A favourite story of mine, from 20 years ago, published in the Toronto Star:
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Sourdough Saloon.
The kid who handles the box of toes was digging them out with a spoon.
“Which do you choose for your glass of booze?” he asked the guy from the Star –
This big one here to go with your beer? Or the one that’s the colour of tar?”
They’ve been pickled and dried, and kept safe inside a jar that was filled up with salt
Till the moment one’s taken, and stirred but not shaken, and placed in a double of malt.
They’re human remains, these ill-gotten gains, removed from real frost-bitten feet;
Donated for drinking, intended for sinking in glasses of whisky served neat.
DAWSON CITY, YUKON—This town lies on the permafrost of Canada’s extreme north-west, a remote place surrounded by remote mountains, its climate so cold in the winter that the trees crack in the frigid wind with sounds like gunshots.
A few thousand people call Dawson home. There are more in the summertime – many, many more as the trailer homes and RVs roll through on the circle tour to Alaska, stopping to gamble at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s casino that recalls the dizzy days of the gold rush – but in January most of the stores are boarded up and the buildings are dark through the long nights. Only two hotels stay open and their bars serve the miners, the trappers and the characters who come through in an evening.
And of those two hotels, only one serves the Sourtoe – the most disgusting Canadian concoction ever swigged, chugged and, yes, heaved, by those unsuspecting tourists. Which is why I drove all the way here, to be grossed out like the rest.
“We’ll serve you a Sourtoe if you really want,” said Kyle as he checked me in at the Downtown Hotel’s front desk. “Just come though to the Sourdough Saloon” – and he nodded toward an ornate wooden door off the hotel lobby, with dark leaded glass hinting of song and laughter to come later – “we usually do it after 9 pm, but are you sure you want to? It’s really disgusting.”
Of course, I assured him. I drove seven thousand kilometres for this. No turning back now.
He gave me a booklet to read in my room before coming to the bar and it told the history of the Sourtoe. It sounded foul.
It was Captain Dick, living down by the crick, who bought a moonshine shack.
He didn’t look far – it was there in a jar, a toe from years way back.
It was froze one night in the bright moonlight while running from a cop –
It belonged to Otto, who drank himself blotto before Louie gave it the chop.
During prohibition, goes the story, brothers Otto and Louie Liken were being chased by the Mounties as they hauled a load of illicit rum from Dawson into Alaska. Otto got his foot wet and his toe became frostbitten. They knew that if it was left untreated it would spread gangrene into the foot so, in the middle of nowhere, Otto cracked open a bottle of his overproof hooch and drank until he was anesthetized, then Louie lopped the toe off with an axe.
For some reason they kept it in the bottle of rum where it sat for half-a-century, pickled solid, until their cabin was bought by “Capt.” Dick Stevenson, a local entrepreneur who ran a riverboat for tourists on the Yukon River. He found the bottle and, not long after, found himself in a Dawson City bar with a couple of friends and wondering what to do with it.
Somebody mentioned “The Ballad of the Ice-Worm Cocktail,” a poem by Robert Service that tells of a British major tricked into drinking a cocktail with – he believed – an “ice worm” floating in it.
“Their bellies were a bilious blue, their eyes a bulbous red;
“Their backs were grey, and gross were they, and hideous of head.
“And when with gusto and a fork the barman speared one out,
“It must have gone four inches from its tail-tip to its snout.”
The ballad tells of the major surrounded by rugged drinkers in the Dawson bar, goaded and chided into swigging back the cocktail in order to qualify as a real Yukoner. He didn’t know the “ice worms” were only spaghetti.
Capt. Dick realized he had a winner in his bottle. He printed up some certificates, put on his captain’s cap and plopped the pickled toe into anybody’s glass who was willing to pay a premium for the experience, to qualify as a real Yukoner. And such is human nature – especially the nature of humans on vacation, or half-soused – that plenty of people were willing to give it a try. The only rule was that “the lips have gotta touch the toe.”
For seven years, tourists stopped by the hotel bar and asked for the toe in a drink, usually champagne in a beer glass. A log book was kept and there were plenty of exceptions: A woman of 84 slugged it back in a glass of 7-Up; a troop of boy scouts drank it with Coke. Then in July 1980, after 725 recorded Sourtoes consumed, a local placer miner fell over backwards while drinking his 13th drink of the evening and accidentally swallowed the toe.
