Nobody believed Mix Hart’s stories about her time in the Yukon — that’s what made her decide to write a novel about the territory. It was stranger than fiction already.
“When I got home, I was like 'how did I survive that?'” she says over the phone from her Kelowna home in late July, a few weeks after the publication of her book, Hotel Beringia.
None of the characters in the book are based on people Hart met the summer she was 21 and took a job waiting tables at the Eagle Plains Hotel on the Dempster Highway. But the feel of the Yukon characters and passers-through that she met; the landscape that surrounds the hotel, including the Arctic Circle and Tombstone Territorial Park? That’s all taken from real life. So, too, are components of a few of the more unbelievable adventures Hart had when 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, like waiting tables.
In Hotel Beringia, Rumer and Charlotte, two big-city sisters, move North to take serving jobs at the hotel bar. There, they meet truckers, tourists, scientists, highway workers, politicians and more. Everyone in the book has their own reasons for being in the Yukon, which was something that stood out to Hart when she herself served at Eagle Plains in the '80s.
She took the job because she’d always been fascinated by the Arctic and she was game for adventure. She wasn’t looking for stories at the time. In fact, it would be years before Hart started writing. She went to school for fashion design, then worked as a teacher and a painter before picking up writing when her kids were young. Even then, she says, she didn’t view herself as a writer. She just thought of herself as “someone who writes” — despite the fact she’d been journalling since she was 15, and, at 21, was someone who was tuned into other people’s stories.
“People were coming from all walks of life and this is where they ended up,” she says of the hotel. “You didn’t really know any of their history and you didn’t really know any of their futures, and everyone just ended up at this hotel with their stories (…) that they just sort of leaked out.”
Since leaving in the '80s, Hart has made a few trips North to soak up more of that 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. That’s what she did with anyone and everyone she ran into on that research trip to find out what brought them North? What kept them North? Where were they going from here? Human interaction was key, not just to the process of Hart’s writing, but in the pages of Hotel Beringia.
Within Rumer and Charlotte’s larger adventures, which include romance and intrigue (sometimes all at once in the case of Charlotte, who disappears with her lover), is a more nuanced examination of the way relationships play out and are impacted by things like familial bonds, egos, and connections — to each other and to the land.
Because the land plays a huge part in this story as well, says Hart. It has to. How can it not when it’s such a dominant feature of life in the North? One of the things that fascinates her are the different relationships people have to it.
The sense Hart got when she was here in the '80s, and the sense she still gets now, is that some people look at the North and see a boundless natural resource. That’s a dangerous and destructive way to view it, she says, and one that makes it vulnerable to exploitation.
“The Arctic has this unbelievable strength but it also has this fragility,” she says.
Her hope is that Hotel Beringia serves as a reminder of this to people who already know it. For those who haven’t been here, she hopes the book offers an immersive experience that might help them understand this and view the Yukon as sacred in the same way she does.
