Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon

by Pat Ardley

We arrived back in the middle of June from a lovely month-long vacation and jumped right into getting the fishing resort ready for the summer season. The lodge had already been towed to its summer location in Kilbella Bay at the head of the inlet. The floats were tied to shore with stiff legs, which were usually at least sixty feet long and straight and attached to a series of logs that held everything away from the rocks like the Dawsons Landing store floats, almost but not quite out of the afternoon westerly. There was a mountain rising up right behind our cabin, and our view out the front was of the Kilbella/Chuckwalla River delta with the snow-capped Coast Mountains all around. In the distance we could see the Monarch Icefield and Silverthrone Mountain. We were the only crew hired. George was hired to be the manager/handyman. I would be the cook and housekeeper, and John and Norma Buck served as the hosts. There was a lot to do to clean up after the long months in storage and to sort out all the boats and fishing equipment. The boats were all piled on a float and each one had to be pulled into the water and then have the small motor attached. After each boat and motor was assembled, George took it for a test run, bouncing across the waves and sometimes zipping up the river, hair flying and grinning from ear to ear when he returned to the dock! Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time on my knees scrubbing the kitchen and its equipment and then making beds and cleaning bathrooms. Hmm! I thought and squinted out at him through narrow slits.

  Every sunny day there was an afternoon westerly wind that brought waves crashing into the floats. Our little cabin heaved and bobbed and banged, first into the float that it was tied to, and then into the logs that were holding us in place. There was just enough time for the floats to all drift back out toward the churning sea, before the next wave crashed them backwards again. The worst of it was that all this bumping always made the needle skip across my much-loved Jim Croce and Carly Simon records if I tried to listen to music. If there was a stormy night, sleeping was not an option and there were quite a few stormy days and nights throughout the summer.

  One lovely and, thankfully, calm night I got up to use the washroom. When I flushed the toilet, the water flashed bright enough for me to “read my lover’s letters.” I flushed again and again and finally woke George with the noise. He told me that it was phosphorescence—a natural light emitted by micro-organisms in the ocean water. He said that you can sometimes see from far above that there is a trail of phosphorescence for twenty miles behind a large ship travelling at night. So now every time I flush the toilet I’m bringing light-emitting organisms into my bedroom? I felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone.

  I was cooking and cleaning for eighteen guests plus George, myself and the owners, John and Norma. It was an endless job from 6 AM until 10 PM. Cutting, chopping, baking, roasting, washing dishes, serving, making beds, cleaning bathrooms, laundry, more cutting, chopping, serving, washing dishes, day after day after day after day. There was about an hour in the middle of each afternoon that I had to myself when I could catch my breath and, most of the time, as long as there wasn’t a westerly blowing, I would just drop on my bed and sleep. I felt like a zombie when I first headed into the kitchen in the morning. I never got enough sleep and relied heavily on the first pot of coffee to get me going and I still felt like a half-dead carcass when I finally left the kitchen late at night.

  One morning before the guests had started to come in off the water for breakfast, I was standing in the quiet kitchen washing a bowl in the sink. There was a door behind me and a counter with a coffee thermos where people would come to fill their coffee cups. I had a sudden feeling of warmth slide along my leg and had a moment of panic thinking someone had come up behind me and put his hand up my pant leg! I looked behind me and no one was there. Then I felt my leg and there was a bump in my jeans. The bump turned out to be a pair of my underwear that I had missed when I dressed in a stupor in the dark before coming in to make breakfast. They had been stuck up my pant leg and had finally made their way, warmly down the inside of my jeans. I looked around to make sure that no one was watching as I snatched them up and stuffed them into my pocket.

  Later that day I sat on the steps of our cabin sewing a button back onto my shirt. The afternoon was full of sunshine and light and as I reached for the spool of thread my hand knocked it off the edge of the step. No problem, right?! I watched as it rolled across the plank. I watched as it kept rolling and suddenly dropped overboard off the side of the float. I leaped up to rescue it as it floated off and was about to disappear under the next float. This was going to take some getting used to!

