by Pat Ardley
Another miss, for some reason, was that my bread would not rise. For the most part, I did what the books said. I mixed the ingredients well, I kneaded the dough for as long as they told me to, I left it for ages hoping it might rise more on the counter before putting it in the oven. I even thought, maybe it will rise after I put it in the oven. Once I put the loaves into the oven, though, what few bubbles there were would flatten and not rise again. George started calling them “bricks of bread” instead of loaves. Many years hence, after having made thousands of beautiful high loaves with perfectly proportioned air pockets, I now know part of the problem was that I was trying to make super-healthy bread and it was simply too heavy. All those great ingredients like whole-wheat flour, oatmeal, bran and wheat germ cut through the air pockets made by the rising yeast and elastic gluten. You really can’t substitute all of those ingredients instead of white flour and expect to produce a nice high fluffy loaf. And I no doubt heated the liquid too hot and mostly killed the yeast. I might as well have been making porridge. But hard and flat or not, it was healthy. And with butter slathered on and homemade jam heaped all over it, my bricks of bread were a real pleasure.
While we had been off the island for our holidays, mechanics came to the lighthouse and hooked up the new foghorn. They didn’t hook up the automation equipment that would turn the foghorn on, but it was now set up for us to push just one button to manually turn the fog siren on. They had pointlessly replaced the lovely low rumble of the old horn with a new high-pitched, screechy, dentist-drill-shrill siren that would jangle my nerves every time it was foggy. Every twenty-five seconds for a full five-second blast. Making it almost impossible to fall asleep. On a foggy night I would find myself levitating off the bed for five seconds every twenty-five seconds, until it was either not foggy anymore or until morning had arrived to drag me out of bed.
One chilly evening we looked out our big front window onto the most beautiful, sparkly, snowy night that had come to envelop our island. When it snowed, visibility for ships in the channel was almost non-existent, so the loveliness of the evening was shattered by the shriek of the new foghorn. For five seconds … every twenty-five seconds. Great huge flakes were drifting down and glittering each time the light from the tower swept past. We watched as the snow built up and covered the walkway and how it left a huge white square on the helicopter pad. We showed Lorna how to make snow angels and covered the front lawns with them. Enough for an entire angelic choir!
In the morning, Ray found their old-fashioned sled and we all piled on and went flying down the winding walkway to the wharf, doing about fifty miles an hour. Only on the last hairpin turn did we lose the top two people, who went skittering off in a hysterical pile of loose hats and mittens. After a childhood of sledding on the gentle Prairie landscape, this was the best sledding ride ever! Our shrieks of laughter were muted by the low-slung clouds and the thick covering of snow. After the snow stopped falling we could see the mountainsides on Calvert Island well defined by the blanket of snow, and the world seemed to be only soft shades of grey and white. Even the calm ocean was monochromatic grey as the dense snow mixed with the frigid water on the surface.
John stopped by, towing a firewood log for his parents’ furnace. He tied it onto the beach under the wharf. He salvaged logs for a living, but this one had some rot in the end and he thought it would be rotten all the way through, therefore not good for a building or a float. John left, and the fellows started cutting the log into rounds. As they went, the wood became stronger and better. There was not one knot or bit of rot in the rest of the log! It was forty feet long and a good three feet thick at the butt end. Ray and George used the crane to lift the heavy blocks onto the wharf. Once they started chopping into the log there was no stopping them. Lorna and I stacked load after load of wood into the tractor wagon and drove it up to the house, then stacked the wood again in their basement. George liked to say, “Our firewood warms us twice. This time when we chop and stack it and again when the Salo family heats their house with it.” Over the next week we chopped and stacked our way through the entire log. John felt sick when he heard that the whole log was not rotten and they had cut it up for firewood anyway. Apparently it could have been worth a lot of money. It was a great fir log though, and fir makes some of the best and hottest fires. Ray’s family was warm the rest of that winter and most of the next, while our house stayed cozy all winter with the oil furnace in the basement.
One nasty dark and windy night I caught a glimpse of a twenty-foot sailboat as the beam of light swooped past. It was bouncing and dipping in the waves in front of our house and then rearing up on the next swell. I put a jacket on and went out to the edge of our deck. The wind was howling so I couldn’t hear what the people on the boat were yelling. One of them grabbed a jacket and started waving it in the air. In a pinch, this is an international distress signal. I ran and woke George to come and signal that we would help. George yelled for me to grab his rain gear and ran out the door. I grabbed his jacket and boots and raced behind him. He was already lowering the skiff with the winch when I got to the wharf. It was bitter cold, and I was frozen with the fear of him going out into the storm in that ridiculously inadequate tin boat. He grabbed life jackets and climbed down the steps then pulled the boat onto the beach, stepped into it and pushed away from shore.
