Nobody believed Mix Hart’s stories about her time in the Yukon – so she decided to write a novel about the area. The novel was stranger than fiction.
“When I got home, I asked myself, ‘How did I survive this?'” she says by phone from her home in Kelowna in late July, a few weeks after her book was published. Hotel Beringia.
None of the characters in the book are based on people Hart met that summer when, at 21, she took a job as a waitress at the Eagle Plains Hotel on the Dempster Highway. But the feel of the Yukon characters and passersby she met; the landscape surrounding the hotel, including the Arctic Circle and Tombstone Territorial Park? It’s all taken from real life. The same goes for some of the more incredible adventures Hart had while she was here – like crashing a hovercraft on the Eagle River and then driving a Jeep into the river that same season – and some of the more seemingly mundane ones, like waitressing.
In Hotel BeringiaRumer and Charlotte, two city sisters, move north to work as waitresses in a hotel bar. There they meet truckers, tourists, scientists, road workers, politicians and more. Everyone in the book has their own reasons for being in the Yukon, something Hart noticed when she herself served in Eagle Plains in the ’80s.
She took the job because she had always been fascinated by the Arctic and had a taste for adventure. She wasn’t looking for stories then. In fact, it would be years before Hart started writing. She studied fashion design, then worked as a teacher and painter before starting to write when her children were young. Even then, she says, she didn’t see herself as a writer. She simply saw herself as “someone who writes” – although she had been keeping a diary since she was 15 and by 21 was someone who was interested in other people’s stories.
“People came from all walks of life and ended up here,” she says of the hotel. “You didn’t know their history or their future, and they all just ended up in this hotel with their stories (…) that they just let trickle down.”
Since her departure in the 1980s, Hart has made several trips north to absorb more of this character, including one while she was writing Hotel Beringia with the help of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.
“I’m a person who asks a lot of questions,” she says. She did that with everyone she met on this research trip to find out what had brought them north? What kept them north? Where did they go from here? Human interaction was key, not only to Hart’s writing process, but also in the pages of Hotel Beringia.
In the larger adventures of Rumer and Charlotte, which are marked by romance and intrigue (sometimes all at once in the case of Charlotte, who disappears with her lover), there is a more nuanced look at the way relationships develop and are influenced by things like family ties, egos, and connections – to each other and to the country.
Because the land plays a big role in this story too, says Hart. It has to. How could it be otherwise when it shapes life in the north so much? What fascinates her are the different relationships that people have with it.
Hart’s impression when she was here in the 1980s, and the impression she still has today, is that some people see the North as having limitless natural resources. That’s a dangerous and destructive view, she says, and one that makes it vulnerable to exploitation.
“The Arctic has this incredible strength, but also this fragility,” she says.
Their hope is that Hotel Beringia serves as a reminder of this for people who already know. For those who haven’t been here, she hopes the book provides a comprehensive experience that might help them understand this and see the Yukon as sacred in the same way she does.
