by Pat Ardley
The couch under the solarium window became my favourite place to sit with Casey in the dark. We could watch the night sky while cuddled up reading a bedtime story by flashlight. And in the daytime, it made the perfect perch from which to watch the ever-changing scene out in front of the lodge.
One morning, there was a commotion across the bay high up on the shore and under the low branches of a cedar tree. There was a skate lying on the rocks and a juvenile eagle with his wings spread wide, protecting his breakfast. Two other eagles, adults, thought they were in for a very decent meal, but the young one was ferocious in his flapping and pecking and seemed to have infinite patience to protect his food. A full hour later the two older ones finally gave up and flew away. The larger wingspan on a young bald eagle enables them to eat by increasing their ability to protect their food from older eagles.
The before picture: George cut through the front wall of the main lodge building (also our living room). We needed extra room added to the lounge area.
The after picture: George installed a solarium-type window that added an extra three feet of space to the crowded room. The couch under the solarium window became my favourite place to sit with Casey.
As we got closer to another fishing season, George made a quick buying trip to Port Hardy. He headed over early in the day and, not wanting to waste any time, then pounded through the westerly all the way back to the inlet in the afternoon, heavily loaded. That night as we were getting ready for bed, we could hear a boat motor, and it sounded like it was coming into our bay. There are not many boaters that drive around in the dark, but George thought he knew who it would be. He got dressed and headed out to the front. When he got there, the motor sound had disappeared. Figuring that the boater must be anchoring, he headed back in and once again climbed into bed. Then we distinctly heard a motor coming into the bay again. So George got up, got dressed and headed out the front. No motor sound.
He came back in, and while we were scratching our heads trying to figure out what was going on, we could once again hear the motor. This time George went out the back door, stood on the porch and breathed in gas fumes. Our new Sportspage was tied up quite close to our back door and in front of the generator shed. All was quiet for a few minutes and suddenly Sportspage’s engine kicked into full throttle! George leaped across the dock and jumped into the boat thinking someone must be trying to steal it. He flashed his light below and up top, and there was no one there. We found out later that all the pounding through the waves that afternoon had splashed so much salt water on the ignition up on the flybridge that it was arcing and starting the engine. I started calling the boat Christine after Stephen King’s scary novel about a car that starts on its own and kills people. This added another notch to George’s reputation.
Our first guests of the 1985 season were due to fly in with their own airplane. The fog was so thick we couldn’t see to the other side of the bay. Out of nowhere we suddenly heard an airplane engine. Finally we could see the plane pulling up to our dock. They had landed on the water in the inlet just past Dawsons Landing where the sky was clear, and they step-taxied, or ran the float plane the whole four miles on the water, all the way up the channel to our bay. George went out to pick the guests up and as he arrived at the dock, a large sailboat turned into the bay. There was a woman sitting at the very front of the boat with her feet dangling over the prow. They didn’t have the chart for the entrance to Rivers Inlet so the skipper had been driving as slow as he could while his wife sat up front watching for rocks. When they saw the airplane zoom into our bay the woman had shouted, “Follow that plane!” They came in and the husband took notes from our chart so they could continue on their way.
This season we had hired a cook to do a lot of the prep work for meals so I could have more time with Casey. One week there was a large group of men who had been fishing for three days and were ready and waiting for the airplane to come pick them up. They were whooping it up and roughhousing on the front deck when our cook went out and joined in the horseplay. Suddenly she pushed one of the guests overboard. He happened to be dressed in his town clothes, including his Rolex watch and Italian leather shoes. There just happened to be an extra seat on the plane and I was back to cooking full-time.
Family
Jessica Ardley was born in December of 1985. I wasn’t as cavalier about birthing babies this time. No more hunting trips flying into even deeper wilderness a month before the baby was due. We stayed with my sister June and family in Edmonton for the last few weeks before Jess was born. Staying with my sisters before and after our children arrived was a joy beyond measure. Coming out of the wilderness and being wrapped in the loving arms of family for six weeks each time was an ideal way to bring a child into the world. Coming from the quiet solitude of the inlet to become the centre of attention was soul-satisfying. I’m surprised I didn’t have more babies! Well—not really!
Our home in Rivers Inlet was full of kids’ stuff. I couldn’t picture how the summer would play out with guests and two children in our home/lodge. There were toys everywhere. Two little ones take up so much more space than one. They also take up more time.
We now had hired someone new to cook breakfast and do the baking, so we hired a woman who could do the lunch and dinner prep. Then I could breeze in, and put the finishing touches on the meals to ensure they were up to my standard. It didn’t work as well as I planned, as I found myself hiding with the two kids in the backroom trying to keep them quiet. Our guests didn’t come to the lodge to hear small children.
Jessy and Casey. We had to keep a close eye on Jessy. We were surrounded by water, and she headed out the door every time it was left open.
