What I know of the Klondike gold rush comes from reading The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London in my late teens. London’s life fascinated me, and I read most of his work. What I recall about his Klondike stories is the bitter cold and the elemental harshness of frontier life, where survival depended as much on luck and timing as it did on grit. For men who lusted after a big strike in the gold fields, the hardship was worth it — at least, until it wasn’t. Many prospectors never hit paydirt, while some that did squandered their sudden riches in the saloons and bordellos. While these elements are present in Ley Lines, Tim Welsh’s debut novel, he takes the Yukon story and adds several imaginative twists.
As the title implies, certain places in the world, such as Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Mount Shasta, and Crusoe Island, are thought by some to hold sacred energies, magnetic fields, or supernatural attributes. Sawdust City, the mining town where most of the novel unfolds, may be one of these places, at least in the view of Professor Zong, a purported man of science. “We all hold in our hearts beliefs that are irrational, that run counter to orthodoxy,” Zong says.
When a seven-foot-tall ear, white as chalk and floating on a round stone pedestal, follows a couple of miners back to Sawdust City from the top of a mountain, Zong is oddly dismissive, declaring the Ear an interesting curiosity but nothing to get worked up over. For the grizzled sourdoughs and patrons of the Dog Dick Inn, however, the Ear is seen as a gift, a big strike, the answer to their prayers. It doesn’t take long for the Ear to become a major attraction, drawing visitors and pilgrims from miles around, and pumping new life into the city. “It was as if the Klondike creeks, drained dry of gold, had deposited one last gift.”
Meanwhile, another strange artifact is being dislodged from the earth, not an ear this time, but a colossal Nose. Unlike the Ear, which is quite benevolent, the Nose strikes apprehension in the men trying to liberate it from the earth; some feel incapacitated when near it, as if in a thick fog. The Nose is wanted for the same reason gold, oil, diamonds, or cobalt is wanted. Aren’t such things all for the taking, to be put to productive use, to make someone wealthy and powerful? But might it also be true that some things should be left alone? The Nose turns out to be malevolent, and once freed from its resting place is like a “frost giant waking from its thousand-year slumber, the earth coming to reclaim its child.” Sawdust City will not be the same again. If the Ear represents hope, the Nose is a reminder of the cycles of death and rebirth, destruction and renewal, boom and bust. Beyond the control of mortal men, the Nose lays waste to Sawdust City.
The remainder of the novel centers on Sasha, Don, Molly, and Ladle and how these characters recover from the disaster and the ruin of their home. Some of Welsh’s most evocative writing is found in this section as he ties together past and present. What matters in the end in this harsh and remote landscape are the stories, told and retold, alive as long as there is someone to listen. “Do they reflect what really happened? Who the hell knows now. But they’re worth telling, all the same.”
Indeed. With Ley Lines, Tim Welsh has given us a tall tale to carry us through the long cold northern night.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
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