by Pat Ardley
More crazy busy days. A plane buzzed the house and I had to run and change my outfit so I could take a boat out to the airplane dock. It was a man from Tourism BC coming to check the place out. I entertained him and the pilot for as long as I could, but George didn’t come back from fishing for an hour, so they left. They were impressed with the quality of our resort and we soon received a Tourism BC–approved placard in the mail. After they left, I ran around in all directions to get the rooms cleaned for the guests who were staying with us, then another plane buzzed the house. I zipped out to find two unexpected guests. They had been here already this summer and just really wanted to come back. I had a big pot of soup and fresh bread that I could feed everyone with, and I frantically tried to keep ahead of the dishes, which I was still washing by hand because of a lack of electricity with the tiny generator that we were using.
Everyone went out fishing again, and by the time the kitchen was clean, it was time to start dinner. I started the fire, raced over to the island to pick vegetables and whipped up dinner for eight guests with four courses. I had nearly finished cleaning up, and the guests had all left for bed, when suddenly there was no water. They had each taken a shower before bed and ran the damn dam dry, causing an airlock in the line.
I was up again at 4:30 AM to get the fire going to start breakfast for our eager fishermen. I leaned on the bathroom counter and stared at myself in the mirror wondering if I could find a clue in my eyes or in my expression that explained how I had ended up here. “Kill me now, Jesus!” is all I could think. I didn’t know how long I could keep this up. How long could I go without a proper sleep? “Let me sleep, Jesus!”
I had to wait until it was light out before George could get the airlock out of the water line. The new motor for the five-kilowatt generator had arrived but when George tried to remove the old motor, he found that he couldn’t separate it from the generator, so he left with both the generator and new motor to see if the mechanic at the fish company could help. I couldn’t get a nap in because a few of the guests stayed in bed and would want a late breakfast. How very relaxing for them! They finally headed out fishing and the two men who were leaving that day came back, so instead of catching up on chores or catching up on rest I had to entertain them until their flight arrived.
George finally returned with a tiny generator that would only run one freezer at a time. At least that’s something. We ran both small generators at the same time and just plugged a freezer straight into the borrowed one. He had left our generator with the mechanic, who was an alcoholic and who said it will be ready tonight or tomorrow, but I wondered about that.
I accidentally smashed the fridge door into my face, which caused my nose to swell, and I could hardly see. My sinuses were affected and my eyes keep watering, my nose kept watering and every few minutes I sneezed. Not to mention the pain. I finally took an antihistamine, which helped my sinuses but was putting me to sleep—and the dishes just keep piling higher. Ah yes, then it was time for the Fisheries officer and his wife to visit. My legs and hands keep twitching as I thought of all the things that I needed to be doing instead of trying to be polite over tea.
They soon left and I rushed to prepare lunch. I sighed, thinking, if only they would all use the same butter knife and use their hands instead of bread-and-butter plates. George had finally hooked up the water, and I got a fire going to heat some for the dishes. By now I was so tired I could hardly stand up but there was an impossible mess to deal with. I finally washed ten things and lay down for a few minutes, washed ten more things and again lay down for a few minutes. This was the only way I could finally finish the dishes throughout the afternoon and eventually start getting dinner going with a pork roast in the oven.
I took a call from the Vancouver company rep, who was repairing our diesel generator. The fellow told me that the generator was fixed and would be on the freight boat that was leaving in three days. That meant that we would have our, what I liked to call, “city power” generator back at the lodge in about a week. Just in time for the end of our fishing season.
I had a full forty-five-minute nap and this carried me through dinner. George had picked up the repaired five-kilowatt generator from the mechanic at the fish camp and after putting oil in it, he started it and, miracle of miracles, it ran! Even though our water supply was low, I ran the dishwasher, justifying it because I was sure someone, somewhere once said that dishwashers used much less water than handwashing and I was going to believe it. Just before I closed my eyes, I heard rain start to patter on the roof and I smiled.
