by Pat Ardley
George hung the artwork that he had picked up on one of his buying trips. There was a huge triptych to fill one large wall, and there was his favourite: an E.J. Hughes painting of the entrance to the Nanaimo Harbour, with the little lighthouse on the island. This was the same lighthouse that he watched as a child every time he left Nanaimo on the ferry, which was the beginning of George’s love of lighthouses and the very beginning of our excellent adventure.
Guests relaxing inside the new lodge.
I was hanging the towel rack over wet paint when I heard the airplane carrying our guests fly over the lodge. I left the towels folded on the back of the sink, and ran home to change out of my work clothes. The construction crew flew out on the same plane that had brought our guests in.
We had started laying the stringers for the new buildings on April 12, 1987. Our first guests arrived on Friday, June 12. Two months from start to finish. One big beautiful lodge and a new guesthouse with four more guestrooms. My favourite new additions: a chef that we hired to cook lunch and dinner and a breakfast cook who would also do the baking. We now had a staff of ten including: the breakfast cook, the lunch and dinner chef, a manager to help George keep all the equipment and boats running smoothly, a housekeeper, and many dock staff to clean boats, clean fish, and perform the myriad jobs that needed to be done throughout the summer—garbage collecting and burning, fuelling boats, helping guests with anything and everything, vacuum-packing guests’ fish, cleaning and fuelling boats again at lunch time, checking tackle boxes, looking after the guestrooms and laundry and watering my plants. And so much more. Okay, now we were on our way!
Well, not exactly. The chef we had hired seemed to have lots of experience but he just couldn’t manage all the necessary little details of looking after a kitchen in the wilderness. Two weeks into our season, two weeks of me helping in the background, I sent the underqualified chef home. After organizing one of the dock crew to look after the kids, I took over cooking lunch and dinner. Then as the season progressed, drinking sent the alcoholic mechanic and his wife, the breakfast cook, home too. They were having parties in their room with the kids who were our dock crew and housekeeping staff. Every afternoon, the mechanic would be drunk and unavailable for emergencies by 5 PM. George pulled him aside one day and said he couldn’t keep drinking like that. Otherwise something was bound to go wrong. Well, the fellow didn’t like having someone question him about his drinking, so at about 3 AM, he stormed to our door and quit. Of course he took his alcoholic wife with him. So there I was: cooking breakfast, lunch and four-course dinners again, as well as preparing morning snacks, afternoon snacks and baking all the bread, cookies and desserts for twenty guests at a time.
Casey and Jessy on a pallet boat that Casey built with an IKEA blind sail and pallets from freight supplies that were delivered. The two of them sailed out of the main bay and out onto Darby Channel—with George following, of course.
That fall, I set up a schoolroom in the upstairs mezzanine area of the lodge. I moved most of the furniture out and lined the walls with plywood with lots of pushpins for attaching Casey’s art and schoolwork. I had a sheet of Styrofoam so Jessy could attach her artwork too. Casey was a reluctant five-year-old kindergarten student. There were always many more interesting things to do outside. To make a distinction between home and school, he had to call me Mrs. Ardley when we were in the classroom. I spent a lot of time trying to get Casey to look at the board where I had written, “Lad runs.” He would look everywhere but at the board. I think he felt that he simply couldn’t be blamed for not knowing what it said if he actually never looked at the words.
We had sent away for correspondence courses from the BC Ministry of Education. The lessons came with lots of information for me about how to approach teaching. None of the lessons could compete with the fact that Casey would sometimes look out the “schoolroom” window and see a log drifting by into the bay and knew that he could get his dad to pay him two hundred dollars for it if he could just get out there and get it first! He was saving for a boat. George told him that when he could buy the boat, George would buy the engine for it.
