Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon

by Pat Ardley

  We finished the trim in the kitchen and Kenny and I started painting the outside of the main lodge building. We had had several days of good weather and decided the shingles would be dry enough. We both had thick, wide paintbrushes and a bucket of milk-thin red stain. The old shingles were very dry and soaked up the paint like sponges. We painted for about four hours and had only managed to paint one and a half outside walls. I was thinking Please, oh please be there! when George left to check if the part had arrived at the store.

  Hallelujah! The needle valve had finally arrived. The company had put the part on a bus to Vancouver for furtherance on the freight boat to Dawsons Landing. George quickly put the generator back together and, while we crossed our fingers, tried starting it up. It worked! We could get back to using power tools. In the next four hours, using the paint sprayer with a tube going into a five-gallon bucket of stain, we were able to finish painting the outside of all the buildings. I carried the bucket along while George sprayed the walls. Even with having to move the ladder every few feet, we were still able to finish painting all of the outsides of the buildings in less than four hours. Hooray for electricity!

  George cut huge cedar planks to make dining tables, a beautiful bar, the porch steps and beds for the guestrooms. He cut stacks of planks to completely cover the open spaces on the floats and to make a heavy walkway between our lodge float and the guesthouse float as well as a bridge over to the generator shed. Putting the planks down across the logs was a slow job. Each plank had to be levelled just right across the float logs, which were a mishmash of uneven surfaces. He used cedar shingles to shim up the planks on any low points and used the adze to chop down through logs that were too high. Amongst our first guests a few weeks later would be a couple of fellows who were timber buyers in the US. They walked around our floats with awe on their faces. They were almost in tears when they talked about our beautiful walkways. And the cost of those walkways if we had to buy those planks in town—they were a full twelve inches wide by a full two inches thick and eight or ten feet long. They didn’t feel that they should walk on this beautiful, straight, clear lumber!

  When the walkways were finally done, George made a huge plank box with a heavy lid and lined it with Styrofoam sheets for an icebox to hold the fresh fish for guests while they stayed. George had repaired the Francis Millard fishing company’s floats during the winter and they agreed that he could get ice from them during the summer. The Millard’s fish camp consisted of several large floats tied together in the back of Finn Bay, where commercial fishermen could safely tie up during bad weather and stretch out their fishnets over racks if they were in need of repair. The company had ice available during the commercial fishing season so it would be a short trip for George to pick up several tubs of ice at a time.

  We were finally feeling legit, since the freight boat was stopping at Rivers Lodge in Sleepy Bay now, and we would no longer have to travel to Dawsons Landing to pick up our supplies. The freight boat called Tyee Princess arrived with our first two open skiffs with motors as well as our order of fishing rods and tackle for our guests. A washing machine, dryer and a dishwasher also arrived. I insisted on the dishwasher. Most of the money we had spent so far was for tools to make George’s life easier. The dishwasher, good knives and a beautiful set of canary yellow (just like my car) Copco pots would make my life easier. I was studying the Escoffier cookbook and learning as much as I could. Did you know that in classic French cooking, they suggest that you should not use the core of a carrot? I was paying one thousand dollars freight on a two-­thousand-dollar grocery order delivered to Rivers Lodge from Vancouver. If I had to pay that kind of freight on my carrots, I was darn well going to use the whole thing! One very important lesson that I learned from this world-class cookbook was that for the most part, French cooking is about being good at using leftovers. They prepare most of the meal early in the day and mostly rewarm what has already been precooked! Then they add a sauce. Busted!

  Now, with the buildings all a uniform red and the white trim getting done, the lodge was starting to look really good. It was time to celebrate!

  There was no liquor store in the inlet. There was no one like old Gus making beer anymore, so the only time there was beer in the inlet was in the summer when the people on the Fisheries patrol boat, the Falcon Rock, would pick up orders for us. The rest of the year, if we wanted a bottle of wine or rum, we would take the boat to the general store, buy a money order for the price of the wine plus the return postage, and mail it to the liquor store in Port Hardy. About a week after sending in the money order, we would receive a box in the mail with our bottle or two. It was quite amazing how fast the news travelled that liquor had arrived in the inlet. People suddenly dropped over late in the afternoon. It would have been rude not to offer them a drink.

  Some folks arrived with food, and we suddenly found ourselves putting the tools away, pushing the table saw against the wall and pouring drinks at the new kitchen counter. We plugged our 8-track player into the extension cord and immediately everyone was dancing to Bob Seger, the Bee Gees and KC & the Sunshine Band. In the middle of “Get Down Tonight,” the chimney pipe crashed down and with a whoosh, soot shot across the living room. The dancers moved back in each direction but continued hopping and gyrating while George went for the Shop-Vac, vacuumed up the mess, and the dance floor filled up again with the party-starved dancers. Then the booze was gone and we waved goodbye until the next liquor order arrived in the mail. Until then, it was back to offering company a simple cup of tea.