Halloween
We went to a party and then we went to a funeral. Everyone who lived at the mouth of the inlet was invited to a Halloween party at Lucky’s home at Dawsons Landing. There were commercial fishermen, sport fishermen, handloggers, beachcombers and a couple of ladies who could do all of the above as well as knit! The costumes were very inventive given that there wasn’t a craft store or department store where one could buy actual costumes. We used what we had and embellished by adding papier mâché, glitter, ribbons, funny hats and in my case—laundry!
I went as a laundry basket. I trimmed handles into a large cardboard box and drew a wicker pattern around the box with a black felt pen. Of course we would be staying overnight at Dawsons so when we dressed to leave, I stepped into the large hole in the bottom of the basket and then piled the clothes all around me that I would wear home the next day. I put a toque on and pinned the rest of the clothes that George wanted all over the surface so laundry hung down over my head and shoulders. I was feeling rather proud of my costume and pleased that I didn’t need to pack an overnight bag.
The party started early so people could arrive while it was still daylight. Only gentle, elderly Olaf Slayback didn’t make it to the party. He lived right across the bay from Dawsons Landing, but he wasn’t feeling quite up to the noise and excitement. Everyone brought food and liquor, and the drinking and dancing was well underway, long before it was dark. There is nothing like a costume to bring out the best in people—we seem to lose our inhibitions. And when you throw in hard-to-come-by alcohol, you have a dynamite combination. We still didn’t have a liquor store in the inlet, so people had been saving bottles of wine, rum and rye for just such an occasion. The food was fantastic: fresh bread and buns, several salads, salmon patties, pickled halibut, clam chowder, thin slices of abalone, fresh mussels, cracked crab and fried cod. My favourite item was a mixing bowl full of just-caught, cooked and peeled jumbo prawns. Warren and John had pulled their prawn traps on their way to the party and cooked them on the tugboat stove then peeled them as they drove up Darby Channel to Dawsons.
We danced and danced, sang our way through a stack of cassette tapes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Queen, Fleetwood Mac and everyone’s favourite dancing group, ABBA. I stood to the side at one point to catch my breath and watched as young and old danced together and age didn’t matter. The only time I had seen this kind of mix-and-match dancing was at a wedding with a room full of relatives. It felt so good to be part of this very diverse group of people all having a wonderful time together.
As the evening was approaching midnight, Eric and Steve, two of Lucky’s sons, thought it would be a good idea to set off some fireworks and outdated flares. They had the presence of mind to contact the Coast Guard to let them know that they were sending up half a dozen flares at midnight and not to worry, it was just for show and that everyone would be safe. We all stood on the lower dock while Eric lined their planter boxes with burning schoolhouses, bottle rockets, Roman candles and other impressive pyrotechnics and set them off with a propane torch.
The night was perfect, with a huge clear dark sky like a blank canvas, and we oohed and aahed at the sparkling light show. Then Eric handed out the flares and we pulled them one at a time and lit the sky all around the bay and made it look like it was daytime. The flares soared three-hundred feet into the dark sky and exploded into bril
liant light that could be seen for miles.
We then had to go back in and dance off some of the adrenaline rush from such excitement. More ABBA and Beatles tunes, more food and drinks all around. An older couple, John and Edith Moore, who lived on the other side of Dawsons Landing, were the first to leave. We saw them off, waving as they rowed their little boat out into the dark. Then we headed back to the dance floor. We were shocked, though, to see John walk back through the door thirty minutes later. With a solemn face he informed us that old Olaf Slayback was dead in his bed. Silence crashed in on us as we all felt the burden of having just killed him with our fireworks display! Eric’s face was ashen with the implication that his lights and noise had been too much for our dear old Olaf. Well, that was the end of the party. We all slinked off to our borrowed beds, and sleep was in short supply the rest of that night.
