Kyla Macarthur shares “A Day with Jello”, one of Carl Barney’s paintings. Photo by Palma Berger

NEAR THE BORDERS .. OFF THE MAP

by Palma Berger

At first glance the paintings looked like doodling gone mad. As if someone started to doodle and continued until the whole ‘page’ was filled with lines and areas surrounded by lines. But the outlined areas enclosed colour.

The ‘doodles’ were shapes. Shapes of people, places, furniture, indoor living, outdoor living, scenery and colour. Each scene is intensely recorded.

This is the work of Carl Barney whose work is on show at the Odd Gallery.

Barney is a self taught artist, born in Michigan, ‘weaned in Sombra, Ontario,’ who came to Whitehorse in 1992 to meet with a friend. He lived here for the next eight years. It was during the last six of which that he took up painting. He was not painting as a stand apart observer of the life and people around him; he lived and loved every minute of their lifestyle.

As Andrew Connors said of his lifestyle in a two room cabin in the Head Acres, “A party could be going on or friends might be watching a movie while Carl sat on the cabin floor with the canvas propped up against the back of the couch or laid out on the old living room carpet. Listening to the activity and joining in the conversation he was engaged intuitively and kinetically with the canvas.”

It is the depth of that engagement with each painting that draws one to each piece. The more you look the more you see.

Suddenly the doodles are not just that, they are in most cases contour lines following the highs and lows of a scene or a face, or a figure. There is no subtle blending of colour to show shape, but each enclosed area drops into another shade of a particular colour.

David Curtis said of ‘The Way to Lewis’, “This piece first appeared to me as a small eccentric painting of dubious quality, that could have been dismissed as ‘naïve’ or ‘folksy’. But there was something intentional in its execution and intriguing in its rendering of its theme that kept me coming back.”

So it is with all the work. Mike Yuhasz, Gallery Co-ordinator said of opening night for the show, ‘The people didn’t leave early, they kept coming back to view and discuss the different pieces.”

Joyce Caley confessed she has been back to visit the gallery a couple more times. “It is the colour that gets me, and there is so much to see in each work.”

In “Young Andrew” the pink t-shirt on the young lad has the folds and shading defined by areas of a deeper pink or burgundy. The movement of the water is shown with pale blues, deeper blues, greens, blue-greens, all of which areas are enclosed with a darker colour.

“Canadian Gothic” draws one again and again into the living room of the older couple sitting on their couch with their mementos and paraphernalia around them.

There may be scenes Dawsonites recognize, as in the room at the Whitehouse Cabins.

The subjects are not stilted, nor do they have stilted names, as in “A Day with Jello”; Jello being a male friend.

There is a liveliness, warmth, no pretense, but there is a sense of being in touch with humanity in all its forms.

Dick and Andre North enjoy their time at Berton House. Photo by Dan Davidson

With Dick North at Berton House

by Dan Davidson

Dick and Andrée North have been spending their first Yukon winter in a few years in Dawson City. They’ve been caretakers at Berton House, the home of the writer-in-residence program.

Pierre Berton bought his boyhood home in the early 1990s and turned it over to the Yukon Arts Council, which entered a joint agreement with the Klondike Visitors Association to manage the property while a Berton House Committee operates in cooperation with the Dawson Community Library Board to oversee the selection and care of the writers that live in the house.

When the program began with Russell Smith in 1996, it was just a summer operation, but it gradually expanded to year round, with four writers taking three month terms in residence. In 2001 the Canada Council dedicated some funding to the retreat program and made it much more attractive.

Sometimes a hole develops in the schedule when a writer is unable to come. This most frequently happens in the winter, and then the committee will offer the use of the residence to some other writer outside of the program (minus the stipend and travel assistance) just because it’s better to keep the house occupied.

That’s how Dick North, a writer with too many Yukon credentials to be able to qualify under the program's rules, managed to snag the winter berth at Berton House this year. Andrée North arrived in December, and Dick joined her from the USA, where he was wrapping up some business, in January.

Dick has recently seen the re-release of his book, The Mad Trapper of Rat River, in a new, expanded edition which includes his second book on the subject, Trackdown. In fact, this new edition, under the original title, now forms North's definitive account of Albert Johnson's story, and of his own attempts to establish Johnson's real identity. The new edition combines most of the text of the original Mad Trapper with that of Trackdown, eliminating portions of the second book which overlapped the first.

The pictures are incorporated with the text, which makes for a better flow in the reading. In addition, there is new material at the end of the story, with analysis of a significant photograph which appears to establish more clearly Johnson’s true identity.

North is convinced that Albert Johnson was really John Konrad Johnson, also known as William Hoffner and Arthur Nelson.

North found a connection to his new publisher after the appearance of a Mad Trapper story by another journalist in the magazine Sports and Field.

“A guy named Bob Butts (wrote it) three or four years ago. He did a great job on the story, and he’s one of the first guys that ever gave me credit - he said where he got all his information.”

After some correspondence between North and Butts, the latter suggested that North submit the book to Lyons Press, a publisher in the outdoor adventure field.

“So I did, and I got talking with Jay Cassel, he’s the editor. It was a nice fit for me. He loves to fish and hunt and all my books are sort of outdoors stuff.”