By the time she was eight months old, I had to keep a constant eye on our adventurous Jess. Every chance she got, she dragged, then crawled her way to the door and the great expanse of water not far past it. By now, three-and-a-half-year-old Casey knew not to step out the door without his life jacket on. Jessy was sleeping in a crib, and Casey had the high bed from IKEA that was level with the window looking out over the back of the bay. Our watery backyard is very sheltered within the logs of the standing boom, and we spent many happy hours watching small schools of tiny fish, seals cavorting about, kingfishers diving for dinner, ducks swimming and the great blue heron feeding from the logs. We watched as the heron stood on the log and crouched lower and lower so slowly we could barely detect any movement. Suddenly, it would jab at the water and there would be a silver fish in its beak, squirming wildly to get away. Then the heron would flip it around so it could swallow the fish whole, and we could see the fish wriggling all the way down the long neck. We saw the heron catch an eel that was a foot long. The eel kept winding itself around the heron’s beak. The heron flipped its head again and again, unwinding the eel until it eventually wore the eel out and was finally able to swallow it whole. One of Jessy’s first words was “spots” because we watched a seal swimming upside down, and you could see black spots on its white belly. It was our own personal wilderness version of an aquarium.
Casey had a small rowboat that George tied to the dock with a long rope. He could row himself around a little and if he ran into trouble getting home, we could pull him back in. One day that summer, a guest misunderstood the reason for the rope and thought that Casey just couldn’t get the knot undone. He helpfully undid the rope and off Casey went. The safety rope never limited him again. His new boundary was the front window of our house. If he couldn’t see it, then I couldn’t see him.
I relied more and more on my kitchen help, which was fine, but I didn’t like the hiding with the kids part. By the end of the too-long summer, I told George that I wouldn’t do that again. We would have to build a separate lodge, or I would be spending the next summer in town with the children.
What Time Is It?
We made a trip to Vancouver as soon as the lodge was put to bed after another fishing season. We met many times with
our architect friend Chas. He and George designed a beautiful two-storey lodge with the second floor cantilevered out over the deck so people could take shelter from the rain underneath as they watched guests come back in to weigh their fish. The upstairs mezzanine would be a comfortable area for guests to get away from it all. There would be a separate upstairs area at the back of the building that had crew rooms, a washroom and an office with lots of storage space. The main floor had a huge living room and dining area, two more washrooms, a great kitchen that I designed, with a large pantry at the end of the kitchen and a laundry room next to it.
We borrowed money to start the building process, and George let our suppliers know that he would soon be ordering large quantities of building supplies. He just had to work out a timeline for early spring since we didn’t have the floats on which to build yet. He had cut down massive cedar trees on public timber lands with permission from the BC Forestry Service. He had the licence on his desk when we received a snarky letter from a man in the Forestry office. He wrote, “Cease and desist cutting down trees on the public timber land until you have applied and paid for a licence to do the cutting.” George wrote back with an ultra-polite letter to the man and suggested that he check the name on the signature line of his signed licence to cut. Of course it was the same man. Government officials!
George was able to slide some of the logs into the water himself. He got our friend with his tugboat to pull the others down the hillside and into the water. George collected quite a boomful, and we finally started putting them together. We worked all winter on building the new float for the lodge as well as a large float for another new guesthouse.
On Wednesday mornings we had our Montessori-style playschool sessions with all of the children who lived at our end of the inlet. There were four families with ten kids in total, and we moms met once a week at one of the four homes. There would be Tracy Nygaard, Bonnie Lunn, Jenny Salo and me, and we each worked with someone else’s children throughout the morning and usually sent them off to play outside after lunch while we relaxed over our own lunch with coffee and plenty of chatting.
One Wednesday I heard the workboat engine zoom across the bay and, as it approached the house, George shouted, “What time is it?” I leaped up off the floor and plowed over two little kids as I raced to open the front window and shouted back, “Eight minutes after ten!” My heart was in my throat—I knew something was wrong. He shouldn’t be there! One minute before, I had caught a glimpse of the new float loaded with the building supplies for the lodge, approaching the narrow entrance to the bay with George behind it, pushing with the work skiff. The float must have hung up on the shore on the now falling tide!
The lodge boats were stored out of the water and wrapped for the winter. The structure and tarp covering took a lot of work, but the fibreglass was protected from sun damage over the years.
I ran back through the maze of kids and puzzle pieces and out the door, grabbing the tide book as I passed the kitchen counter. George had bellowed for Anthony, our helper from Port Hardy, to “grab the axe and get in my boat!” and he dropped him off on the end of the lodge float to help another crewmember push against the shore of the island with pike poles. I jumped into my speedboat and with my heart racing and silent words of encouragement to the engine, I pulled the starter cord while I untied the back end with the other hand. The lodge float had hung up on the sloping shore of the island, and the tide was going out. Seconds could make the difference now as the water drained from the bay and the barnacle-covered rocks reached out to seize the float in a catastrophic embrace.
