Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A barefoot band
As you grow older, and there’s a lot more of your life folded behind you than there is stretching before, you’re bound to indulge in more than a few nostalgic musings. Nevertheless, the last couple of weeks have contained some extraordinary opportunities for looking fondly backward on some special times in my life.
As I recounted in my Sept. 27 column, the 15th anniversary revue mounted by OnStage Uxbridge gave me the chance to reunite with some musical theatre comrades, and in the context of singing the hits from those 15 years, rekindle some artistic bonds too long neglected.
Then, out of the blue, only a few days after the revue was done, I got an e-mail invitation from a Facebook friend (I’d actually only joined Facebook to contact people for the revue) to come down to Toronto for a “Yukoners Night” at a place called the Free Times Café on College Street.
As you’ll know if you read this column even only occasionally, I was a denizen of the Great Northwest for some 17 years (almost exactly the time I’ve now been in Uxbridge). The Yukon is big in acreage, but small in people, still only 30,000 in a territory bigger than Texas. So you get to know your neighbours pretty well.
I was intrigued by who might show up for this “Yukoners Night”, even by what form the evening might take. Would it be just a gabfest, would stories or songs break out? How wide were the invitations spread? I knew of a few former Yukon acquaintances in TO, but not a lot. If the Yukoners were of recent vintage, I might not even know a soul except the host.
So indulgent wife in tow, I drove through Sunday night’s rain to the Free Times Café, pulling up a few minutes after the soiree was supposed to start.
“There’s supposed to be a gathering of Yukoners in here somewhere,” I said to the distinctly un-Yukonny waitress.
“In back,” she said, nodding a head toward the inner recesses of the place, whence the sounds of a solo singer were wafting. So in back I went, into a room that held maybe 30 people (and perhaps 20 were there). At first, I didn’t recognize a soul, until after a few seconds my host noticed me, and gave me a big welcoming hug, which was nice considering we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of decades.
“Any Yukoners here I’d know?” I asked him.
He looked around. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “Unless you know him,” he said, looking toward the small stage.
And then I realized I did know the singer, who as I walked in was performing a song probably only a Yukoner could write, about an unusual dog team and containing a chorus highlighting the words “gee” and “haw” (which are mush-ese for “left” and “right”).
We sat down and listened to the rest of Remy Rodden’s set, and then we learned the reason for the occasion. He and Grant Simpson (my host) and a guitarist named Kate Weekes had come down from Whitehorse to play at a showcase for Ontario folk festival organizers, and while here, talked the café into letting them do a couple of sets for transplanted Yukoners. Only most of the folk who turned up were family. Besides the three musicians (and Remy’s wife), the only ex-Yukoners were me and another former vaudevillian, chanteuse Patti Cross.
Grant and Kate did a joint set after Remy, and as I watched, I realized how typical this trio really was. Remy had come to Whitehorse to take a job as a government biologist (government’s the biggest employer there), and 25 years later he was still there. Grant came as a ragtime piano player for the Frantic Follies (the outfit that got me and Patti there), bought into the company and was still around three decades on.
Kate I didn’t know, but as she performed, I knew she was the strongest archetype of all. She told us she was a dog musher and canoeist, and like most “wilderness women”, it was impossible to tell her age - she could have been 19 or 40. She was barefoot, and she sang in a small reedy voice that nevertheless got way inside you as the evening wore on.
She said she was from Ontario, that when she was in the Yukon she found it hard to leave, but when she was here she found it just as hard to tear herself away. I knew how she felt.
She and Grant and Remy sang a lot of songs that you could really only understand if you’d spent some time north of 60. One of Kate’s was particularly haunting, about the lonesome glory of winning the “Red Lantern”, the prize given to the last finisher in a dog-sled race like the Iditarod or the Yukon Quest. Not many sports give you a prize for coming last, but it’s typical that the official sport of the Yukon, a place that Robert Service said was for folks that “didn’t fit in”, would do just that.
It was a simple night at the Free Times Café, listening to some Yukon musicians sing about home. But it left some pretty complicated feelings.