The police arrived the next morning to confirm Olaf’s passing while we huddled in groups over coffee and biscuits. It was a very different scene than the happy, devil-may-care Halloween night that we were all now regretting. After a short visit to Olaf’s home, the police came back across to Dawsons Landing and their waiting float plane. One of the constables came over to our table and informed us that Olaf had died between 6 PM and 10 PM the previous evening. There was a collective sigh of relief as we realized that our fireworks display hadn’t killed the dear old gentleman after all! But we were still a rather subdued group of people as we climbed into our boats to head home and get back to our regular lives.
Olaf’s funeral was on Friday, November 3, 1978. He was eighty-six years old when he died and had been living in the inlet since 1922, handlogging and fishing for most of those years. It was overcast and drizzly, and the little inlet cemetery looked ever so forlorn. It’s situated on a flat patch of grass far above the high-tide line, is surrounded by huge cedars and is in a tiny cove called Taylor Bay, off the main inlet. The minister from the Thomas Crosby V officiated, and most of the people who had been at the Halloween party were in attendance. Fishboats, a tugboat, a rowboat and several speedboats were anchored and bobbing on the swell in the bay.
The collection of bare-headed individuals were dressed in their finest rain gear and surrounded by towering West Coast cedars dripping great drops of rain. The little cemetery already had six wooden crosses, all with a good view of the pretty cove where the boats were floating. “Old Peg-Leg Pete” was written on one cross. He was known for stomping around on his wooden leg on the deck of his fishboat. Also buried here: Mrs. Perry, who before passing on at eighty-one was still chasing loggers and bears with a broom. Old-timer Jack Rendle was the unofficial caretaker of the cemetery and visited the site regularly during the year to cut the grass and keep the area from being reclaimed by the forest. Before the funeral for his old friend, Olaf, Jack had scythed the grass, put sand on the slippery cedar steps leading up from the beach and helped dig the grave.
Olaf’s coffin was on the back of a tugboat and all hands were on deck to lower it into Jack’s skiff before he rowed his old buddy to shore. Several people put wreaths on the new grave—plastic wreaths that they had at home just in case. There would not have been time to order a real flower wreath. Where in the world was I that people kept a wreath in their linen cupboard in case someone dies?
Setting the Hook in Twelve Inches of Water
The morning started out to be so lovely. It was all sunshiny and warm with lots of birdies chirping. We were looking after the BC Tel station for our friends, Andy and Nell, who had left for their six-week vacation. The station was on the north end of Calvert Island and there was a lovely house for Andy and Nell where we were staying. It was on a flat grassy area just above a little bay that had a tidal flat that goes dry for several hundred feet out from shore. Because of that, the dock was on the other side of the spit of land about half a mile away. There was a rocky, rutted and rolling road between the dock and house, then it wound from the house up about two thousand feet to the top of the hill where the telephone and repeater equipment were also housed.
George leaped out of bed to make coffee and breakfast. He was in a hurry to leave in the boat to go to Dawsons Landing for the mail and to check on our house and lodge. The weather had to be good because the round trip now took about five hours, and he had to cross Fitz Hugh Sound, which can get very rough very quickly.
Needless to say I was surprised when George returned in the truck less than fifteen minutes later. George’s workboat was missing and he had hurriedly tried to start the speedboat so he could search for it, but the battery was dead. The extra battery, the backup system, was also dead. The master switch had been dutifully turned off, but the ignition key was left turned on, so power must have leaked out all night long. George had come back to grab some jumper cables, and he couldn’t wait for my help since I didn’t have shoes on.
I quickly threw my shoes and cap on, called Zak and jogged down and up, and down and up, and up and down to the dock. George was having trouble getting a good connection. It took thirty minutes of fiddling and scraping and jerry-rigging to get the engine started. We hauled the rubber dinghy in the back, called Zak again and cast off. We started off by scouting the bay around the dock as far in as we could go. The bay narrows in one back corner and then opens wide but shallow into another bay. This bay is totally dry at low tide. We couldn’t see anything, so we took off quickly while I scanned the shores with the binoculars. We angled to the left outside of the bay and headed up the channel that becomes a dead end about two miles away. This is where we would normally anchor our boat and head across the island for beach adventures. In the other direction, Kwakshua Channel is about four miles long and opens into Fitz Hugh Sound.
