Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 18/00) - It's Saturday afternoon in Old Town at Bullock's Bistro. The room fills with the warm aroma of sourdough buns fresh from the oven as patrons help themselves to beverages from the fridge.

Across the street at Weaver & Devore's, someone is buying milk, a newspaper and cigarettes, extra light please. The talk is about someone who had a baby and how beautiful it was and, by the way, upstairs you can buy boots.

The store has been there forever, starting as Weaver & Devore Trading in the summer of 1938.

It's late October but still the sky is a blue mirror on the water as a man and two boys paddle to the small dock across from the Trapper's Cabin, a stone's throw from Bullock's and Weaver & Devore. Cars slow to a carriage's pace as they crawl around the beaten one-way road that circles Pilot's Monument, the Norweta is moored at the government dock and the rasp hum of a float plane comes and goes, an echo of summer when the lake is constantly churned with the wake of float planes landing and leaving. To talk about the history of Old Town is to talk about the history of Yellowknife.

This was the hub at one time. The Northern hub of a Northern city that looked nothing like its southern counterparts.

Renata Bullock, owner of Bullock's with her husband Sam, says part of the magic of Old Town is how the community merges history with the present.

"History just goes on and on," said Bullock, "but the character never changes."

"You get yesterday with tomorrow merging and I really like that," she said.

You can see the bay from the wide windows in Mary and Friend's Tea Room. It sits almost at the exact spot where Franklin Ave. turns into a one-way street, just past Pilot's Roost which closed this weekend because of the funeral for a pilot who died in a plane crash.

The place to be

The Victorian trimmings go well with the blue and green back-drop that pours in through the windows of the tea room. Owner Mary Bryant moved to Old Town in 1989. She says she didn't want to live anywhere else. She built the restaurant in her house.

"It's like it always was in frontier time, alive, different, not like any other place in Canada," Bryant said.

She knows first-hand about community spirit as during a recent storm her family's boat was taking in water and about to sink when her neighbours, fellows from Air Tindi, came with water pumps to save the boat.

Bryant, like Bullock, talks about the types of people who live in Old Town -- the spontaneity, the creativity, the openness, she reflects on the history, the architecture, and the one thing both Bryant and Bullock refer to over and over again -- the nature.

Penny Johnson is out digging up wilted pansies from her flower bed. She says she's preparing it for winter. The sewage pump-out sticks through the dirt like some mutant plant.

Johnson lives on Latham Island on the back side, that's how she gives directions to her home. When asked why she lives in Old Town, the resident of 17 years doesn't say a word but leads to the backyard and points.

Her lawn slopes down toward the water which sparkles beneath a falling autumn sun. A float plane is moored at her neighbour's dock. The right wing and nose are visible through the naked branches of shrubs.

Finally she breaks the silence to say "this is why I live here."

And it's why tourists from all corners of the south flock to Old Town once the sun starts sticking around for most of the day.

The city of Yellowknife has been trying to come up with ways to make Old Town more tourist friendly.

In the spring of 1999 the city brought together designers to brainstorm ways to get full use out of Old Town.

"Yellowknife is really pockets of cities that sit next to each other," said architect Tracy MacTavish of Pin-Matthews Architecture.

"We hope to develop ideas to create linkage," she added.

Tourism jewel

The city's recent waterfront management plan suggests wider roadways for cars, better routes along the water for walkers and joggers, easier access to the harbour for boating and a waterfront park.

The fact that Old Town is a tourism jewel is no secret. In a continent that is increasingly suburban, Old Town represents an aberration, a denial of the Mississauga, suburban ghetto life. Old Town life is only read about in books or seen in movies by people who commute 20 minutes via the 401 every weekday.

Boating life

Bruce Davidson is house-sitting a cabin on Joliffe island. He takes his canoe out at twilight. The water is a deep mauve and flat. The sky is a deeper mauve.

He canoes out to the houseboats, a community in itself that he considers part of Old Town. A motorboat sputters beside a red houseboat, the boater manoeuvres the boat so it just touches the side.

The motor stops, the boater steps out grabbing some bags, 'done it a thousand times,' the commute home -- miles away from freeways and suburbs.

Beside the cabin is a treehouse about 10 feet up a tree; beside that another cabin and dogs baying all around. On the canoe back, the lights are muted on the shore. The hum of an outboard rises and falls and the canoe rocks on the wake.

As the sun sets over Yellowknife's high rises the shadows grow long like history in Old Town, reaching East to the place where it began. Back to the place caught in the frenzy of gold rushes, fur trading, and surviving.

An old man leans out the porch of his shack in the Woodyard. The lines on his cheeks and forehead run deep. The TV is on inside and a tin can voice murmurs something. He says he has nothing to say about Old Town, he's been there for 40 years.

He doesn't remember how long he's lived in the Woodyard, he doesn't care much about time.

"I just wake up and live and not worry about anything else," he murmurs and looks out at the twilight October sky.