Shifting

So they build on ice up here. Well, actually permafrost: frozen dirt. After a foot or two down the land is permanently frozen. Well, OK. Not permanently... ice is actually classified as a type of liquid... just a very, very slow moving liquid. And so the permafrost shifts and flows under the landscape. It's one of the reasons that there are so few high buildings. It's costly and sometimes impossible to put down foundations through the permafrost to find solid ground. Sometimes it seems bizarrely to be not taken into account - as with the local swimming pool... which apparently was not insulated against the permafrost and so is unusable in winter.

The house we are in shifts and pops and creaks all through the night. The house is built in two sections - an older wood shack, and then the kitchen/bedroom addition - and from the line between the two buildings comes a constant discussion about which way the structure is going to lean at any moment.



















Dawson is full of buildings that have concluded that discussion in a variety of ways. Left, right, back, front... into the middle.


















They're all pretty spectacular in their varying stages of repose. I guess after a certain period they all sink slowly into the cold ground.


















I saw a story teller up here who is born and bred in the Yukon (Ivan Coyote) who talked about how appealing she found the idea of building on something that actually wasn't solid at all. That the weight and heat of you living in the building changes the way it sits on the land. That the original buildings of the gold rush miners were the practical ones - up on blocks, with a good layer of air insulating the permafrost from you (and not the other way around).























I like the idea very much. A building that's in constant negotiation with the ground that it's on. That talks to you about what's going on between it and land. Whether your weight is changing they way it's co-existing with the land... whether the weight of a Raven on its roof is changing something about its own particular hard-fought and negotiated sag.