My best tool for teaching Casey to read was not in any of the lesson plans. Bribery always worked. Read to the end of this word and you will win three Smarties! I am not above bribery. I am also very proud to say that against all odds, I did teach Casey to read—and he grew up to be a voracious reader! Jessy won Smarties if she could say the word for the picture on cards. She loved playing school. One time Casey had to write a story about a picture in his reader. There was a family crouched on the roof and holding onto the chimney of their house that had water up to the windows. Hovering above them was a helicopter, no doubt there to save them. In Casey’s story, the house is sinking. This made sense to us since we lived on floats. I’m sure the kids in town all thought the water was rising because of a flood.
The Crew Sinks the Freight
It was June in 1988 and I had hired Peter, a wonderful chef, and we had a crew of nine others who were just getting the lodge and boats ready for a new season. I looked out the kitchen window and could just barely see something bobbing along on the surface of the water on the far side of the bay. No—there were several things bobbing along! It was too far away to make out what exactly I was looking at, but I knew that something wasn’t right. I grabbed binoculars and looked again through the old wavy pane of glass. I could see a red gas tank and some cardboard boxes floating. The hairs on my neck stood straight up.
The freight boat had just left the bay, and I had asked two of the crew to make a few trips to the freight float to collect some of the goods and bring them back to the lodge. I raced out the door, yelled to Peter to come with me, and we both jumped in my boat and zoomed out toward the freight dock. As we got closer, I could see more boxes and bags and containers floating and making their way out of our main bay. We turned the corner and there were three—not two, but three—crew standing on the float, soaking wet, and I could just see the point of the prow of the work skiff poking out of the water.
As I swept up to the dock crew, their faces betrayed mixed emotions—guilt, fear, relief—but all I really saw was stupidity. I put my engine into neutral about fifteen feet from the float and yelled, “What the hell happened?”
“We loaded everything into the skiff,” one of the crewmembers answered rather sheepishly. “And when the last person jumped into the front of the boat, water sloshed over the gunnel and it went down pretty fast.”
Everything was: three brand-new twenty-five-horsepower outboard engines (which by themselves would have been enough of a load), a brand-new ice machine, three hundred pounds of frozen meat and another several hundred pounds of dry goods and fresh produce. Some of the cardboard boxes bobbing along would have the not-so-fresh produce. And we can’t forget the twenty-five-horsepower engine on the back of the skiff, a full tank of gas and these three big guys, who had been, albeit momentarily, standing in the boat.
My mouth was hanging open in shock and disbelief. One of the guys called out, “Can we have a ride?” I snapped out of it and shouted, “FUCK YOU!” then turned and blasted away from them and back to the lodge. The chef kept muttering, “What the hell, what the hell?” Oh boy, what a lot of trouble this would cause. I called George with the bad news. He was in Vancouver getting a few things organized for the summer. He was stunned by the news but I could tell he went immediately into crisis mode and was working out what had to be done to rescue the equipment.
There was nothing we could do about the meat and groceries. They were ruined or gone. But George would have to dive to see if he could find the motors and the ice machine. I went right back out with a long rope with a weight on one end and a buoy on the other and dropped it down right where the skiff was. This would be a marker for George to help him locate the motors later. The rope went down about 125 feet, which was an extremely deep dive for him to have to make. I sent two dock crewmembe
rs in two boats to pick up the idiots off the float with instructions to troll around and pick up anything they could get their hands on.
The skiff was underwater but not gone completely. The engine weighed down the back end, but we could reach the rope that was floating at the front of the boat. We towed it over to shore, tied it to a tree and then pumped the boat out as the tide went down. We seemed to be using the tide to empty boats far too often. Once the water was out of the boat, and the tide had lifted it, we towed it back to the lodge and took the engine off the back. A couple of the dock crew lowered the motor into a forty-five-gallon barrel of fresh water, then with a special hook-up for our hose, ran fresh water through it, hoping to minimize the saltwater damage. It was running when the boat sank so the electrics in it would be ruined, and the salt water would make a mess of the rest of the insides.
George flew back from Vancouver and started organizing his diving equipment. He filled a couple of air tanks, and sorted out all the other gear that he would need to hook on to the motors if he found them. Once again, time was running out as our first guests would be arriving in a few days, and three of our brand-new engines were lying on the bottom of the ocean.
