Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon

by Pat Ardley

  As soon as we settled into our new location, I started to clear a patch for a garden on one of the low hills on my island. I would step out of the workboat onto the rocky shore at whatever tide it was and climb up to the clearing carrying the heavy weight at the end of the rope that was tied to the front of the skiff. One turn around a bush with the rope and the weight was enough to keep the boat near the shore, but if it was going to be a super-low tide, I would have to keep an eye on the boat or it might get hung up on the rocks as the tide went out. I worked a path through the salal bushes up the side of the medium-sized hill to the largest flat area at the top.

  I didn’t trust planting on the lower flat, grassy area just in case the salt water of a winter high tide reached that point. I hoped the garden would supply lots of fresh vegetables, but I didn’t realize how much work it would be for years to come as I slaved over taming that patch of cedar peat, roots, salal and moss. Over the years, there were times during a super-high winter tide with a low pressure that brought the water level two feet over the lower grass area, splitting the island into three, with only the hills showing above the water. During the highest tide, the water was so high George ran our work skiff right across the island through the middle of the hills. It’s always good to trust your instinct.

  There were a couple of huge cedar trees, a lovely yew tree, several smaller hemlock, lots and lots of salal, a few wild crabapple, salmonberry, huckleberry and thimbleberry. Also a twinberry bush that produced terrible-tasting berries that George liked to trick kids into tasting. There was a thick, deep, soft moss that would later be dotted with trillium, yarrow, fritillaria and pretty little daisy-like chamomile plants.

  I also found saskatoon berry bushes and wild roses after I cleared away some of the salal. Under the moss, the salal roots created a layer that was as solid as concrete and almost two feet deep. I slaved over those roots for months with a mattock, hacking and chopping and tossing the pieces over the side of the hill. A mattock is sharp like an axe but the heavy head is turned sideways so it worked better for heaving up over my head and crashing down through the roots. Bit by bit I opened up the ground and made a garden space about fifteen feet by thirty feet. It was good, healthy outside work instead of just demolishing and deconstructing inside the dusty, old buildings. It also made me feel good to be on solid ground again.

  One side of the island sloped gently down toward the water, and there was a very thick covering of rock cress that I was sure would be a good fertilizer. I raked this into piles at low tide, filled five-gallon buckets full, then hurried the buckets across the shore, over boulders and rocks, then up to the garden and back again before the tide came back in. This made the start of an amazing compost heap. There were also plenty of starfish and huge twenty-six-legged sunstars in the bay that I collected and added. I found a small shell beach at low tide where the sunstars were piled on top of each other, and there were so many that I went into a frenzy lifting them on my rake and dropping them onto the bottom of the workboat. Later I lifted the slippery mess into buckets to carry up the hill.

  I wrote to the Agriculture Department at the University of British Columbia and asked about the combination of seaweed and starfish. They wrote back and said it would make very healthy compost. The only problem would be the bad smell for a few months. My compost was far enough away from our house that we were not affected by it. The Ocean Falls fire chief and his wife visited us one day, and he loved my compost idea. Back at home he made his own pile of seaweed and starfish, but all of his neighbours grew mad at him because their dogs would roll in the stink and then come home reeking of the dead sea.

  After many months of hard labour, I had the medium hill a little under control and I started working on the big hill. It was too early to plant and we didn’t have our building supplies yet, so I had plenty of time to work in the garden. The top of this hill was much farther to climb with buckets of seaweed and soil. There was no real soil up that high, just deep cedar peat moss. I broke the moss up, chopped the roots apart and went in search of a patch of soil I could bring over in buckets to add to the mix.

  There was an area we called “the slough” at the very back of the bay. I hiked about fifty yards into the woods and up a tiny creek where I came to a pond. There was nothing that I could dig up, but I did find the most interesting flower of all, way back in the marshy woods: a sundew, or Drosera rotundifolia, which is an insect-eating plant with the most amazing shape. It looks like an alien with lots of red-tipped antennae.