  Rivers Lodge Is Open

  We didn’t celebrate for long. We still had to finish painting inside and clean away all the building debris. I set up the kitchen with my lovely Copco pots and our Wedgewood dishes—given to us as wedding gifts—that would help me produce and beautifully present fine hotel-style dining. When it came to our food and service, we sought to emulate the Four Seasons Hotel. We wanted to look after our guests and anticipate their needs before they even knew what they wanted.

  One of Lucky’s sons arrived to see how we were doing as I was pushing, pulling and shoving a huge cabinet into place in the kitchen. He leaped in the door and started pushing the heavy cupboard with me. I was so unaccustomed to having someone help with the heavy lifting that I tried to shoo him away. But I quickly realized that it would be great to have his assistance. I had become too independent over the last many months working my way around manual labour and I didn’t know how to let go.

  We had changed the configuration of the small backroom behind the kitchen and it now held the washer and dryer, and fridge. The room had originally been closed in with no outside access. Axel had used the room to store cans of paint and other items that he didn’t want to freeze. There was a low wooden bench along one wall with a large round hole in it and a note was painted above it reminding himself the last time he painted this rather uncivilized toilet, that it had “Vet Paint” and he shouldn’t sit down any time soon. The colloquial name for this type of toilet on the coast was “the aquarium.” When you looked through the hole, you could see fish swimming around below the logs under the house, and at a super-low tide, you could watch starfish moving along the bottom. Not your bottom—the bottom of the ocean. This bench was the first thing to go when I was tearing the house apart, but I hated to paint over the “Vet Paint” sign. We added a door to the back wall. Just outside was a small shed that we had pulled onto the back of the float for extra food storage. In the kitchen, the cupboards had to be kept well organized since there wasn’t time or wood to make doors for them.

  George built the beds for the guesthouse and I set up the rooms. I had splurged on down comforters so the guests would be warm in cool weather and cool in warm weather. I tacked cardboard boxes onto the wall of the backroom of our house to pile the extra linens, sheets and towels. George started the oil heater in the guesthouse entrance to take the chill out of the cabin.

  He set up the two twelve-foot
open fishing skiffs that were for the guests’ use and organized fishing gear in the tackle shop beside the guest­rooms. I had made a grocery order for the freight boat and had the menu planned for our first guests, who would arrive in a little over a week. As long as the air-traffic controllers’ strike was over. But we kept working, hoping that everything would be settled and planes would be flying again.

  George had cleaned up the float from which we had pulled the wash house. He filled in places where there were no planks with his hand-cut ones and towed it out to the main bay. Then he used a massive anchor from Gus’s shop to keep our new Sleepy Bay International Airplane Float safely anchored away from shore.

  Most airplanes could not manoeuvre into the small bay where the lodge was tied to shore. I say most, because over the years there were a few planes that actually did come in and tie up right in front of our house. One was flown by John Salo, who had an inordinate skill with equipment, including airplanes. The other was flown by a pilot who tied to our house float in the Cessna that we chartered to carry three hundred pounds of halibut we bought from Scarlet Point Seafoods in Port Hardy to feed our guests. And later, a pilot who simply didn’t know any better came right in to tie up in front of the lodge float.

  A few days before our guests were to arrive, George went out in the boat and called the Duncan travel agent. He came back in looking utterly dejected. The strike was still on so the guests had to cancel. We had no other guests lined up. The travel agent didn’t know any fishermen, and fishermen didn’t know her. George’s and my combined marketing skills were less than zero. We had been on our heads with construction and naïvely hadn’t done any advertising.

  Old Jack Rendle came in for tea in early July. The first sockeye opening was coming up and there were quite a few commercial fishermen tied to the dock at Duncanby Landing in Goose Bay on the other side of Rivers Inlet. Duncanby Landing had fuel available for the fishboats, as well as a small store and washroom and laundry facilities. Jack was the winter caretaker but was able to stay in his cottage during the summer seasons, when he wasn’t out fishing himself. I asked if he would like to bring a few of the fellows over for a nice home-cooked meal in exchange for some sockeye. He thought it was such a great idea that he organized six men to come over a few nights later. They were super happy to be fed because they were away from home for several weeks at a time and cooking for themselves. I was super happy because sockeye is the best salmon to can. The night after the fishing was closed for the week, the men all arrived with three sockeye each and had a delicious four-course dinner. We continued with this exchange for the next ten years until Jack left the inlet.

  I canned all the sockeye in half-pint jars with just a pinch of salt on the meat. During World War II, even when food was scarce, people didn’t want to eat canned white chinook salmon as they assumed there was something wrong with the fish. It’s simply due to the genetics of different salmon runs. One year there was a terrific run of white salmon and one enterprising company wrote on the cans: “Will not turn red in the can.” They managed to sell all they had. My salmon, canned in a boiling-water bath, was bright red in the jars! The very best canned salmon ever!

