometimes washed-out road that led from the hard-rock drill to the camp, and had quietly said, “Watch the side.” For some reason he thought I was talking about the rock face, not the outside of the road, which fell away sharply toward boulders and scree.

Our front-right wheel went over the edge and Jim hit the brakes just in time, but the truck was teetering on the fulcrum of the edge of the road. He could have opened his door and jumped out but that would have sent the truck, and me, plummeting. I remember thinking as I looked out of the passenger window into a couple of hundred feet of air, “If I slide across his lap then maybe both of us will get out – but will he think I’m gay?”

But Big Ron had seen our mistake and had run to the back of the truck and was using all of his 300-plus pounds to hold the damn thing in place until Swiss Martin was able to stretch a cable from the rig and hook the truck and, getting us out, pull it back onto the road. No one talked much about the mishap that night, though not, this time, because my experience was in any way trivial but as Irish Jim was a touch embarrassed.

Not long after, Dave, the prospector, decided to give me a shooting lesson. When we arrived at a spot a few hundred metres up the side of the valley, approximately level with a target he’d placed, he lay down on the ground, put his eye to the telescopic sight and started to guffaw with laughter. He’d set the target up behind a boulder so that there was no way we’d be able to shoot the damn thing. He lit up a joint, his third of the day, and shared it this time, the two of us swapping stories and falling asleep by a trickling creek before I was jarred awake by a rustling next to me that I thought might have been the grizzly but turned out to be a curious caribou stooping towards me in the grass. In the water, a large fish was jumping its way upstream. I’ve not forgotten the sound of that, either.

Later, on the hike back to camp, I dawdled behind Dave and wrote on a rock, in indelible marker, AUGUST, 1977, NOAH RICHLER WAS HERE, and then threw it as far as I could. “For another prospector to find,” I said to Dave.

That summer, my lodgings were a four-bed platform tent I shared with Big Ron and Craig. The two of them had a stack of skin mags they’d look through, but at the foot of my bed was a row of books my father had packed for me – his desert island reading list. It included Dostoevsky, Koestler, Stendahl, Dickens, Kafka, Joyce, Gallant, Malraux and Schwartz-Bart – but also The Art of Kissing, a primer from the 1940s that counselled on a variety of osculating techniques and ways to pick up girls. (“Tell a girl she’s beautiful. Tell girls they are beautiful even if the mirror throws the lie right back in their ugly faces.”) The last book was a joke, of course, a hangover from my father’s St. Urbain Street youth. After a time, I noticed that one or two of the books would go missing for a while, then be returned, and others would go missing in their place. Not just Big Ron but his assistant and Irish Jim were reading them – bored with the porn, though I wasn’t about to say anything that might bring attention to their secret.

Big Ron got between me and trouble one last time up on the mountain, when a few of us were moving the drill rig to another location, which we’d do by disassembling it into parts that would be lifted by helicopter – a Hughes 500 that came periodically to take our core samples away. The bits of the rig that were not to be lifted singly, as well as sheets of plywood, we’d strap together or put in a net that I’d gather up and hook to the belly of the helicopter. It was a job I liked and thought exciting. I’d crouch on the road beneath the machine hovering down, the pilot watching me in the mirror that was attached to the front of the machine’s left skid as he brought the blades as close as possible to the face of the rock before, following my signal, he’d lift the machine up and away.

The others tended to stand farther up the narrow and precipitous road, well away from me and the helicopter and anything untoward that might happen – and that day, in the seconds before something did, I realized that letting me be the one to hook the loads up to the helicopter’s belly wasn’t so much about letting the kid enjoy himself as avoiding danger.

A sudden gust of wind lifted the helicopter and the pilot instinctively turned the nose down and away from the rock that would have shattered the blades, sending a blast of air and the load I had been about to attach hard into my face, the plywood catching the wind like sails and flying past me and down the mountain before the pilot was able to lift the helicopter away completely. I was knocked unconscious, and it was Ron who ran down to the scene, this time to lift me out of the debris and to the side of the road until I came to.