  Thankfully I had passed a large cedar tree right at the edge of the shore with the dirt falling away from it and into the water. At high tide, I could grab shovels full of black soil and, beneath that, real sand, and I could load the workboat with buckets of the heavy mixture. I struggled up the hill with bucket after bucket, and the only thing that I ever grew up there, and not very well, were potatoes. The medium hill was much more productive.

  There was something about the soil in my garden that produced wonderful turnips that were sweet and crisp like apples. I brought bags and bags of goat poop from a trip back to Addenbroke, where the new lightkeepers kept three goats. The broccoli and cauliflower were also amazing.

  Ken Moore, a gentle old-timer friend who lived in Finn Bay, often came in for tea, or we went and visited him. One day Ken told me about the diet he was on. A doctor had informed him he needed to lose weight, so he cut back on his candy habit and treated himself to only one chocolate a day. And that was enough for him to lose twelve pounds. It was years later that I found out that his one chocolate a day was a Rogers’ chocolate, which are two inches across, at least an inch deep, are loaded with delectable fillings and are easily equivalent to four or five ordinary chocolates.

  Ken wasn’t only interested in cutting back on his own sugar intake. He tried to stop the juncos from eating his delectable cherries one year. He sat at his open kitchen window and shot at them, killing one after another. He would hit one and the rest would fly out of the tree for a few seconds and then land again to continue eating. He shot every last one in this way. He wasn’t a mean man. He was actually quite kind and had a soft spot for birds and animals and had two pretty budgies in a birdcage on his kitchen table. He just didn’t want those juncos eating his entire crop of luscious cherries.

  One day I looked out and Ken was on the sloping shore of my island with a rake and was stuffing my seaweed into sacks. I did what I had to do. I picked up a rifle, walked out to the corner of the float and pointed it at him. This is the only language that these old-timers understand, especially from a twenty-two-year-old girl. I called out to him, “Ken, put the seaweed back or I will have to shoot!” In a split second, Ken made the right decision and dumped out the burlap sacks and climbed back into his boat. Then he came in and we had tea.

  First Renovations

  There was a public timber-cutting area set aside a few miles from our bay where George was allowed to mark quite a few big cedars for our own use. That was something that Rivers Inlet had lots of: timber. There were lots and lots of cedar trees covering every slope of every hill and mountain right up to the head of the inlet, where there are also huge fir trees mixed in with the cedars. People from the Ministry of Forests would check the trees out and charge us a stumpage fee based on the estimated board feet in each tree. This would be a nominal amount that we were happy to pay, and we could then legally cut down trees. We needed big logs for building floats and smaller logs for cutting into lumber. We could burn the scraps in the kitchen wood stove and the soon-to-be-­ordered fireplace for the living room.

  Rivers Inlet had been handlogged for years. If you scramble a hundred feet up and into the forest behind our floats you can still see stumps of gigantic cedars with notches cut in the sides for the fallers’ springboards. The springboard was a diving board–like platform and would be pushed into the notch sometimes ten or twelve feet up from the base of the tree. Risking life and limb, the faller would the
n climb up, stand on the board to put an undercut in the side facing downhill, then move the springboard around to a notch near the uphill side and, from there, cut the tree down.

  The senior lightkeeper’s family from Addenbroke Island had handlogged around Sleepy Bay twenty years before we arrived. Years later when George was diving in the back corner of the bay, he came up to the surface with a potty-training seat—covered with barnacles. We gave it back to John with a chuckle and said, “No wonder you’re so tough!”

  While George was in the short-lived business of falling trees for our new endeavour, limbing them, then getting them into position with the use of peaveys and jacks and finally sliding them into the water with the work skiff, I was tearing apart the inside of Axel’s wash house. Right in the middle of the main room was a gas-powered wringer washing machine and a big claw-foot cast iron bathtub. Behind the main room was a smaller room that was completely lined with cedar boards with a very dodgy old barrel used as a wood stove that turned the room into a sauna. A wall-mounted bench had to go, and so did the barrel stove. The chimney pipe was falling to pieces as I moved it out, no doubt from using salty beachcombed wood for so many years. I stripped the backroom bare and painted the floor, then we moved the tub back there and hooked up a little oil-fired Dickinson boat stove with a coil in it to heat water. George ran an extra water line to the back of the building but hadn’t hooked up the line yet.