The call went out for a replacement. Eventually, an Alberta woman heard of the dilemma and donated a toe that was due to be amputated because of a corn, but after another summer of imbibing it was lost during renovations. Not long after, a trapper from Faro donated his frost-bitten big toe and Capt. Dick was back in business.
Eventually, he took his Sourtoe cocktail on the road. Every now and again somebody would swallow the toe and he’d have to find another, but somehow donations always seemed to turn up. Sometimes he’d have several toes at one time. He was even invited onto The Tonight Show to share it with Jay Leno, but the U.S. government balked at allowing human remains to cross the border.
Capt. Dick never made much money from the toe, but it was usually good for a few bucks in a bar. He finally moved to Whitehorse around 1993 and gave his latest pickled toe to a friend who took up the cause again in Dawson. It found a home at the Downtown Hotel and in January this year, the new owners of the hotel bought the rights to the Sourtoe name and all the certificates and a foot’s worth of blackened and putrefied toes, packed in a jar of rock salt. It was right around then that I checked in for the night.
Tip your head back and open a crack in your mouth as the booze trickles by.
But try not to swallow, or the toe will then follow and inside your stomach will lie.
It’s happened before, according to lore, that the toe has been gulped back and lost;
Then they’d search for another from somebody’s brother whose foot fought a fight with the frost.
“I would say there must have been a couple of dozen toes, minimum, that have been The Toe so far,” said Matt Van Nostrand, the co-owner of the Downtown Hotel, which charges $5 for a single shot of a drink of your choice with a human toe floating in it.
“Two were swallowed a couple of years back, and then last summer, someone chewed it. He chewed it right up and took it out of his mouth and handed it to me and it was just toast. He was a firefighter from Ontario and those guys like to party. His commander found out about it and he was shipped home the next day and we got an official apology for it. That was kind of neat. We don’t hold a grudge – I’m sure he was just really drunk – but it is a fairly hard to come across little piece of the business. They don’t last forever and we could definitely use more toes.
“We’ve had as many as 150 people do it in one night – people just line up for it. And we’re very proud of it.”
Which begs the question: Why?
“The appeal?” asks Van Nostrond. “We say that it’s a way of becoming a sourdough – and you know what a sourdough is? It’s a person who’s spent a winter in the Yukon from freeze-up to break-up. It’s something that you can come and do that’s tied in to the identity of the Yukon and specifically Dawson City. It really says you’ve been here and you’ve taken in some of the Dawson City culture.
“Mind you, it’s totally disgusting, and the more I do it, I wonder how the hell someone decides to do it. It’s a human toe, and when you do a bunch of them it starts to get a little bit soggy. It’s just a kind of really graphic thing, you know. People will put it right in their mouths and push their cheek out with it and it just makes me sick. I sit there and I can’t even watch – it’s gross.
“And I don’t know why the hell people do it, but they do it and they line up for it and sometimes it just kind of blows my mind.”
There are strange things done in the midnight sun and the Sourtoe’s strangest of all.
There’s no time to fidget while swigging a digit that’s floating around your highball.
Up here in the Yukon, while other folks look on, there’s ice in the air and the snow,
But not in this bar, in this drink for the Star – there’s only a black pickled toe.
I’d stalled for time when I walked in to the saloon, with just a pair of guys in thick coats up at the bar and a couple playing pool. I bought myself a beer and some drinks first for the guys at the bar and asked if they’d mind if the bartender put a toe in them and they didn’t care. “Sure,” said the clean-shaven one – well, comparatively clean-shaven, “as long as I can have it in a Sambuca. I reckon I’ve had about 13 since I’ve been coming in here, so another will go down well.”
Why so many? Did he like the taste?
“It’s ’cuz people like you keep buying me drinks if I’ll do it. Hey Georgia, make sure that’s a Sambuca, okay?”
Georgia the bartender nodded and poured the drink. Kyle wandered through from the front desk and smirked a little. “So you going to do the toe, Mark?”
“I’ll get there,” I said. “Will you do one with me and these guys?”
“No way – it’s disgusting,” said Kyle. “It’s gross.”
“How can you call yourself a Yukoner?” I asked.
