by Pat Ardley
Unfortunately, his three floats were tied up in Draney Inlet. There is a ferocious riptide in and out of Draney, so few people actually enter the inlet. Fortunately, it was only a few days before someone pulled up to his dock to bring him groceries and mail. The fellow bundled Axel up in his blood-soaked blankets and took him to the “one-doctor hospital” at the Wadhams Cannery fish camp, about eight miles away. Axel survived but had a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. He had trouble getting around after that and was ready to sell his buildings and floats to us. He left everything except what he could fit into a small suitcase. Of the items he left behind, my favourite was a zither in good working order in a purple velvet–lined case with music books and instructions on how to play it.
We also bought the buildings and their contents and floats from Gus Erickson. We had met Gus a few times over the previous winter and he was happy to sell everything he owned to us. He didn’t trust banks and cheques so we paid for everything in cash. We didn’t think to get a receipt. Lucky for us, he had no intention of tricking us out of the sale.
For many years previously, Gus had lived in the Yukon, had a trapline scattered over many snowy miles of the country and seldom made trips into town. One fateful night he was in a bar fight and broke a bottle over the other guy’s head. The RCMP threw him in jail and waited to see how the injured fellow was after he was taken to the hospital. Sadly, for both men, the fellow died from his head wound. Gus spent a few more days in jail before he escaped and fled the Yukon, leaving everything he owned behind, which included his secret caches of food, furs and money.
He had now lived in Rivers Inlet for twenty-five years, fishing and handlogging and making beer for his friends. He had a thirty-gallon ceramic container that he brewed beer in, and all his friends would come over to help him drink it. They drank until they couldn’t hold any more and most passed out somewhere in his cabin or out on the float. Some crawled to their boats and headed home, often not making it there. One of these friends had been living on his boat tied to a float in the back of the bay that we had picked out for our resort, just two miles from Gus’s place. He headed home one night but didn’t answer radio calls the next day. When someone checked on him, he was “drownded.” He had stepped off his boat, missed the dock, landed in the water and was so drunk, he didn’t even kick off his slippers. Gus told us, “I used to make beer for my friends but they all drownded so I stopped making beer.”
The not-so-sentimental Gus was waiting for “an old man to die” so there would be a bed available for him in the Finnish Manor old folks’ home in Burnaby. We would have to wait until he left the inlet to collect his floats. We were happy with the arrangement since we were working at the other end of the inlet and hadn’t yet secured a place to put the floats.
We acquired this twelve-foot speedboat that George dubbed Patty’s Page in a futile attempt to entice me into the thrill of being in a boat. I did use it for a number of years for bottom fishing near the entrance of our bay and for picking up the mail from the Dawsons Landing post office.
We didn’t have to wait long because the turnover in the Manor was pretty quick. At the end of the summer and fishing season, John Salo used his tugboat and towed Axel’s floats then Gus’s into Sunshine Bay near the cabin we had rented the previous winter, where we were able to tie everything to John’s standing boom. Now in addition to the skiff and The Page, the yellow flat-bottomed speedboat, we had a couple of buildings on floats, as well as an old boathouse, an old very heavy-duty sixteen-foot-long workboat with a forty-horsepower Johnson motor and the ten-foot skiff with a twenty-five-horsepower Johnson outboard engine we’d had shipped up to Dawsons Landing when we first arrived. I am not counting the OM, which I didn’t believe would ever be a viable boat for us to use.
We also acquired a twelve-foot red speedboat from Axel, with a windshield, a steering wheel and a twenty-horsepower Mercury engine on the back. George dubbed the vessel Patty’s Page in a futile attempt to entice me into the thrill of being in a boat.
Each of the old-timers that we had bought from had left a well-stocked workshop with electrical parts, boat and motor parts, some very old carpentry tools, logging tools including ropes, blocks and tackle, hooks, dogs, six-inch heavy metal staples, Gilchrist jacks, and winches, fishing equipment, trapping gear, buckets of plumbing parts, and in one shop there was a forge and a stretcher. It was time to start our own business. Now all we needed was money.
Bankers Wear Such Nice Shoes
Regular bankers laughed at us. The thought of a couple of kids in their early twenties using their money to start a fishing resort in the middle of nowhere was endlessly funny to each banker, who would inevitably usher us to the door.
“Where is it?” they would ask. “Floating?” They would chuckle. Then we got in touch with the Federal Business Development Bank, known as the “lender of the last resort”—in this case, literally. They reviewed our business plan and must have decided they would at least look at what we had. What we had was several rundown floating log rafts with poorly built cabins that we had already started to strip the insides from. That and a couple of old fibreglass boats with old motors, a couple of sheds full of tools and a lot of confidence in our abilities.
With no way to contact us other than by regular mail, someone at the bank went ahead and booked a flight into Sunshine Bay for one of their loan advisors. We were still in Sunshine Bay waiting for John and his tugboat to tow our floats into Sleepy Bay. One bright crisp day in the late fall, an Alert Bay Air Services float plane landed and taxied into Sunshine Bay. There was no clear place for the pilot to dock the Beaver so he drifted around in circles waiting for someone to bring a boat out to him. Anxious to know who was on the plane, we jumped into our skiff and went out to meet it in the middle of the bay. The bottom of the boat was awash with several inches of water with a thick slick of oil floating on top. I bailed as fast as I could, trying to make the boat a little more presentable for whomever was arriving on the plane.