  The front room of the wash house would be our bedroom and the backroom would have our bathtub and a space for storing dry goods. It just needed cleaning and painting but not yet. We had to build a connecting hallway between the main part of the house and the wash house now that it was moved into position. This was complicated by the fact that the main building’s top plate above the wall studs was only about five feet eight inches from the floor, so George couldn’t make the door any taller than that. It worked for us because we were both short enough to walk through the opening, but we would have to make a taller door for the main guest entrance. Over the years, many a taller friend bumped his head at the family entrance. The main building that we were working on had been built almost forty years ago with no insulation other than tinfoil-backed paper and it had small windows. The very low top plate also meant that the small windows could only be opened about four inches before they bumped into the plate. This would make for a stifling kitchen in the hot summer months.

  More complications were time consuming because the floors of the two cabins were not even, and the roof on each building had to be cut open to create a proper covering for the hallway and small washroom that would be built off the hallway. To put in a proper main door, George had to cut into the existing roof and build a new section that extended out and across the new porch. The porch was made of beautiful nine-foot two-by-twelve-inch planks that George had cut on my island.

  Once the roof over the porch was built, I attached the shingles around the opening. The wall studs were about twenty inches apart and nailing the shingles was tough because the wall bounced under my onslaught. When I was at the top of the ladder and reaching as far out as I could, I hauled off and slammed the hammer into my left hand completely flattening the end of my index finger. I looked at it thinking, “This should really hurt.” I carefully climbed down and walked around the building to call George back from the island. As I walked, I pushed and pressed the wound around and reshaped the skin and nail so it once again looked like a proper finger.

  George rushed back, knowing I wouldn’t call for his help unless I really needed it. He walked me over to the tap and started to run cold water over my hand and then Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! It started to hurt. We didn’t have time to stop for injuries. George just bandaged my finger and gave me a couple of aspirin, and we both went back to work. I didn’t climb back up the ladder that afternoon though, since I was feeling rather light-headed. Instead, I sorted the nails that I had pulled from the walls into a good pile and a those-too-bent-or-rusty-to-be-­reuseable pile.

  Christmas was just around the corner and George’s mom and dad and sister Gery were coming to stay with us. We were still living in the cabin we rented from Jack Rendle, which had been towed along with the other building from Sunshine Bay, but we could squeeze a few more people into it and sleep in our new not-quite-finished bedroom in the wash house. Before our company arrived, we cut down a seven-foot pine tree and decorated it with keyhole limpet shells that naturally have a perfect hole in them for a ribbon to slip through. The keyhole in a live limpet helps move sea water out of the shell. Jack came over for tea and noticed our rather bare tree, so the next time he came by he brought two strings of very old lights and a box of pretty baubles. We had a 2.5-­kilowatt generator that we could turn on in the evenings, and the decorated tree truly sparkled in the corner of the main room.

  As soon as our family arrived we had a party. We also hosted the Coopers, friends from Sunshine Bay, and Andy and Nell from the Calvert Island telephone station. At one point, Nell wanted to get another bottle of rum from their boat. I asked one of John’s crew to go with her since we had all been drinking, and there was only a narrow plank walkway over to where their boat was tied. A few minutes later they walked into the cabin with silly grins on their faces and presented a dripping-wet and shivering Nell. She had stepped off the walkway and into the water. She went down right over her head, but on the way she managed to place the rum bottle onto the walk. They were both so proud of themselves that they had saved the rum! And there was a round of applause because we were all so glad that she did!