  Before working at this lodge, the only cooking I had ever done was for George and myself at the lighthouse and fluffy egg and tomato sandwiches as a kid before that. I was stretched beyond my comfort zone, but being the only one available I just had to keep going. Whether or not I had any skill, I had acquired the necessary confidence from watching my mom. Everything she made was delicious and she never seemed bothered by the mechanics of cooking—except on goldeye night. With five kids in the family and half the neighbourhood kids wanting to eat at our house, Mom was a wreck by the time we all had “boneless” portions of iconic smoked Winnipeg goldeye. Getting the bones out of those fish in order to safely feed half the neighbourhood children was a loathsome job.

  One lovely cloudless afternoon near the end of the summer, when there was a bit of a lull and not very many guests, I put on a life jacket and took a little skiff for a ride. George had shown me how to run a boat and this was the first time that I was trying it on my own. The floats were tied up only a few hundred yards from the mouth of the Chuckwalla River, so I headed across the tidal flats dodging half-sunken logs and continued a couple miles up the river. The river valley was about one mile wide and surrounded by mountains, which by September no longer had snow on them. There were soft sandy beaches in many places and lots of logs jammed into the sand. The water was very clear and I could see the clean sandy bottom and lots of salmon as they darted away from my boat. I couldn’t get very far up the river because it suddenly became very shallow and I didn’t want to hit the bottom with the leg of the motor and get stuck so far away from everyone. I put the engine in neutral and drifted back down the river, listening to the birdies chirping and lots of rustlings in the bushes that I couldn’t identify. I felt brave and refreshed by the time I headed back to the lodge. All of a sudden I understood why George loved being out in a boat so much.

  In the meantime, George had been working longer days. I was only half joking when I said that he would have to show his identification before I let him into our cabin at night. He spent a lot of time cleaning boats and fish, but he spent even more time out in the boat guiding guests into catching fish. A part of his job was to take guests on sightseeing trips. He would run three or four people up the inlet pointing out interesting local sights, like where there used to be canneries or where there was once a hospital years ago when the inlet had thousands of summer residents, all working in the commercial fishing industry either catching or canning salmon. There was even an old jail site to point out. The metal bars were still clearly visible where they had sunk when the float the jail was on broke apart in a storm. Sometimes he would take the guests up the river in a flat-bottomed, jet-powered riverboat to see the beautiful valley. He spent a lot of time with guests out on the water and the country just grew into his soul. My soul was still deeply seated in the Prairies, but I loved our experiences, the incredible wild country and the man. Before the summer was over, he was talking about staying in the inlet for the winter on our own.

  Late in September when the last of the fishing guests were long gone, the floats were tied together and towed back to Finn Bay. George and John Buck had been fishing first thing in the morning before John Salo and his tugboat arrived, so I spent a lot of time cleaning the beautiful bright coho while the floats were being towed. Of course the fellows needed a nap after their early morning fishing! It was silly of me to expect help. The discordance of living in this man’s country whe
re the men, George, had so much fun, and the women, me, had the cleaning and cooking to do, was really getting to me now. It was perhaps the last time I cleaned a salmon. The tow was long and slow, taking about seven hours to finally arrive in Finn Bay. We stayed in the little cabin while the owners went to town and we were able to catch our breath and visit some of the people who were living at the mouth of the inlet. One day while we were picking up mail at Dawsons Landing we met Jack Rendle, a friendly, toothless old commercial fisherman who had a small house on a float that he wasn’t using. He agreed to let us rent it for the winter. At that time, it was tied up in Sunshine Bay, on the west side of Ripon Island, about four miles from Finn Bay and about one hundred feet from John’s own collection of floats. We would move our belongings again sometime in the next couple of months, after we were finished working for the lodge.