The pilot threw the door open for the passenger to climb out, and I was shocked to see beautiful, highly polished soft leather shoes reaching tentatively out for the top step of the ladder. I was usually in gumboots in the boat because there always seemed to be greasy water sloshing around in the bottom. The poor fellow climbed down and I helped him step gingerly from the plane’s pontoon onto the wooden seat of our boat, and I suggested that he sort of hunker down so he didn’t tip overboard and ruin his lovely shoes and banker’s suit.
We helped him out of the boat and took him on a grand tour of our holdings. We painted expansive pictures for him of what we planned to do to improve the cabins, how we would do it and when we hoped to be finished. We would definitely be ready in time for next season’s fishing. We showed him the work we had already done, which was mostly demolition, George’s drawings of the improvements still to come and a list of equipment that we still needed.
Our proposal for the bank read like this, “World famous Rivers Inlet! Home of the legendary giant chinook salmon and the spirited coho, chum salmon and the feisty pink salmon, which also spawn in the many streams and side channels of Rivers Inlet. The nutrient-rich waters washing out from the icefields turn the ocean a milky green and feed the young salmon well before they head out into open waters. There are three fishing resorts in the Rivers Inlet area and ours will be the fourth. Now with more flights into the inlet, ease of access is a huge bonus for our new venture.” We went on to show that we had a good grasp of income and expenses over the short term and the long term.
I nervously poured Earl Grey tea as we discussed the logistics of putting our plan into action. We also chatted about how surviving a long cold winter in the wilderness had toughened our resolve to succeed. The man was interested in our background of working at a resort and also the experience we gained from working for the Fisheries Department. He was also impressed by my grade-twelve accounting skills. The pilot circled a
round over the house to signal that he was back, landed and taxied into the bay to pick up our guest. I slipped out of the cabin ahead of George and our guest to bail the boat more completely so I could show our dapper banker our great customer service.
As the plane taxied out of the bay, George and I both let out heavy, disappointed sighs. We felt that it was not terribly likely that they would lend us money either. Well, we had that wrong. There must have been something that tipped the banker in our favour—maybe the enthusiasm, or the confidence or maybe he thought it was a great idea too. Maybe he was even a fisherman. We received a letter telling us that we were eligible for a loan for twelve thousand dollars—the full amount that we were asking for.
First Days in Sleepy Bay
George spent the next couple of months beachcombing for logs to make a standing boom for us to tie our floats to in Sleepy Bay—our very our own bay. (Within a few years of arriving in Sleepy Bay, George started the paperwork necessary for a foreshore lease. He patiently filled in the paperwork. Letters went back and forth between the Lands Branch and us for well over a decade in order to finally be given the foreshore lease in our bay. The name, Sleepy Bay, would finally be marked on charts of the entrance to Rivers Inlet.) George collected enough logs to string together for a standing boom that we could tie our floats to. There would be a long line of logs that the floats would be attached to, and attached to this long line would be logs that pointed toward the shore at right angles, that were tied with cables, boom chains and heavy rope at both ends. These were called stiff legs and they would be tied to huge cedar trees and act like hinges to keep our floats from getting too close to shore as the tide went down. One afternoon, he and John towed the logs into Sleepy Bay then worked together and tied the logs securely into the most sheltered corner of the bay. The new standing boom (named perhaps because it was like a boom of logs that would stand in the same place forever) would go from east to west so we would see the sun as much as possible as it moved across the treetops on the other side of the bay about sixty feet away. The bay was ringed with low hills covered with two-hundred-foot cedar trees, but straight across from our house was a handlogged area, so the new-growth trees were only about thirty feet tall.
The next morning, all the floats that we owned were disconnected from John’s standing boom and then strung together. John towed them from Sunshine Bay to Sleepy Bay. He and George scrambled around tying all the floats together and to our standing boom, while I danced around shouting encouragement and hauling ropes, huge logging staples and sledgehammers to the next place they would tie to. This was so exciting! Our own buildings in our own bay. Now the adventures would really begin!
Later that afternoon, after John had left, I watched as a ripple flowed across the flat water making the reflection of trees and shoreline wobble and waver. A small, round, shiny black head poked out of the water, creating a new set of ripples. The seal had a curious look around then sank straight back down and, moments later, popped up again ten feet away. The reflection of trees shimmered some more. All of a sudden, a little open skiff zoomed around the corner with the Dawsons Landing storekeeper’s son Rob holding up a shotgun, ready to shoot. After lowering the rifle, he headed over to where I was standing. “I always shoot ducks in this bay!” he complained when he got over the shock of a bunch of buildings occupying his usual hunting ground. He used the birds as bait in his traplines.