I was afraid to watch and afraid not to. I ran back to our house and stood on the deck so I could warily follow the rescue. After many minutes of slowly pounding through the waves, with water sloshing over the sides, and wind tearing at his clothes, George pulled up close to the sailboat and threw a rope to the fellow who was on his knees in the back of the boat. It took a few tries but the guy finally snatched the rope with a long gaff and secured it to the back of the sailboat. Once the two boats were tied together, the fellow hauled in more line and was awkwardly able to tie the rope to the front of the sailboat to make it safer for towing. Meanwhile, George had made sure that the rope was secured to the stern of the skiff, and he let out a lot more rope before he cautiously turned back toward the bay and very slowly towed the sailboat through the storm to safety.
The couple on board were so thankful. They thought they were going to end up washing out to sea but then they realized that their boat was being pushed closer and closer to the lighthouse. Their engine had stopped working and they couldn’t put sails up in the stormy wind and high seas. That’s the funny thing about sailboats: they almost always passed us using an engine and rarely did we see one go by with the sails up. We found out that they had no flares, or charts, or life jackets, or life rings, or extra rope or radiophone—and apparently no sense whatsoever to head out onto the ocean so ill-prepared. They stayed with us that night, and in the morning Ray and George and the fellow tinkered with their engine and got it working again. We gave them flares, some rope and life jackets and showed them how to get to Dawsons Landing where they could pick up more necessary supplies. They were so lucky that I just happened to look out the window when I did. Just a few minutes later and they would have been around the point and out of sight and no doubt crashing onto the rocks.
After the storm passed and the swell settled down, we used Ray’s boat to visit a couple that were caretaking the BC Tel relay station on Calvert Island, Andy and Nell Olsen. I was always perched at the very front of the boat, so when we travelled through rough water I took a terrible pounding up my spine from the hard wooden bench. For weeks after each trip across to Calvert my back felt like someone had strapped hot coals under my shirt. But I had no knowledge of how to run a boat through waves and swells, so my spot was always up at the front, taking ten times the pounding of the happy driver who sat at the back holding onto the motor’s tiller arm. It was the price I paid for our excellent adventures.
There was a huge tidal flat in front of the Olsens’ house so we tied the boat to the dock on the other side of the peninsula and walked about a mile and a half to their place on a little-used but very r
utted road. All along the road there were signs of wolf—tracks and poop. As we approached the Olsens’ house, we could see a young wolf sitting about twenty feet from their kitchen window. Andy had intended to shoot any wolves he saw come around because they kill all the deer, but when this one showed up on his lawn, exhausted and starving, he didn’t have the heart to. So he fed it that day, and the day after, and it stuck around ever since. As we got closer, the wolf loped off to the edge of the lawn with its tail streaming out behind it, then turned and stared at us with huge yellow eyes.
I had seen more wildlife in the year since I arrived at Addenbroke than I had seen in the rest of my life. Every day was an opportunity for new and often unexpected encounters with forest animals, whales and dolphins, as well as the tiny sea creatures that I was finding as I scrabbled along the rocky shores. The love that George and I felt for each other grew along with our sense of adventure and our growing sense that we really belonged in this wild country.
In the middle of March of 1974 we wanted to get some mail out, but the supply ship would not be in for another two weeks. Ray told us we could take his boat to Dawsons Landing. The day looked clear and the weather forecast was good, but I bundled up in my warmest Prairie winter clothes and we headed off early in the day to make the trip to the store. Dawsons Landing consists of an assortment of buildings tied to shore in a sheltered bay just off the main channel of Rivers Inlet. The general store is built on a huge log raft locally called a float, and the building sits about three feet above the water. On another float is a gas station with the fuel tanks secured on the hillside behind it and great long hoses draped down the hill and across the water to the dock. There were other floats for the storekeeper’s house, generators and storage sheds. The whole place was floating.
We handed in our mail to Lucky, the storekeeper, and turned to see all the wonderful goods for sale. The store carried everything that would be needed in town: clothes, shoes, rain gear, tinned food, books, housewares, tools, boat parts, plumbing parts and fishing gear. And if you timed it right and arrived just after the freight boat had been, there would also be some “almost fresh” produce. They also had the only post office for over fifty miles in any direction. The only thing missing was that in those days, there was no liquor for sale anywhere in the Rivers Inlet area or, as with the post office, for over fifty miles in any direction! The store was a little quiet in March but extremely busy in the summer fishing months with the hundreds of commercial fishermen living for weeks at a time on their fishboats. In the middle of the sockeye season, there could be a thousand commercial boats in the area.
A fishboat drifted in to the dock then a couple climbed off, tied up and came into the store. I could hear them talking with familiarity to Lucky and I heard an English accent. A happy, rosy-cheeked face was smiling and stepping quickly toward me. Right behind her ambled a jovial-looking fellow with a blond curly mop holding fast to a pair of reading glasses. We walked to the front of the store and introduced ourselves and said that we had just come down from Addenbroke Lighthouse. They introduced themselves as Sheila and Richard Cooper, then Sheila turned to me and blurted out, “Are you the kelp-pickle lady?” I had to laugh. I was known for making kelp pickles? How would people have heard about them? Sheila turned red with embarrassment, but I insisted it hadn’t been an insult. We were all having a good chuckle when a couple of fellows came in to the store.