The freight barge had just unloaded thousands of pounds of building materials onto the float tied up in deep water on the far side of the bay. There were: piles of two-by-fours six feet high, piles of plywood, boxes of nails, rows of windows, two-by-twelves, tar paper, cedar shingles, stacks of aluminum roofing. The tide was going to drop seventeen feet six inches, one of the highest tides of the year, and if we didn’t get the float unstuck, we could lose everything while the float broke up on the shore and dropped all of the materials into the ocean. George pushed the metal teeth of the work skiff into one corner of the float and I pushed my boat into the log close to the skiff. With no teeth on my boat, it rode up onto the log. Fearing that my boat would swamp, I had to back up, letting water slosh over the transom, and I tried again. I drove it into a spot where there was a hump of a knot on the log. The boat stayed down and I gunned the engine. George had his engine full-throttle while he rocked his boat back and forth and back and forth and I did the same.
The float would pivot a little but it would not budge, and we were running out of time. George zoomed around and pushed from the other side with his engine’s propeller coming within inches of the rocks and I snugged my boat into the right angle where the lash log meets the float log and went full steam ahead. It was not going to move. The water was receding almost two inches every minute and the shore was getting a better hold of the heavily laden float.
George pulled back and roared for Anthony. As he flew past the end of the float, Anthony dove into the skiff, clutching the axe. George zoomed over and dropped Anthony on the end of the fuel float, which was tied to our standing boom and shouted at him: “Cut the ropes!” All of the other floats that were attached to our standing boom were tied in with heavy cable and boom chains, but the fuel float was attached with ropes in case of an emergency, and we had to cut it loose quickly. Anthony is a big man, and with a few powerful chops, he cut through each of the heavy ropes holding the fuel float in place. At the same time, Bonnie and Jenny left all the kids with Tracy and jumped into their speedboats and were suddenly pushing beside me. Now the fuel float was loose. George worked the skiff in behind it and pushed it another forty-five feet away from the grounded lodge float. With no words exchanged, I knew what he was going to do. I joined him with my boat on the far side and, together, we pushed the fuel float—its tanks heavy with diesel and gas from the barge that morning—straight at the jammed lodge float. Just ahead of impact, we both pulled back on the throttles and let the float go. There was a moment right before the fuel float connected with the lodge float in which I felt the air being sucked out of the bay. As the one float rammed the other, we all held our breath and watched as the lodge float shuddered. There was an almost imperceptible bump, then a bump, bump, bump, and the lodge float settled free in the water, away from the shore.
Building the New Lodge
It was 1987 and we now had tons of supplies piled on the lodge float, and two more crew had arrived by plane shortly after the barge that delivered the goods had departed. There were now six of us to work on the building. My time was somewhat short as I had the two kids to look after—and sometimes more on playschool days. The rest of the crew was made up of Anthony, his friend Larry, who also had construction experience, and a couple who were very helpful at the beginning. He was a handyman who could do plumbing and electrical, and she cooked for all of us, so I had more time for kids and construction work. This couple liked to party, but the rest of us worked so hard and for so long that no one else had the energy to drink in the evening.
With three dedicated workers, as well as me and George at times, the building started to take shape quickly. George spent a lot of time on the phone organizing supplies to be delivered when we needed them, not before and not after. We didn’t have extra storage space for all the wood that we required for such a huge two-storey building as well as a new four-room guesthouse—and the start of the new fishing season was looming. It was a delicate balance of delivery trucks and timelines, freight boats and barges that kept George hopping. He worked miracles with the suppliers who went out of their way to accommodate his urgent orders, sometimes delivering items within an hour of his call. We had amazing support from the suppliers, better even than if we had been building in town, I believe.
As we progressed with the building, George could see that we would not be able to finish in ti
me with the small crew. He hired two more men. Then a week later, he hired yet two more. The building came together. The last of the windows went in within hours of arriving on a barge, and the finishing pieces were hammered on. George had been to town and bought a double fridge and a double-wide stove at an auction of Vancouver’s Expo 86 kitchen equipment. The two pieces were so huge that I had to remove the door trim at the kitchen for them to fit through. Then it was all hands on deck to coax the enormous pieces up into the building and into place in the kitchen. The walls were painted, the carpet laid and the cedar boards applied to the ceiling. The pot lights in the dining area arrived and were too deep for the ceiling. George raced out to the workshop and created round doughnuts out of cedar to finish the lights, which gave them a porthole-like design feature that seemed intentional.
Building the new two-storey lodge. The second floor was cantilevered out over the deck so people could be sheltered outside if it happened to be raining and watch as guests returned with their giant salmon and halibut.
One afternoon, I was talking to George while he was up a ladder working with a metal square to mark sections of roofing gussets. He turned to me and dropped the square. We both heard the thhhp as the two-foot-long tool slipped between the planks and disappeared into the water. We both stared, aghast that such a long tool could actually find its way between the planks of our walkway. Over the side, yes, but between the planks? Later that afternoon, George was again working up the ladder, and once again dropped a square. Unbelievably, the second square made that same thhhp noise and disappeared without a trace. What are the odds? He decided it might be prudent to stay off ladders for a while.