Yukon Territorial parks tend to be around water, just like mosquitos do. The worst mosquitos I have ever had the displeasure to meet in person are Yukonian mosquitos. It’s not that there are so many of them all at once, or that they are particularly painful when they bite. But they are desperately tenacious. You cannot get away from them. They find a way. The feeling of running my fingertips against my shaved head and having the mosquitos roll up into little bug balls is loudly disquieting. I wrote poems about these mosquitos. It should have been an epic poem or saga or veda, but I’m not that verbose any more.

Because I didn’t switch on International calling while I still had signal in the US, I had no phone coverage for this entire leg of Canada. The visitor center in Watson Lake had free Wifi, and boy did I use it! But it was very slow. Buying Yukon campground passes took forever, and I didn’t use most of them before they expired in 2 weeks.

I didn’t bring my debit card with me like I thought I had. And I had very little US cash. So I had nothing to convert into Canadien dollars. Luckily I had a couple credit cards that didn’t charge extra for foreign charges.

Dawson has a lot of mine tailings just sitting around everywhere. It’s kind of decorative. The tourist information officer at the Dempster Highway Info Center reassured me that we could make the drive to Tuktoyaktuk, NorthWest Territories, so long as I drove slowly. So we headed that way. The Tombstone Territorial Park campground was full, so I had to keep on driving. Luckily it was summer and the days were long as we approached the Arctic Circle, and eventually I found a turnoff to a small hunting camp. It was on a river, and there was a stand for hanging your caribou carcass. There was occasional rain in the area, so I’d wake in the daylit night to take a look at the river to make sure it wasn’t rising upon us. If anything, it went down a little. This became my new favorite campsite on the trip. And, even though we were still in the Yukon, there was a good breeze that kept the mosquitos from lighting too much.

OK, so here are my truly inspired poems. They’re inspired by mosquitos, so you mustn’t expect them to be any good.

Little black crystalline flakes
Less than half the size of my smallest fingernail
Fluttering down from the sky
Where they touch your skin they stick
and you bleed till you knock them off.
Even then it feels like they're still touching you.

Like electrons or Schrodinger's cat, mosquitos
pop in and out of existence depending on whether anyone is looking at them, or not.
Where they go or come from is a fiendish hell: cotton candy everywhere but no water to wash it down.

Last night's visitor
Is crucified upon the screen
Across my window
Paying for the sins of his kind after taking of my flesh and blood
But how many souls has he saved