We were introduced to Ken Moore, a commercial fisherman who lived full-time in Finn Bay near the mouth of Darby Channel, and the other fellow, John Buck, the owner of a fishing resort who wintered in Finn Bay after the sport-fishing season was over. Everyone finished their shopping and we were all leaving about the same time. While we had been standing around talking, the sky had darkened and by the time we walked out the door, snowflakes had begun to fall. Ken asked if we would like a tow as far as Finn Bay and we gladly accepted. They were in a thirty-foot cruiser with a nice warm wheelhouse and cabin. George sat up front talking to the resort owner, and I sat below at the table having tea with Ken—the first of many cups of tea shared with him over the years. When we were almost at Finn Bay, George leaned through the small door and yelled to me over the engine noise, “Do you want to cook for eighteen people at John’s fishing resort this summer while I manage it?” I shrugged and shouted back up to him, “Sure!”
PART TWO
Rivers Lodge
Working at a Fishing Resort
Two months later we left the lighthouse. We had been there for almost a year and a half. We had been perfectly happy there, but when a chance encounter with the resort owner turned into a job offer, we both were excited to try something new.
It was 1974 and we listened to ABBA and the Beach Boys as we packed our few belongings into boxes and loaded them into the tractor wagon for the ride down to the wharf. John Salo and his tugboat, the Robert G II, were anchored in the bay, and George and Ray used the hoist and a net to lower our things down to him. The most important piece of furniture that we had to take was our bed that George had so patiently and lovingly carved. There were also the two very heavy coffee tables, wooden planters and various jars of jellies, jams, pickles and canned clams and salmon. Also important was our record player, with quite a few records, that had been a godsend for me on crushingly quiet winter evenings.
We pulled the netting off our makeshift chicken coop and let the banty chickens run free. They were very adaptable and would be hiding their eggs in the woods again shortly. We left the chicken house for future junior keepers. I had scrubbed our temporary home from top to bottom and now walked through the rooms feeling just a little sad to be leaving. We had had such a wonderful time here and I didn’t quite know what we were heading into. But I was sure it would be more exciting exploits. I stood looking out the big picture window in the living room and memorized the vista: the always interesting and changing ocean as it rolled and roiled up the channel. The mountains rising three thousand feet on Calvert Island to the highest point on Mount Buxton, the lush shades of green of its tree-covered flanks and the contrasting starkness of the treeless craggy rocks at the very top. I had no premonition that one very sad day I would land in a helicopter on the very peak of that mountain to fulfill an important wish for George.
I finally turned to go, and bumped into Lorna, who was also unhappy to see us leave. She loved to have someone to play tricks on and would miss listening in on our story time. We walked over to the senior keeper’s house to say goodbye to Ruth, who was just sending the 11 AM weather report. She came into the kitchen and wrapped a bundle of cake for us to enjoy on the trip to Finn Bay. In the Robert G II, the trip would be a little over an hour. We had hugs all around on the porch and headed down to the wharf. John was waiting on his boat, which was gently swaying on the swell. They had everything already tucked safely on the boat, so we headed down to the shore where John could pick us up in his skiff. We climbed aboard the tugboat and with a forlorn wave headed out of the bay and on to our next excellent adventure.
The resort in Finn Bay was called North West Safaris and was built on log floats like the Dawsons Landing store, only on a much smaller scale, and was safely tied to shore in a corner of the bay just off Darby Channel in Rivers Inlet. The entrance to Finn Bay was about 150 feet wide, and the bay itself was a half-mile long by about five hundred feet wide in places and was surrounded by low tree-covered hills. The resort was there for the winter because the spot they tie to in the summer was too rough on the floats in the winter winds. John dropped us and our belongings off on the floats and headed out of the bay, leaving us in the stillness of the beautiful late-spring day. The lodge owner had a little cabin that we would stay in for the summer, so we carried our things in and piled them in the corner. The cabin was one room with a clothes rod along one wall, and a saltwater marine toilet and sink in a cubby hole in the corner. You pumped sea water in to flush the toilet but the sink wasn’t hooked up to fresh water yet. Very simple accommoda
tions compared to our comfortable house back at Addenbroke—and it definitely didn’t have anything comparable to that incredible picture window. But I was excited and anxious to get started.
We had arranged to leave for a holiday in Vancouver before the fishing season started, and our flight was arriving shortly to pick us up. All commercial flights into the inlet landed on the water, so they either had long metal floats underneath the body like on a Cessna or Beaver, or they landed on their belly like the Goose. Also, most of the float planes had wheels underneath so they could land on the tarmac at the Port Hardy Airport. These are called amphibious planes. If they didn’t have wheels, they had to land on the water in the harbour, which was ten miles from the main airport and made it nearly impossible to make your connecting flight! We had very little time to look around the camp and get our bearings before we hopped on the Alert Bay Air Services Goose and flew to Port Hardy and then on to Vancouver.