A couple of weeks ago, 150 Whitehorse residents braved an unseasonal cold snap to walk with torches along the Yukon River, behind a giant papier-mâché effigy of Old Woman Winter. At the Robert Service Campground, they threw the effigy onto a massive bonfire and watched it burn, roaring their approval.
This atavistic ritual, organized yearly by Yukon Educational Theatre, supposedly exorcizes the winter in one passionate, symbolic act. In real life, though, winter is ousted much more slowly. April is the season of stubborn snow and mud, so much slick, greasy mud that people who live on rural dirt roads have to park their trucks and walk the last kilometre home.
But finally, it's happening. The swans are back, a sign of our imminent release. Peter Heebink was the first to spot them, two pair of trumpeters, on March 10 out at Marsh Lake. Peter lives there, and often sees them first. He phones Todd Powell at Renewable Resources, and Todd calls Jukka Jantunen, the interpreter at Swan Haven, and they head out to count the swans and see what they're up to.
Which is resting, usually, and feeding on last year's plants on the silty bottom at the edge of the ice. On Sunday, April 1, there were about 40 of them, Jukka reckoned. They were visible through the viewing scope, bums up, necks down in the water, or sailing peacefully beside the ice, against a backdrop of willow and spruce and mountains.
By mid-April, there are 1,500 to 2,000 trumpeter swans whooping it up on the lake. And they're joined by numerous quacking, whistling and shrieking species of shore birds and waterfowl, who hang out on the mudflats as the ice recedes toward the shore. Jukka says the noise is deafening.
As the trumpeter swans move out, the tundra swans move in, from southern California and Mexico's Baja peninsula. They arrive in late April and take off a couple of weeks later to their breeding grounds in western Alaska and eastern-most Siberia. In their migratory habits, the tundra swans resemble another species appears in the Yukon around this time. Indeed, Jukka saw a cluster hanging around a downtown parking lot on March 28, looking a little anxious, a little ruffled, a little miffed at the unexpected cold.
They were, of course, RV-ers, the vanguard of the flock who will soon be streaming up the Alaska Highway; nomadic elderly couples, usually American, for whom the call of the open road becomes irresistible each spring.
The territorial tourism department likes to refer to them as "rubber-tire" tourists, and does everything in its power to keep them here. To little avail: They are Alaska-bound. Like the tundra swans, they are drawn by an irresistible urge to flock with, and to, their own kind.
No, they won't stay, but they will give us what we need: sure evidence that spring is coming.
Not that we haven't felt it. Spring fever has taken hold, you can see it in the bars at night, that hungry, restless look, that willingness to get in trouble that drives even the most staid individuals to do things they will later regret.
Relationships are breaking up, as they do every spring with the inevitability of the ice cracking open on the Yukon River.
Now, the young and the antsy among us await a migration toward which there are no feelings of ambivalence whatsoever: the travellers. They are the kayakers, the mountain-climbers, the entire crew of extreme sports enthusiasts. Tanned, fit and above all, never-before-seen-in-Whitehorse, they are starting to roll into town. "New blood," goes the whisper, and all eyes turn toward the door.
April is the season of longing, frustration and mud. But it is also the season of candle ice, which falls off melting snow drifts in upright slivers about five inches long, which tinkle on the rocks as they break. It's the season of ice chunks floating past Whitehorse under a blazing blue sky, of lengthening days, of brilliant northern lights.
And it is the season of the swans' return. We hear them honking overhead, reminding us of ancient patterns and ancient renewals.
Yukon poet Michael Reynolds has written about that sound, in his Chorus: In The Voices of Swans, published in the Winter, 2001, edition of Ice Floe magazine: This is the sound of the world turning: rough mechanism, hinge and gears. The frost is ready to take or to give. Muscle groaning, gripping, slipping across the skull's firmament: a sound with shape constellating in the mind. Look up! Fix to that most distant voice; use this; do not not hear this.