by Pat Ardley
I kept seeing moths flying around the kitchen. Then I saw the odd one flying crookedly in the living room. Something was wrong. I remember cleaning out the whole linen cupboard at our home in Winnipeg when I was young. Everything went in hot water in the washing machine because my mom would not allow moths in her house. I started a search, checking every drawer, cupboard and shelf. I finally saw a moth flying from the attic. I poked my head past the trapdoor and flashed the light around. I climbed into the attic and crawled across our funny-looking carpet that we had rolled up and stored there because it was too strange to use in our house. (More about this carpet later.) There was also a round cheese crate in the attic full of raw wool that George’s dad had brought for me to card and spin.
When I turned the flashlight onto the crate, my flesh crawled. The wool had been eaten into a hollow cone shape and was covered with squirming, wriggling larvae. Obviously, I was only seeing the ones downstairs that the bats didn’t eat! I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I called to George that I had an emergency, and he came running into the kitchen. He took a large green garbage bag up and gingerly placed the whole crate in it while I ran to get the work skiff, a bucket of used diesel oil and a blowtorch. I pulled up in front of the house. George lowered the package onto the bench seat, and then he took the container to my garden island, poured diesel all over it and set it on fire. Sadly, without realizing it, he burned the mess right over my stunning poppy-plant roots. They produced beautiful huge red poppies that could be seen from passing boats out in Darby Channel, but they would never bloom again.
The weather along the coast can change very quickly, and the days warmed up and melted the snow and ice. We headed back up to Dawsons and started working in earnest. George had already put in the footings for the two new corners but hadn’t backfilled them yet, which was what I did all that day. I collected huge boulders from the shore far below the cabin. I lifted each one up onto the lowest part of the wharf, hoisted them into a wheelbarrow, then pushed the wheelbarrow up the wood-plank walkway. The wheelbarrow would be so heavy that it tipped over almost every time I came to the same turn in the wooden boardwalk, no matter how I balanced the load. Maybe I tried to carry too much each time, but I was determined to push as much as I could at once to get it over with. Once I got to the cabin, I hand-carried the boulders one at a time down a set of rickety wooden stairs and dropped them where the new footings were. Then I collected many heavy buckets of shells and sand to pour in beside the boulders. These buckets full also took the laborious and circuitous trip from the beach up, up, up to the cabin.
Every day that we worked on the cabin, I brought a few bundles of shakes in the boat and, using a wheelbarrow, pushed them up to the cabin site. They weren’t as hard to push but it was still awkward. Then I would wrestle the large, heavy bundles down the stairs and around the base of the cabin to pile them close to where I would be using them. When the freight boat arrived, we spent two days moving the lumber from the store float up to the cabin. All our supplies were landed at the store float this time because the ship had blown an engine and was not able to manoeuvre into some tight places like Sleepy Bay or to the Fisheries float at Dawsons. We were concerned that Lucky would be mad at us again for bringing groceries into Dawsons but, because of the special circumstances, he was friendly and just charged us a docking fee.
One item that arrived with our supplies but belonged to the Fisheries was a barrel with a one-hundred-foot length of three-quarter-inch chain. The barrel was eighteen inches in diameter and about two feet high. They had asked George if he would move it from the store float over to the Fisheries float. I can still hear them laughing. It was all George and Lucky could do to raise the barrel to the upright position onto Lucky’s freight truck. Then Lucky suggested that it might be easier to move the chain outside of the barrel.
Our friend Richard had arrived to pick up his own supplies so George asked for his help, but while Richard was in the store, George thought just maybe he could move the chain on his own. A heavy chain doesn’t react like rope does, so before he moved it, he tied one end to the edge of the lower float, just in case. He cracked open the barrel and pulled one end from the pile and lowered it about four-and-a-half feet from the store float down to the tie-up float. Unfortunately, there was a small gap between the higher and lower floats, so as soon as there was a few feet or so of chain hanging over the side, the weight of it pulled it straight down and all George could do was jump aside and let it go, while checking to make sure that neither the chain nor the rope was wrapped around his ankle. The chain just slid over the side and kept going until all one hundred feet was hanging in the water. The rope held though, but now George sheepishly had to figure out how to raise the chain.
Richard said they could try using his net drum on his gillnetter to spool the chain in, but he hadn’t run it since last summer’s commercial fishing, so they’d have to see if it would even operate. Once the engine was in gear, the drum made one revolution and abruptly stopped, so Richard jumped onto the foot pedal that operates it and the linkage cable broke. He managed to get enough slack in the cable to tie it back together and after another fifteen minutes was able to get the net drum to turn sporadically if he continually jumped up and down on the pedal. It was a big pedal that required all his body weight, so while Richard was frantically jumping up and down on one side of the boat, George was pulling with the drum on the other side. When George stopped pulling, the drum stopped turning, but Richard kept up his jackrabbit performance.
They finally got all of the chain onto the back of the boat, but they still had to unload it at the Fisheries dock, fifty feet away. When they got there, they found that while the chain had been doubling and tripling over the drum, it was getting wound up in a rope and it took them another hour to unwrap the tight mess. Then Richard turned to George with a silly grin and said, “This is what it’s like each and every time I go fishing!” Minus the chain, of course.