  Wilderness Wedding

  In the month before I left Winnipeg for the West Coast in 1972, I had been looking for a particular piece of music that I heard on a TV show. The music spoke to me, and I wanted it at my fingertips. In the credits of the show, the piece was called the same as the title of the program, Narcissus are Forever. I can’t recall details about the show other than that I loved the music and that Canadian actress Margot Kidder starred in it. I had asked for the song in many record stores since then but received many blank looks and no luck. I was surprised one night at a dance at the Winnipeg Cabaret, when the piano player of a local band started noodling on the piano during their break and he played my piece! I worked my way over to him on the stage and asked what he was playing. “Étude in E, Opus 10 No. 3 by Chopin,” he said.

  Now that I knew the true title, I looked in music stores in Winnipeg expecting to have no trouble finding it on an 8-track tape. But no luck. Shortly after, I crammed my meagre belongings into my car and drove west. On the way, I picked up a friend in Regina who also wanted to escape to Vancouver. I had an 8-track player in my car and we sang along at the top of our lungs to my tapes on repeat all the way across the Prairies. We decided to pick up another Cat Stevens tape to fill out our repertoire. We checked a few stores in Saskatoon, then Edmonton, Kamloops and anywhere else we stopped and picked up more music to sing along with, but I couldn’t find my favourite Chopin. We listened to Cat Stevens all the way to the coast. Once we left the flat Prairies and the gentle rolling foothills of the Rockies behind, my friend and I chain smoked as a way to cope with the fear of driving off a cliff, and she covered her eyes through some of the most beautiful scenery on earth.

  And now, two years later, I flew with George sixty miles north of Rivers Inlet to Ocean Falls where we could pick up a marriage licence. The little town was virtually closed. The mill that created the once-thriving community had shut down and the co-op store was barely surviving with a bit of tourist boating traffic in the summer and a few local people in the winter. I flipped through a cardboard box of records in the store, though I didn’t expect much but I always checked anyway, just in case. And there it was! Chopin’s Étude in E, one of the most romantic pieces of music I have ever heard. We picked up our marriage certificate and the music we would play at our wedding, in the almost deserted town of Ocean Falls.

  We were near the end of September, the fishing season was over and we were looking after the lodge until it was time to head to Vancouver with the lodge owner and a couple of boats. We were organizing a party to celebrate our wedding. There was a bit of a problem with the logistics though because we didn’t have a firm date for when the Thomas Crosby V would be in Rivers Inlet with the minister on board who would marry us. Like most traffic on the coast, they had an unpredictable ETA. Our guests would be coming from miles around and sometimes it was difficult to get a message to people that lived far away. There was no reliable phone service in the inlet and we were trying to contact people who lived outside of local VHF radiophone range. We finally decided on a date that was around a time we figured the Thomas Crosby V should be in the general area and that’s what we told people. “Come for a party to celebrate our marriage, and we may be married or not, depending on whether the minister can get here before the party.” We were going to be the first non–First Nations couple in twenty-six years to be married in Rivers Inlet.

  We planned the party for Friday, October 11, 1974, and let everyone know to be at our place on that date, minister or not. People started arriving in the afternoon in skiffs, speedboats, fishboats, tugboats and private planes. Everyone was bringing food and drinks and plenty of good cheer. About 6 PM, we had a call from friends at Dawsons Landing who said, “The Thomas Crosby V just pulled into the dock and the minister wants to know, should he come down now and marry you?” Well, there was so much bustle and banter and people were already drinking and eating and the music was blaring. We didn’t want to ruin a good party so we told them to tell the minister to come on down tomorrow. The party was grand, and there were so many people dancing and bouncing on the float that we actually made waves that rippled and flowed out across the bay.

  Wedding day, 1974, with the Thomas Crosby V in the background. Humpback whales, orcas and chum salmon joined us for the ceremony.