“I’m not – I’m from Toronto,” said Kyle. “I came here last summer to pick mushrooms and just never quite left.”
He went into the back and returned with a wooden box that, when he opened it, I could see held some certificates, a spoon and a small Mason jar filled with salt. He flipped the lid on the Mason jar and dug around in the white crystals. A black object came to the surface. A dry black object. A large, dry black object. It looked like a turd. Georgia pulled her head back in an involuntary recoil.
He dug around some more and pulled out some smaller, more shriveled objects, but we all knew it would have to be the big one.
“It’s better in Sambuca,” said the guy at the end, looking past it to the glass as Kyle lifted the big toe, as big a toe as any grown man can cultivate, and plopped it into the liquor with a little splash. Georgia slid the glass down the wooden bar and the guy lifted it straight to his lips and drank it down in one shot. The toe went right into his mouth. He pushed it back out between his lips, took it with his fingers and dropped it back into the empty glass.
“Want to buy me another one?” he asked.
No – it was time. Georgia rinsed off the toe and plopped it into my double-shot of Yukon Jack whisky. I’d had a pint of beer for courage and there was no going back. All eyes were on me. I thought of Robert Service’s British major, perhaps in this very bar:
“Yet on him were a hundred eyes, though no one spoke aloud,
“For hushed with expectation was the waiting, watching crowd.
“The Major’s fumbling hand went forth – the gang prepared to cheer;
“The Major’s falt’ring hand went back, the mob prepared to jeer…”
It’s difficult to drink a drink without looking at it. I raised the glass toward my face and stared at the floating black toe. This close, its long nail looked hideously untrimmed. Its severed end was a hardened mass of dark folds, with the bone barely visible. Was this a frost-bitten toe, clinically removed from a Yukon foot model who wore sandals too late beyond the season? Or lopped off the corpse of an axe-murderer to remove its identity tag?
I raised it closer. The warm smell of the whiskey was reassuring; the gruesome sight of its cargo was not. I put the glass to my mouth and tipped it gently. The alcohol washed against my lips, clean and strong. The toe sat in the bottom of the glass and didn’t move. I tipped it more and let the drink flow in past my teeth. The toe didn’t budge.
“You can drink it fast, or drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe,” recited Kyle helpfully.
“I hate watching this,” said Georgia.
“You shoulda had a Sambuca,” said the guy at the end of the bar.
And then, with the glass tipped back for the last of the drink to splash in, the toe lost its sticky grip on the base and tumbled down and bumped against my mouth. The surprise as I felt it touch made me gasp, just enough to open my mouth a little more and for the toe to wash inside, past my teeth and up against my tongue. It was never like this for Fergie.
“Oh gross,” said Georgia. “I hate it when that happens.”
It tasted like nothing at all – like a lump of plastic. I picked it out quickly and dropped it in the glass and ordered another beer, quickly, to rinse everything out.
“Now you’re a sourdough, Mark,” said Kyle.
“No I’m not,” I said. “I’m just another idiot. But that wasn’t too bad at all.”
These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
I drank the glass with the Yukon Jack and the blackened, pickled toe.
I’m not that smart, though I’ve got the heart of a guy who’ll try anything quick,
So I’ll toast him now and give a bow to the Yukon’s Captain Dick.
No one could tell me where Dick Stevenson is now. He’d be 76 years old and calls to his last known address in Whitehorse went unanswered. But while he may have faded into the background, his creation is only growing in demand. In the last 18 months since Van Nostrand and his business partner bought the Downtown Hotel, 4,000 people have joined the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. He reckons the club has about 35,000 members since its inception – all people who’ve drunk The Toe.
“It just seems to be becoming more and more popular. We’re having to dedicate more time to it in the bar,” he said.
“Doing it in the wintertime is kind of neat, when it’s just locals in there. In the summertime we have a guy who reads out the Sourtoe rites and there’s a lot of hooting and hollering and people just love it.
“I can’t imagine it starting up anywhere else. You’ve got to be crazy to come up with some anatomy of a human being and drop it into people’s drinks and tell people to drink them and to pay you for it – it’s just too crazy. But that’s what makes it neat because that’s what Dick Stevenson did. He just created it out of nothing, and now there’s thousands and thousands of members of the club. Hell of a thing, you know.”