Author Elizabeth Hay has completed the fifth and final installment of her blog tour, chronicling her recent trip to the Yukon and Yellowknife. You can catch up with her previous posts here. Now, over to Elizabeth.

May 15, Yellowknife

Six days of unbroken sunshine since we arrived. We’re staying with good friends on Latham Island in the old part of town. My husband, a coastal boy from the north shore of Boston, says it reminds him of New England—the rock and water at our doorstep—the winding, narrow roads. This part of Yellowknife seems more beautiful to me than ever. We are in the perfect spot at the perfect time of year: the sun is warm, the air off the frozen lake is cool, the mixture is just right.

Many changes. Big new houses and lots of them. More roads. Visible prosperity. What used to be called Rainbow Valley, the First Nations village at the end of the island that’s now known by its Dogrib name Ndilo, is abustle with construction; the tiny, flimsy, multi-coloured prefab houses that I knew in the 1970s are nearly gone. The new rainbow is the line of green, orange, blue, red and yellow houseboats that stretch out along Jolliffe Island in Yellowknife Bay. What a place this is for quirky, ingenious habitations—the town’s old improvisational style lingers in the houseboats and in many of the new houses in the old part of town. The subdivisions are a different story. Around Niven Lake new mega-houses on lots created by blasting away the magnificent outcroppings of rock look like they belong in Calgary. I can’t help thinking that Yellowknife is an architect’s paradise and a builder’s nightmare.

How easy it is to slip back into the social fabric of the town. People are welcoming and easy. Many people I knew in the seventies are still here and happy to be here. Some left only to return, drawn back and drawn in by any number of things, none of them unrelated to the quality of the place—storied, and also poetic.

The painter Sheila Hodgkinson, an old friend, has a small trailer-turned-into-a-home in Trail’s End, the town’s original trailer park. From the front you would never guess that her back door opens onto a natural rock terrace that leads up a sloping rocky stretch to the best view in town. Yesterday we stood beside her and took in all of Back Bay, Old Town, Yellowknife Bay, Jolliffe Island. The ice, white when we arrived, is blacker by the day. The houseboats are strokes of colour against the steady rock and shifting ice and sky.

Last weekend, thanks to wonderful friends Karen Johnson and John Stephenson, we camped overnight on the Yellowknife River. Karen drove us to Cassidy Point on Prosperous Lake and there we pulled our canoes across the frozen lake to the open water near Tartan Rapids. I just loved scooting the canoe off the ice into the water, something I haven’t done since the Thelon River canoe trip with John in 1978. We portaged around the rapids and came to the Yellowknife River and camped on the other side of it, just down from the rapids. I also loved seeing the river in two states of being, brimming with new melt-water and frozen hard farther out. In the morning two beavers the size of elephants sunned themselves on the edge of the ice. They were nose to nose, or side by side, apparently just keeping each other company on that beautiful day.

These last two weeks in the north have been packed full and deeply satisfying. I think of the lovely high school English teacher, Joyce Sward, making a special effort to drive us from Whitehorse to Skagway so that we could see the White Pass. Of Whitehorse librarian Lori Schroeder driving us from reading to reading in the Yukon and being knowledgeable and kind the whole time. Of my old friend John Stephenson’s long, patient, excellent arrangements that made it possible for me to come back to Yellowknife. Of his wife Karen Johnson’s lovely hospitality. Of everyone in Yellowknife—at CBC North, at the NorthWords Writers Festival, the Book Cellar, the public library, First Air—who worked to make things work out so well. I think of the mayor, who took us on a tour of Yellowknife and then took us to his home where his wife and mother fed us a hot lunch. I think of the joy of seeing old friends. It actually startled me, the intense pleasure of reconnecting in the flesh with a place I loved at the time and have written about so much.

I was asked at one point what my life would have been like if I had never left. In a way, I never have.