When the weather wasn’t good for working on the Fisheries cabin, I spent a lot of my time digging up my garden and piling seaweed and starfish into compost piles. I had abandoned the garden on the top hill. When I dumped the buckets of soil and compost over the ten-by-fifteen-foot area, I could see that even if I continued to do this for the next twenty years I would still not have enough real soil.
George used the inclement weather to cut lumber on my island from his beachcombed logs. Using his Stihl 090, with a forty-eight-inch bar, and an Alaskan sawmill attachment, he first squared the log and then cut planks. He was piling the lumber that he would use on the Fisheries cabin onto a small float he had just built. When he had piled enough on, he would tow the float to Dawsons and unload. When the days were really ugly, he worked inside on small wood projects like building shelves for our bedroom, a new kitchen table and finally cupboard doors for the kitchen. I sanded and painted the pieces. He set up a woodworking shop undercover on the woodshed float. His main shop, which was originally Axel’s workshop, was for sharpening saws, repairing motors and for storing plumbing, electrical, motor and logging tools.
Another one of George’s projects was to put four large truck inner tubes under the corner of our house float using a bicycle pump his dad sent. The float was low in the water with the weight of my little rowboat garden. He pushed the inner tubes under the logs with the valves just visible between the logs. After they were all in place, he used the bicycle pump and pumped them up and together they raised the front side of the float by almost two inches. He had quite a few more tubes that he would eventually use under the old guest cabin.
One day, we were sitting on a log in the sunshine taking a lunch break in front of the Fisheries cabin when a fellow we didn’t recognize approached us. He wondered if we could rent rooms to his logging crew and cook three meals a day for about six weeks in April and May. I almost choked on my salmon-and-green-tomato-relish sandwich at the thought of making money before the fishing season even started.
He said he would pay for the food and for the expense of shipping it in. George and I carefully exchanged glances, and after a few questions about boat use and fuel, we answered that, yes, we would be able to look after his crew. After we agreed on a price per day per man, the fellow left saying that he would be in touch. As soon as he was out of sight, George and I did a celebration dance and started making mental lists of supplies that we would send for. My other sister, Marcia, had just moved to Edmonton so I was also daydreaming about a trip to see both of my sisters. Now I could afford it.
We worked on the cabin for another six weeks where half of the time was spent wrangling heavy lumber and bundles of shakes up the damn hill. If only we could get the supplies straight up the hill from the water below, but the hillside was utterly impassable. So we either hand-carried the heavy boards from the float below or I put what I could in the wheelbarrow and pushed it up the walkway. After the walls were up and the shiplap boards were attached, I put my hand-split shakes on the outside while George finished the inside. We finished the cabin just before the end of March, right on schedule. We were now ready to look after the logging crew.
They arrived a few days later, and early the following day they headed out with a packed lunch and returned well before dark. They had been working for only two days when the boss showed up and told us that they would be leaving. Every time the fallers dropped a potential tree, it exploded into dust. The wood on his property was no good. Sometimes the inside of huge healthy-looking cedars can be completely rotten. We were just as disappointed as the boss man was. It was not easy to watch that money evaporate along with my trip to see my family. We just did what we would always do: we worked harder on our own projects. George cut a stockpile of lumber for the guesthouse and I worked on the gardens and built planter boxes to spruce up the lodge with flowers.
A Middle-of-the-Night Freight Boat
I was jolted awake from a deep sleep by the high-pitched blast of the freight boat Tyee Princess as it stopped in front of the main bay. In the semi-dark, I could see that George was still sound asleep. I used my elbow to wake him and shouted, “The freight boat!” He grunted and rolled out of bed and fumbled for his clothes. I jumped up and dressed in my warm pants and sweatshirt that I had laid out at bedtime. I pulled on my gumboots, grabbed flashlights and headed out the door wondering if the freight boat always tied up somewhere out of sight during the day?
The new guesthouse building supplies were on the boat and we had been running out of things we could do until they arrived. We had tried to stagger the freight between boat trips but with one order arriving late and the next order arriving early, there were going to be tons of supplies on this boat. The company tried to keep to a schedule but there were many circumstances that kept them from being on time. The wind could come up, they might have trouble unloading, and they might take extra time trying to find someone’s last item of freight that somehow got lost in the bowels of the boat. So many variables. We had hoped they would arrive in daylight because of the amount of freight they had on board for us.
We now had a larger float to use as an airplane dock and for freight-loading and off-loading. The fire chief from Ocean Falls had helped us with a controlled burn of the OM after George finally gave up on his pipe dream of fixing up the old boat.
George used the work skiff to push the now empty OM float out to Darby Channel and signalled the skipper with a flashlight while I called them to say that he was slowly on his way. We would need the fridges and freezers to be on for the groceries so I turned on the generator then climbed into our workhorse speedboat, the original Page.