The water in the bay was actually about thirty feet deep at the front of the floats and shallower at the back, closer to shore. Driving toward the back of the main bay you’d pass a small island, which we quickly named Pat’s Garden Island. This little island with three low hills of varying heights on it protected us from any ocean swells, large waves and most winds, and many years later from several tsunamis. This much protection and a freshwater supply—which miraculously came down the hill behind where we tied our floats to—was a very rare find in Rivers Inlet.
I worked on Axel’s old cabin every day, tearing out the wainscoting, layers of wallpaper and then the walls and some studs, leaving only what was needed to support the roof. I scraped and dug at the layers of linoleum. The top layer of flooring was so rippled and lumpy that I marvelled at how Axel, with his bear-chewed legs, could have shuffled his way around on it.
This cabin was originally used as a logging camp building, and for us it would become the main house and lodge. It was built like a train, where you walked straight through the middle of one room to get to the next. I was taking down the extra walls to open up a larger living area, a good-sized kitchen and a small room at the back for laundry and food storage. We acquired a kerosene fridge along with Axel’s cabin (hooray, we finally had our own fridge!), which worked quite well but the top freezer compartment didn’t freeze things well at all. One day I tried to freeze some extra bread dough and when I came back after a couple of hours, the dough was squeezing out around the freezer door and dropping into the fridge. I called to George, “Come and look at the bread dough that ate Chicago!”
That was one of the best things about our life in the middle of nowhere. Either George or I could come across something really interesting and call the other to see. Then we would be able to sit and have a cup of coffee to discuss our find, or our hopes and dreams, as well as our plans for the next twenty-four hours or six weeks.
We had an oil stove in the kitchen that we only used for a little while. Axel must have felt that it was an improvement over the wood stove that was stored in the shed. It was no doubt easier for him not to have to carry firewood, but I thought it was a dirty beast, so—after scrubbing the oily mess off the walls and ceiling several times because of a backdraft that caused the stove to poof out dirty, oily smoke into the kitchen—we changed back to the wood stove. A backdraft from a wood stove is much easier to clean. It’s not greasy like the oil soot. The old wood stove had a container close to the firebox that heated several gallons of water while the fire was burning and two propane burners attached to the other side that were very handy when I wanted instant heat.
Axel had a cabin on a separate float that he called his wash house since he had a bathtub, a gas wringer washing machine and a sauna in it. The gas engine of the washing machine had a flexible pipe that you hung out the door when you ran it. We wanted to pull the cabin off the wash-house float and onto the main house float and join the two together to create an attached bedroom for ourselves. There was lots of space at the side of the main house toward the back of the float. This was a huge undertaking because we only had hand tools, but we did have a come-along, which was a hand-operated winch, and several sets of heavy blocks and tackle. The block-and-tackle system helps lift or pull heavy loads. Each block that is added helps pull more weight. There were lots of other tools and heavy handlogging equipment in the workshop, things like metal dogs that you pounded into a log, attached a rope through the open end and could then tie it up or tow it home. There were also wedges, blocks and peaveys—equipment still in use forty years later.
George tied the wash-house float in front of the main float and rigged the come-along to pull the building, which was on one-foot-thick log runners the full length of the cabin. The only rope we had was too stretchy. George would heave and crank on the come-along until he couldn’t get another inch of stretch, and finally, but suddenly, the building would hop three inches. We were moving the building sixty-five feet, from the back of the float it was on, to the back of the main house float. It was mind-numbing, back-breaking work. Now only 777 inches to go!
People who lived in the inlet would drop by just to watch. They would have popped in every day if they hadn’t needed to get some work of their own done. How were we going to move that? When would the supplies arrive? What could we do without electricity? We continued to work and build no matter what problems came up. Some we could anticipate, others—like when the fellow who later swallowed the needle valve of our five-kilowatt generator—we could not. At one point, there were five peop
le watching us work the come-along. Thanks, people. George had put a pipe over the winch handle so we could both haul on it and the longer handle also gave us more leverage. One afternoon George was cranking by himself when the pipe jumped off and the handle slammed into his leg just below his knee. He dropped like a rock. “Damn!” he gasped, “I lost all the stretch in the rope,” as he lay writhing in pain. We found out that if something is too heavy to move, you just need to add more blocks and tackle. You can use seven blocks before you start to lose efficiency on the line. We had so many blocks set up there was little room left for rope.
We found crab traps amongst other gear in Axel’s shop. I imagined how great it would be to have crab for dinner, but we didn’t have any bait for the traps. I was washing our lunch dishes in the sink when I looked out and saw a few ducks swimming behind the house. I tiptoed into the next room and picked up the .22, then crept into the bathroom. The window was open a few inches so, without making a sound, I propped the rifle on the windowsill, aimed and fired! Even a .22 is quite loud when fired in a small bathroom, but I got the duck, and we would eat crab tonight! I dragged a small wooden rowboat across the float to the back and skulled my way over to retrieve the dead bird. All the guys were interested to hear that I had shot a duck. When asked where I got it, I said, “Well, I was aiming for the left eye, but I shot it in the heart.” I could feel my worthiness go up a notch. This is man’s country after all! I would forever be judged on how I could handle an engine, chainsaw or rifle.
Pat’s Garden Island