  We were still at the fishing resort so there was room for people to stay the night. Some people who lived close by left in the wee hours of the morning, some stayed on their boats and quite a few slept in the extra bedrooms. The next morning I made a big pancake breakfast for the fourteen people who had stayed overnight, and then everyone started heading home. Just in time, I suddenly realized that we needed witnesses for the ceremony, so we asked the last of our guests, the Broom family, to stay and be the wedding party.

  The church boat finally arrived, and the minister, Bob Ferris, and his wife, Celia, joined us for tea and we went over the plans. Darcy Broom would be in charge of the music, Étude in E of course; Jack Broom would film the ceremony to show our families; and their daughter, Shannon, would be our flower girl with a bouquet of wildflowers picked from between the logs and around the floats.

  Darcy started the music, and she and I walked outside to where the minister was standing with George. George was dressed in his jeans and brown corduroy sport jacket and looking a little nervous. I was wearing the full-length colourfully embroidered white cotton dress that I had bought on a very quick trip to Gastown in Vancouver. I was carrying a little white Bible and the pretty wildflower bouquet. Two humpback whales had just passed the floats in search of a good rocky shore to rub against and the bay was full of chum salmon. While the minister was conducting the ceremony, the background music changed to the constant plopping and splashing of fish leaping out of the water and belly-flopping back in.

  The sun was shining and an hour later there was a rainbow over the Thomas Crosby V as it chugged out of the bay surrounded by orcas that were on their way into the bay for a feast of salmon. I had married my sweetheart. The honest, charming, principled, funny, hardworking love of my life. A lot of water would flow under our house before we were parted.

  Our First Crossing

  The front of the boat plowed into the huge swell of water, and the wave crashed over the bow, washed up and over the windshield and along the top. I was cringing in my seat, holding on for dear life. We rose up on the next swell and the water moved on, leaving our boat suspended in air. We crashed down into the hollow between swells and the entire ­thirty-foot length shuddered as it seemed to haul itself back up for breath. I kept wondering how long this boat could take such pounding. The waves were relentless. How long can I take this pounding? I’m sorry, Mom, kept going around and around in my head.

  We were running the boat from Finn Bay to Port Hardy for John Buck. He had headed out in his smaller and faster speedboat and was possibly already in town. There had been a terrible storm over the last few days and the fifteen-foot swell was what was left of it as we headed out early in the morning. Because of the poor water condition, we had to go very slow, with the speed barely registering, and we had about fifty mile
s to travel across Queen Charlotte Sound, which was open water all the way to Japan. By the time we were almost halfway across, the wind started to strengthen and there was a large chop on top of the swells. I wanted to go back. George couldn’t turn the boat around or we would have been swamped between the swells. We were already going as slow as he dared to go but we had to keep some forward speed to control the direction of the boat and keep it from wallowing and possibly sinking. At this point I was thinking, If I die out here, Dad’s going to kill me! Wave after wave crashed over us, and the boat shuddered and shook, squealed and groaned. Or was that last part just me? I couldn’t tell anymore.

  While I can’t say that George was exactly happy that we were in this predicament, he was very confident in his ability, and he viewed the waves and swell as a challenge. He has a profound sense that boats are made to float while I had simply acquired a pathological fear of boats and water and drowning. I could taste it. Salty and desperate and I’m sorry Mom, if I’d known this could happen I would never have agreed to be here! The water was a dark, angry grey, and now large whitecaps were forming on top of the waves on top of the swells.

  When the waves washed over the top there was a feeling that the boat was going down. Tons of water held the boat like a huge hand pushing down on us. We didn’t talk, we couldn’t talk. The noise of the wind and waves was thunderous. The wind shrieked in the crack in the window that I kept trying to push closed but most of the time couldn’t coordinate with all the jerking and crashing. I kept trying because salt water was forcing its way in with each wave and I was getting soaked with freezing cold water. We pounded with every wave and now the tops were being blown off the whitecaps. Tops are blown off when the wind is over thirty-five miles per hour. “Please make this stop!” was now my mantra. I said it over and over, mixed with “Please send me a skyhook that can pluck me out of this boat and put me on dry land!”