Ivan E. Coyote on Whitehorse

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The best travel-guide for Whitehorse may be You Are Here, an hour-long spoken word show written and performed by Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon. (Available on CD but impossible to find on the web.)

Coyote describes how Two Mile Hill, the old road into Whitehorse, “wraps itself like a bent elbow around the clay cliffs that frame the west side of downtown Whitehorse, the old part with all the little wooden shacks built in the forties by the soldiers so they’d have a place to live when the highway was finished."

The government once changed the name of Two Mile Hill to Jack London Boulevard, and put up a sign to let people know it. Of course the locals ignored the new name and eventually the government put up a bigger sign to let everyone know that Jack London Boulevard was again called Two Mile Hill.

You Are Here is full of such stories that create a vivid image of the town. Coyote, who was born and grew up in Whitehorse, speaks with an accent that sounds a bit like a New Brunswick or Minnesota twang—I wonder if everyone in Whitehorse sounds like that.

Tomorrow I find out.