That night, no one said much about the incident. But having been at the heart of the story and not talking myself up at all meant I’d graduated, in a manner of speaking, and so we chewed toothpicks and I laughed along with the rest of the bunch and they even listened to a story or two of my own, this time, before an aged prospector turned up at the door, a grizzled old-timer right out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and asked if there was a Noah Richler in the house. Yes, said Craig, you can have him. Which is when the prospector tossed a rock on the table, and on it was written, AUGUST, 1977, NOAH RICHLER WAS HERE. “You got something I can eat?” the old man asked.

The date for shutting down the camp was fast approaching and Ted and the geologists from the other bush camps in the region decided to call a party for the last weekend. On the Friday evening, the light still long, the crews started to gather and drink. Hard. A helicopter no one had anticipated came down and disgorged a load of Japanese businessmen who’d heard about the party and wanted to witness it. Big Ron, muttering about some company takeover back home in Saskatchewan, had not taken kindly to this incursion and was grumbling and drinking enough that I could see that things were going to get worse before they got better. I decided to take my exit. Read some Dostoevsky. Write another letter to Nancy.

Outside, the drinking and hollering were getting very loud. Clearly, it was going to be an all-nighter. I could hear some men yelling Big Ron’s name. Some kind of ruckus was already taking place. I ignored it and pulled my old army-surplus sleeping bag up to my chest, continuing to try and read by the light of a kerosene lamp – which is when the tent flap opened and Debbie stepped inside with a bottle of rye and a few beers in her arms. She sat at the foot of my bed, beside the row of books, and offered me one of the beers. This, it took no surmising, was to be my fifth brush with danger.

“Where’s Ron?” I asked, hopefully.

“He went after the Japs,” said Debbie. “It took five guys to hold him back.”

“Oh man,” I said. “Ted won’t be pleased.”

“Ted has no idea,” said Debbie. “He chose tonight to start drinking again and made a pass at me and now he’s out cold in the kitchen. He didn’t see nothing.”

Debbie shifted into a more comfortable position at the foot of the bed. She took off her baseball cap, pushed at her loose hair and undid the top buttons of her lumberjack shirt. It was my fate, not Big Ron’s, I was contemplating – knowing this was one mess he’d not help me out of. All I could think of was Nancy.

“Hey Noah,” said Debbie, grinning her missing-tooth smile and sliding a hand up the bed. “Well who’s a big boy now?”

“I’ll have some of that rye,” I said. And then, summoning all the lessons I’d absorbed that summer, I told stories that were long and made Debbie laugh, and set about drinking with her until she forgot her kind offer and was lying at the foot of the bed unconscious.

I left the tent just in time to see Jim crouched beneath the hovering helicopter and attaching a net to the bottom of it. Big Ron was its drunken load, and he roared as the pilot flew him over the party to a chorus of cheers, before he was set to rest a valley away to be picked up sober the following morning. Yeah.

A few days afterwards, on August 16, I was flown out of camp. In town I watched as news of Elvis Presley’s death blared from a TV in an otherwise empty airport hangar. How odd it was, the hysteria this news caused the lightly-clothed women of faraway cities. Already, I was making the leap ‘outside’ – back south and out into a world I’d abandoned for two months and hadn’t missed at all. And how rapidly was the vision of my summer and its cast of eight suddenly receding.

Back home, I went to see Nancy. Wanting to get some kind of grip on the meaning of our having been apart I stupidly stared into her eyes instead of kissing her and telling her how lovely she was, which should have been easy as the mirror would only have thrown the truth right back into her beautiful face. But I was searching for a magic that wasn’t there – the magic I’d left behind – and, in that moment, I lost her.

Later, she left me for, of all things, a helicopter pilot. But no matter. Nothing – not my years at Oxford, in England, at the BBC, the CBC and the National Post, not travelling in India, South America and Africa, nor all the trips and adventures I’ve subsequently had – affected the man I was to become and what I would demand from the world in the way my summer did up there.

Noah Richler is an award-winning Canadian broadcaster and literary critic and the author of This Is My Country, What’s Yours?