After putting another engine on the back of the skiff, George loaded the boat with his diving equipment, and we headed over to the far side of the bay. He had shimmied his way into his wetsuit at home, but waited until we were anchored right beside the weighted rope before he put the rest of his awkward and heavy gear on. Then he dropped backwards off the side of the boat and, in seconds, sank into the depths, where I immediately lost sight of him. I hung over the edge of the boat with fear eating away at me. I knew the dive was extremely deep and that he would have very few minutes to stay at the bottom. I watched his bubbles break the surface, but knew that I was powerless to help if anything went wrong. He had followed the weighted rope to the bottom and would then swim carefully out from the rope in a small grid pattern. If he kicked his flippers too hard, the soft bottom silt would get churned up, making it difficult to see anything. Just before he was supposed to come back to the surface, he found one of the motors and clumsily tied a signal rope to it, then filled the small deep-water balloon from an attachment on his dive tank so the rope lifted to the surface before he did. Then he slowly began his ascent so that he wouldn’t damage his lungs. With heart pounding, I watched as his bubbles started to rise in one spot and was so happy and relieved to see him pop out of the water. He had to do two more dives on the same spot over the next couple of days before he found the other two motors and the ice machine and attached floating ropes to each. We made the three crewmembers who had dumped them go over in the work skiff and hand-pull up each sunken item. One at a time of course.
Christmas at Rivers Lodge
Christmas Eve was always celebrated at our house in Sleepy Bay. We were situated on the route to Dawsons Landing, and our friends who lived in Sunshine Bay, Finn Bay and Goose Bay would head there on Christmas Eve to pick up their last mail, hopefully containing any packages they were expecting. On their way home, they stopped at our house to celebrate with rum and eggnog, or George’s famous wassail, and a wonderfully delicious buffet dinner of delightful holiday dishes from my childhood.
Growing up in Winnipeg meant there was a heavy Ukrainian influence on some of my favourite meals. In early December, my friend Sheila Cooper came over and we made perogies together, which is a really time-consuming project that was much more fun to do with a friend. We put Christmas music on and danced around the kitchen mashing potatoes, grating cheese, rolling dough and cutting out the little crescent-shaped morsels. I also made cabbage rolls, or holubtsi, and another Ukrainian treat that we liked to call “beer rocks,” which is sweet bread dough wrapped around a ground-meat, cabbage and onion filling. Also part of the buffet was a French Canadian tourtière with rhubarb relish and my mom’s Icelandic vinarterta for dessert. We couldn’t make everything in one afternoon, but I could put all the main dishes in the freezer as we produced them. Then on Christmas Eve, dinner was simply a case of popping everything in the oven and no one had to work.
In the middle of December we would head out in a boat with our friends the Coopers to find Christmas trees for our homes. What boat we used would depend on the weather. If it was a nice calm day, we would take our speedboat and tow a skiff that George and Richard could take to shore when we spotted a good tree. If the weather was a bit nasty, we would head out in Richard’s fishboat, also towing a skiff, so we could stay warm in the cabin until the last possible second before having to brave the elements and get to shore. We were looking for pine trees around six feet high. Most fir trees were way too big and the pretty little pine trees were few and far between. As luck would have it, the best trees were out near the mouth of Darby Channel and, even on a good day in December, there would be a large swell and sometimes some waves on top of the swell. There was one bay that we drove about half a mile into where it was sheltered and a little out of the wind. It would still be tough though, to get on shore with the rocky cliffs, the boat rising on the swell and either George or Richard having to leap onto a rock with a chainsaw in one hand.
This is the Christmas card we sent out in 1988. There was a lot of fresh water near the surface in the bay that sometimes froze during the winter. George would keep a path open by running our work skiff, which had teeth along the prow to break up the ice so the ice didn’t break up the boat. Commercial fishboats often had gum-wood along the prow. We found two gum-wood planks in the attic and George used them to make the best, strongest cutting-board table—it’s still in use forty years later.