Meanwhile, we were both thinking about the large boat that we had seen pass by in the channel the previous evening. We had thought it was the Thomas Crosby V coming for a visit, but no one came to the house. So we just figured they would come over in the morning. The boat wasn’t there the next day, and it would be unlike the crew of the Thomas Crosby V to not drop in for a visit. We didn’t know what to think.
The missing workboat had my twenty-horsepower Merc on it as well as an auxiliary seven-and-half-horsepower Merc lying on the bottom with lots of ropes, axes, dogs and wedges. A lot of money’s worth to lose, not to mention how indispensable the workboat was. Also, the boat had a leak in it, which meant if it wasn’t found within two high tides, or twenty-four hours, it would probably have sunk, never to be found. We were hoping that it simply got hung up on the shore somewhere.
We got to the end of Kwakshua Channel, and George nosed the boat as far into shore as he dared so we could see into the bay that opened in the corner just like the one near our dock. He was getting too close to the weeds, and by throwing the engine hard into reverse, stalled it. It would not start again. The wind was pushing us into shore so we scrambled to get the anchor out and George leaned over and set the anchor into twelve inches of water. He had already pushed the dinghy out of the boat and we quickly searched for the pump. The dinghy was only about three-quarters inflated and we couldn’t find the pump. George climbed into the mushy dinghy and started towing the boat off the beach while I hauled up the anchor and we dropped it again in deeper water. George tried a few things with the battery to see if he could get the motor to start, but nothing worked. I put a life jacket on, got the dog in the bow of the dinghy and climbed in.
We started the long row back to the dock, against the wind and tide. When we were about three-quarters of the way back and ninety minutes later, I spied a boat coming up Kwakshua from Fitz Hugh. “Ah, for a distraction to keep my mind from murderous thoughts,” I mumbled under my breath. We finally decided it was the Thomas Crosby V coming back, maybe even with our boat. It seemed to take it forever to get closer to us, while George kept rowing. It started to turn into our dock so I waved my fluorescent life jacket and they turned and bore down on us. The eighty-foot ship towered over us as they lowered a ladder so I
could clamber on board. George offered to row Zak the rest of the way back to the dock since it wouldn’t be easy to lift him onto the deck. I think he felt it was his penance due.
I was quickly warmed by a cup of coffee, but just as quickly shattered by the news that, no, they hadn’t anchored in our bay last night and, no, they hadn’t seen our errant skiff. They offered to run us back to our speedboat and, no, George didn’t need to get a battery—they had one that we could use. The skipper, who is also the minister, nudged the huge bow up to the dock, and after securing Zak inside the truck cab to keep him safe from the wolves that were probably watching us at that moment, George climbed up and over on to the boat deck. Then we motored back to the anchored speedboat, about ten minutes’ worth of chugging along as the ship goes quite a bit slower than our speedboat, though quite a bit faster than a half-deflated rubber dingy.
They anchored in deep water and put a small boat over the side to use to tow our speedboat alongside. George and the engineer then spent a full hour trying to get the motor started but for some reason they still couldn’t get the right connection. They finally decided to try another battery, so George and I and two deckhands took their small boat back to the dock again to get the battery out of the truck. George went up to the truck, which now had a flat tire.
Using the hand pump from the back of the truck, I re-inflated the dinghy. I then took it, along with Zak and one of the deckhands, and rowed as far as we could into the back corner of the bay to see if our skiff had floated in there during the night. By this time, the sun was almost down. We rowed a long way into the bay, most of the time in only about ten inches of water. After twenty minutes of rowing we finally had to pull over to the shore and secure the boat to a branch and walk the rest of the way through mucky tidal flats.