  We had very little money to spend on Christmas gifts, but I did have a spinning wheel that I had built from a kit ordered from the Mother Earth catalogue while we were at the lighthouse. I also bought two carding paddles—that looked like wide flat hairbrushes—that were used to prepare raw wool or in my case, my hair, for spinning into a long fibre. I had been saving hair from my hairbrush for months, and while George was out, I carded my stash of hair then spun it on my spinning wheel into a nice thin thread. There wasn’t very much but I added a bit of wool and managed to crochet a little folding key-chain holder to give to George as a present. In the meantime, George had found an almost perfect heart-shaped rock and glued a small ring onto the back of it, then spliced a leather thong onto the ring to make a beautiful necklace. Who needed money?

  Shaking All Over

  I once woke up in the middle of the night in our new bedroom in Axel’s former wash house and couldn’t feel my hands. I rubbed the back of them together for several minutes to get the blood circulating again. Both of them were seized in the shape of claws. Actually, my right hand looked like it was still holding a hammer and my left hand looked like I was still holding a bunch of shingle nails.

  George had cut down a nice straight cedar tree and after limbing it and removing the bark, he cut it into fifteen-inch-long blocks and then squared each piece ready for me to make shakes. The chunks of wood were too heavy for me to move so I cut the shakes right there in the woods where the tree had fallen. I used a froe, which has a fifteen-inch sharp cutting edge fastened at right angles to a wooden handle. It was part of the equipment that Gus had left behind. I would line it up with the straight edge of the cedar block and smash down on it with a rubber mallet. The grain of the cedar was very straight and the froe would only need a few more hits to make it slide right through to break off a nice straight shake.

  My left hand and wrist shuddered from each froe-slam and my right hand up to my shoulder vibrated with each bash of the mallet. I was cutting shakes in the winter months, with freezing-cold rain falling on me most of the time. I had a bright yellow rain jacket on, rain pants and a big black sou’wester, but nothing could keep the rain off my wrists and hands. I would work until I could hardly lift the mallet again and then would spend some time piling the shakes into tidy piles. I wrapped the piles with wire and carried the heavy bundles down through the brush and fallen trees and scrambled down the rocks hauling the bundles to t
he water’s edge, one bundle at a time. I tried to time my shake-cutting so that I was finished for the day at high tide so there would be less rocky shore to clamber down. I hoisted the bundles over the side of an old wooden, flat-bottomed boat that we used as a barge and then paddled the boat back to the lodge. I had to unload the old barge when I got back or it would definitely sink overnight. Sometimes George was there to help unload but he was most often busy with his own projects.

  After unloading the barge I quickly headed into the half-finished kitchen to get the wood-stove fire stoked and ready to cook supper. Once the fire was roaring, our kitchen would finally be a welcome place to warm up in. The copper coil at the side of the firebox heated water while the fire was burning but while I was out all day, the fire would slowly die down. There was never enough hot water to enjoy a hot bath, unless I went to another huge amount of effort to boil great big canning pots full of water to help fill the bath. We had moved the cast iron bathtub into the backroom and would soon have a hot-water tank hooked up. So getting warm after a long day out in the freezing rain was a slow and arduous task.

  George’s dad had stayed with us for an extra week. He couldn’t bear to just leave when he could see how much work we had ahead of us. He was such a jolly presence and tackled any job that George handed him with wonderful good humour. I was sad to see him go. Sadder still that he took my dog, Tuki, with him. George didn’t like the dog and deemed it untrainable. Ernie agreed, so off Tuki went.

  We next renovated the cabin that we bought from Gus Erickson, and that involved changing the outside of the building and filling in a breezeway to be part of the new guesthouse. We made the original room that Gus had lived in into guestroom number one and the area that we closed in became guestroom number two. Each guestroom had lots of space for three beds and would have its own washroom with a toilet, sink and shower. The area between the rooms would make a good-sized entrance with an oil heater to dry guests’ rain gear. This room was forever called the drying room, not the usual mud room, since there was no mud—just lots of rain. There was another long narrow room at the other end of the cabin into which George put a door from the outside, and that room became the tackle shop.