George always made big thermoses of hot chocolate: one kind for the children and an adults-only version that warmed us from the inside out. We were never sure if our lips were numb from the liqueur in the cocoa or because we were chilled by the freezing wind.
One December, we had dreadful weather, and there was no end in sight. So we had to settle for harvesting a Christmas tree nearby. We chose a little hemlock from right in our bay. The poor thing could barely hold up even the lightest ornaments, but we decorated it anyway and had a lovely, tall, skinny tree with all the baubles knocking against the main trunk. Another year we had to settle for a less-than-ideal tree and cut down a six-foot spruce. The shape was lovely, but it hurt like hell to attach the lights and decorations to the prickly branches. Later in January, when I took the tree down, I had to crawl around on the floor picking hundreds of individual needles that had hooked themselves into the carpet so tightly the vacuum couldn’t pull them out. Don’t let them talk you into buying a spruce for a Christmas tree. Spruce should only be used in the direst of Christmas-tree situations.
The freight boat would arrive close to Christmas. Every year they tried to time it so they arrived with everyone’s fresh produce and then they could get home to their own families for the holidays. We would receive fresh cream and sour cream and lettuce and tomatoes. There would be boxes of chocolates, maraschino cherries—the kind with the stem so it would stick out of the shortbread cherry balls—lots of nuts and candies, boxes of mandarin oranges (of course), extra pounds of butter, several dozen eggs, a variety of cheeses as well as a great big turkey. Opening the boxes of groceries that were ordered the week before was a highly anticipated event in our house. I always had plenty of vegetables still in the garden; Brussels sprouts, kale, Swiss chard, carrots, parsnips and the best turnips. I didn’t think I would ever say “best” and “turnips” in the same sentence, but there was something about the soil in my garden that grew wonderful turnips that were sweet and crisp like apples.
One night we hosted a special “Christmas” party, of sorts. Our friends Warren and Tracy were Jehovah’s Witnesses and we wanted them to have fun too, so we didn’t include the word “Christmas” in our party invitations. It was snowing lightly, but we had the hot tub cranked up nice and toasty and the kids all played in the water for ages while the adults had drinks and got the party st
arted. We dried the kids off, had dinner and then pushed the table against the wall, kicked up our heels and whooped it up. At one point during the festivities, George went into the backroom to get more ice from the freezer. I heard him head out the back door and come back a few minutes later. Then I heard the hand drill running. I went to see what was going on and saw water all over the backroom floor. George was drilling a few holes in the floor to let the water drain out. There is no basement in a float house, so he had turned the water off and would deal with the burst pipe in the light of day. We went back into the living room and continued dancing!
One Christmas Eve, we had the Coopers and our Fisheries friends, Brian and Bonnie, with us. After dinner, the kids put on a nativity play. Bonnie had made costumes for her boys, Craig and Jordie, and for Casey. They were the three wise men. Jessy and Jarrett, Bonnie and Brian’s other son, were only one year old and just toddling around looking like drunk shepherds. I made a stable out of a large cardboard box covered with cedar boughs. We put stuffed animals around the stable and a baby doll in the manger. I read the story aloud from a Golden Book called The Nativity, while Bonnie prompted the three wise men when to enter the stage. Craig was to put a stick with a star on the top through a special hole on the roof of the stable. Before their entrance, Jessy and Jarrett discovered their toys in the stable and started throwing them over their shoulders and around the room. I was having trouble reading when the poor baby Jesus went flying past my head. Then Jessy and Jarrett decided to listen to the story and were suddenly hanging onto my lap staring up at my face. I could hear the “audience” stifling their laughter, and I tried to do the same. In the meantime the boys—I mean wise men—arrived and started collecting the animals and tossing them back into the stable. I sped up my reading, finished the story in double-quick time, and we all sang a rousing rendition of “Away in a Manger.” Dinosaurs were big in 1987 and so was the dinosaur-shaped piñata. Each of the kids had a go at breaking into it with a baseball bat and suddenly there were toys and candies all over the floor and a room full of happy children. Meanwhile George wore large pieces of the dinosaur in a rather impolite way for his own delighted audience!