The end of negotiations saw North proposing to combine the two Mad Trapper books. Cassel agreed, and also purchased the rights for an American edition of one of North’s other books, The Lost Patrol. The company is also looking at Arctic Exodus, North’s chronicle of the attempt to import reindeer into the North American Arctic.

While at Berton House the Norths are working on the cataloguing of his papers and material related to his work on the Mad Trapper and Jack London. A dozen or more bankers boxes currently line the floor of the room that Berton House writers generally use as a study. North has found an organizational system to work with and is slowly making his way through the mass of material. There’s also material on the Lost Patrol and the reindeer drive, but not as much.

Andrée chuckles a bit ruefully when she notes that the movers and the freight companies just love them.

“Then I’m trying to figure out what I will do when I get it all put together,” Dick says. “That’s up in the air. We don’t know. If anybody has any suggestions or something in mind we’re always open minded. We want to keep it up here, that’s for sure.

“It’s all got to go somewhere. I’m not getting any younger,” says the 75 year old journalist, who has, in his lifetime, been a seaman, a fisheries officer and a newspaper editor and reporter in both Alaska and the Yukon.

Aside from cataloguing, North has two books out looking for publishers. One is a fictionalized biography of Albert Johnson and the other is about Jack London’s time in the Yukon. Jack London and the Cabin Fever not only tells that story but also takes many of his Yukon stories and tells where they might have taken place and also what might have inspired them.

“You take London’s most famous short story, “To Build a Fire.” It has two different endings. If you read Father Judge’s biography by his brother you can see that there’s an incident in there that not only contributed to the first rendition, where the guy lives, but also the second, where he dies.

“Of course, London was camped right next to Father Judge’s hospital, and it’s a pretty well known fact that he knew Father Judge.”

North’s enthusiasm for his subject bubbles over as we talk about this book, sitting in the kitchen at Berton House.

“Gosh,” he says, “you really tripped over something with that question.”

North tripped over most of his subjects years ago and they’ve been bringing him back to the Klondike ever since. The couple will be spending most of the next year here. Andrée has a Yukon Housing apartment and Dick will be doing his usual summer gig as curator and interpreter at the Jack London Centre, a popular tourist site which was founded by the Klondike Visitors Association in the 1980s and based on his collection of London memorabilia.

The couple has enjoyed their winter in Dawson, and Berton House has benefited from their presence. Because they were there, a leaking roof over one of the bedrooms was detected early before it could do too much damage.

Dawson Ranger Heads North With Military Sovereignty Patrol

By Peter Moon

RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut: A Canadian Ranger from Dawson City is a member of the longest one-way Canadian Forces sovereignty patrol in Canadian history.

“This is the trip of a lifetime,” said Ranger Brad Whitelaw of the Dawson City Canadian Ranger patrol. “I would never have imagined I would ever be doing anything like this when I signed up as a Ranger in 1991.

“The people and the places I have seen as a Ranger since then have enriched my life. But being selected to represent my community and Canada on this patrol is something very special. It gives me a special sense of pride to think I am helping to establish Canada’s sovereignty in the North.”

A 20-member Canadian Forces sovereignty patrol is traveling 1,300 kilometres by snowmobile from Resolute Bay, a tiny Inuit hamlet 600 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, to Canadian Forces Station Alert, at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island.

CFS Alert is the world’s most northerly permanently inhabited settlement and operates and maintains signals intelligence collection and geolocation facilities for the Canadian Forces. There are 74 military personnel at the station, which has more than four months of total darkness a year.

Beginning with a Ranger patrol to the Magnetic North Pole in 2002 and a patrol around Banks Island last year, the patrol to Alert is part of a major initiative to use longer and bigger patrols to confirm Canada’s ownership of its Arctic regions.

The patrol to Alert consists of five members of the Canadian Forces and 15 Canadian Rangers. The Rangers were selected from the 1,500 Rangers in the three northern territories. Ranger Whitelaw is the only Ranger from the Yukon.

“The members of the patrol are the cream of the crop, the best of the best,” said Major Stewart Gibson, commanding officer of 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group, the patrol’s leader.

Ranger Whitelaw was one of seven members of the Dawson City patrol who submitted their names for one of the coveted places on the patrol. “When I heard I had been selected,” he said, “I can’t tell you how excited I was.”

Like other members of the patrol, he will be pulling a 16-foot long sled and about 500 pounds of supplies and equipment over the tree-less terrain of the High Arctic. Much of the route will be over sea ice. Temperatures could be as cold as 44 below.

He said he is impressed by the on-the-land skills of the Inuit Rangers.

“Their knowledge of the land is amazing and they have taught me a lot of things,” he said. “In Dawson we don’t travel without a GPS, because every river looks alike and it’s easy to get lost. The Inuit Rangers have an instinctive idea of where to go in these big open spaces, which still baffles me.”

He is taking time off from his carpentry contracting business to participate in the patrol.

“I’m carrying four (disposable) cameras with me,” he said. “I know I am going to be seeing some incredible scenery.”

He is also carrying a Dawson City flag.

(Sgt. Peter Moon is the public affairs Ranger for the sovereignty patrol to Alert.)