I swallowed my fear and headed out into the dark to help. It was hard to see the shoreline from inside The Page, and since the boat had a hardtop I couldn’t stand up to see over the windshield. I pulled the side window open and drove with my head hanging out the side. If I squinted a little, I could just make out where the shoreline was and could follow it around my island and into the main bay. Then bright spotlights from the ship flooded the channel and I felt like I was working my way toward the Star of Bethlehem. George was just arriving with the float when I pulled up. I tied The Page to the lash log and climbed out.
The float was about eighteen by twelve feet and it didn’t have planks in several places. I could see where to step in the bright ships’ light but had to keep moving to stay away from the boom that was lowering the pallets of freight. There was lumber, plumbing parts, windows and thirty-pound boxes of nails strapped together in huge bundles. The float went lower and lower in the water as more freight was added. We only had half the supplies and I was already slogging around in water well past my ankles. This was my worst nightmare. I could so easily imagine a long tentacle sliding over the side of the float and wrapping around my leg to pull me screaming into the deep, black water. I steeled myself to remain calm and kept working, piling lumber from the sling onto the sinking float. As I very carefully dragged my boots along the planks to keep from falling through, I could smell barnyard. Manure was a funny thing to smell coming from the freight boat. Were they carrying cows to someone? Then they lowered a pallet loaded with car batteries and I had to concentrate again. We couldn’t let them get wet.
George asked if I could take the boat back to the house and unload everything there. This seemed like the lesser of two evils to me, so we overloaded The Page with batteries, plywood, the boxes of nails and anything else that might be damaged by water. We finished loading with two rolls of carpet that we propped across the roof of the boat and over to the wheel well where the 115-horsepower motor sits. The Page was very low in the water as I inched my way back to the lodge, motoring so slowly that I wasn’t worried about hitting a log or other floating debris. My main concern was sinking before I hauled some of the freight off. I finally pulled into the dock and clambered out between the rolls of carpet, jumped onto the float and spent the next forty-five minutes unloading the freight, one piece at a time because everything was so heavy.
I really wanted to stay home but knew that I had to get the boat back out to the ship in case there was more dry freight. I climbed back aboard The Page and was again overwhelmed with the smell of barnyard. I leaned down and sniffed closer to my gumboots and smelled the distinct aroma of manure. It was me! I had been tromping around in my compost piles during the day, using a pitchfork to turn the muck. No cows on the freight boat, just my own compost. My heart felt a little lighter as I chuckled and headed back out into the dark.
Once again I drove carefully out to the ship, but this time I tied the boat to the stack of two-by-fours because the entire float was underwater. You could only see part of the piles of lumber above the water. I stayed in the speedboat as George shuffled more dry goods to me. The last to be off-loaded was our order of groceries, which I gently piled on the seats. Hurray for fresh produce! We were finally finished and George untied the ropes from the ship and the crew hauled them aboard. The skipper told us to stay where we were until he was well away from us, and with my heart in my throat, we waited while the ship backed away, turned and as we watched in horror, headed in the wrong direction. The world was still pitch black but you could just make out the outline of the surrounding mountains against the sky. Seconds before we expected to hear crunching of the boat hull on rocks, we heard the engine roar into reverse thrust and the ship gradually came around and away from danger. Somehow the skipper must have forgotten where he was while we drifted and turned for three hours in the dark. He corrected his direction and we watched as the ship slowly headed safely on its way.
Freight boats and tugs and barges from various companies would continue to arrive almost exclusively in the dead of night for the next thirty-four years.
I gingerly drove back into the bay while George towed the float very, very slowly to the lodge. By this time, the tide had come up enough that he was able to bring the float through the shortcut, which shaved at least twenty minutes off his towing time. Then we spent the r
est of the night unloading the freight and spreading the weight around the rest of our floats, afraid that we might not find anything in the morning if we didn’t move it off the sunken float. It was early daylight by the time we finished moving all the freight, and I went in and, with shaking hands, stoked the kitchen stove to make breakfast. A good breakfast fry-up always lifted my spirits. Then I gratefully dropped back into bed.
Building the Second Guesthouse
We were ready to build our second guesthouse. The new float was built, our contract with Fisheries was finished and we had building supplies from the freight boat. We were not afraid of long hours, and the weather was warming up so we didn’t have to spend so much time on winter maintenance. George had cut thousands of board feet of cedar planks that we would be using for stringers on the float that measured about thirty by fifty feet. That was the first job, levelling the two-by-twelve stringers across the logs.
Next, we took turns using the electric drill with an eighteen-inch bit to drill several holes in the two-by-twelves. Then one of us would drive a two-foot spike through the plank and into the log. These planks created the base for the building as well as tied the whole float together more securely. At this point George spent several days ripping two-by-twelves into two-by-fours for us to use on the building structure.
Once we had the stringers down on the logs, all level, even and braced, we were able to steam ahead. First we marked out the footprint of the building on top of the two-by-twelves, and then we loosely nailed old planks around the marks so we had a surface to walk on. The next step was the cabin floor joists. As soon as those were down, we practically threw the building together. We did all this with our tools tied to our belts. Hammers, sledgehammers, squares, levels, drills—everything seemed to have an affinity for the water, and if you dropped it, it was almost guaranteed to sink. We couldn’t afford to lose any more equipment, even if it meant going overboard with it!