  Fog filled the bay with a delicious moist air so thick you could almost cut it with a knife. Only the graceful ghostly tops of the trees could be seen as the mist grew lighter with the heat of the sun that we could feel but not see. Once the fog burned off it was going to be a beautiful day and the water on the sound would be flat, so we planned a trip to explore the beaches around Hakai Passage. I still like the water to be calm when crossing Fitz Hugh Sound because it’s a long way over to Calvert Island and I feel so vulnerable and exposed out in the middle. The fog was gone by the time we were passing the BC Tel station.

  We went around to one of the outside beaches where we could anchor The Page and use the dinghy that we carried in the back to row right onto the beach. The sand here is lovely, fine white shell. It was still very early in the morning with a super-low tide as we walked along the slippery kelp-covered rocks and hunted for abalones on the shore on the other side of the bay. Sometimes you could see one stuck to a rock, and other times you would find one when you pulled the long kelp leaves out of the way. The abalones can’t get away, they sort of flutter along by the frilly edges of their thick meaty “foot” so slowly that you can barely see them move.

  There were also a few rock scallops here. Rock scallops filter feed in somewhat the same way as abalones so you often find them in the same area. I found two beautiful scallops where they were attached in a crack of a rock shelf very close to the waterline. I chipped at the shell and cut the meat out. Beautiful! The meat was over two inches deep and two inches across. I couldn’t wait to cook them lightly in butter for supper. The tide was now quickly covering the kelp, so after finding about a dozen abalones, we climbed into the dinghy and headed over to the sandy beach where we lit a fire and propped a piece of salmon close to it. The salmon was stuck on a cedar board full of nails pounded through from the back. Before we left home I had covered the meat with brown sugar, and it had been marinating in the sun while we foraged. After walking the length of the beach to see what else we could find, we came back to the fire with a handful of gooseneck barnacles. Then I leaned the salmon closer to the fire and balanced a couple of abalones and barnacle skewers over the coals. We had a seafood feast with fresh bread and salad. The perfect meal, on the perfect beach, after a perfect day.

  On our way back home in the afternoon, we stopped the boat outside our bay to phone the travel agent. No news, no new bookings. With a little extra time now, George was determined to put up a good high antenna. He cut down a tall thin alder, cleared the limbs, then dragged it through the water to the side of our float. He attached the antenna to the top of it and using a block and tackle and me, he raised the whole contraption beside the house and hammered a brace around it and to the side of the building. We raced into the house to see if it worked. Sure enough, George contacted the operator for our telephone channel. We could now make phone calls from inside our house! We would still be using our VHF radiophone for many years until Telus decided not to service the equipment due to cost.

  Not only could we make phone calls, but we could receive them too. As long as someone was beside or near the phone when Coast Cone, the BC Tel VHF channel in our area, called our vessel name. “Coast Cone calling The Page, Coast Cone calling The Page, Coast Cone calling The Page, Coast Cone out …” Sometimes I would hear “The Page” and start running toward the phone, and by the time I got there all I would hear would be “Coast Cone out …”—the death knell since we had no way of knowing who had called. The radiophone was in our bedroom which was close to the kitchen, but it was still just chance that I caught the call from our first real guests.

  I was in the kitchen getting ready to can the abalones that we brought back from the beach. We didn’t have very much freezer space so canning was the best way to keep the meat. I heard “Coast Cone calling The Page …” and ran to accept the call. It was from a couple from California who were in Port Hardy and were looking for a place to go fishing. I still don’t know who gave them our boat name and told them how to call us. They had to dial “0” to contact the long-distance operator and get put through to the marine operator in Campbell River who then voice-called us on our Coast Cone channel. Now that I think about it all these years later, it’s amazing that we had anyone call us that year! I told them that, “Yes, we have room for you and would love to take you fishing.” They were going to fly into the inlet and land in our bay the very next day—they were anxious to get fishing and we were ready.

  Our First Guests

  There was such a flurry of activity as we ran in all directions at once. I had a menu already organized for the first couple who had to cancel, so now I just had to execute the plan. Here is my first lunch menu, from July 15, 1976, for our very first two guests, Barbara and Jim.

  Homemade Corn Bubble Bread
and White Bread

  Meat Loaf with Chili Sauce

  Devilled Eggs • Crab Quiche

  Sausage Rolls • Kelp Pickles

  Walnut Squares and Coffee

  George raced off to pick up ice for the fish box. He re-started the heater in the guesthouse to take any chill or dampness out of the air and got the water running and the hot-water tank started. I had to finish canning the abalones, which was an awful lot of work for so few abalones, but it would be worth it in the end because it would probably be a year before we were in abalone country again. I saved two abalones to cook for our guests and put the rest in a bath of warm water. I always told people that I also put on soothing music so the abalones were totally relaxed when I cut them out of their shells, which made for very tender meat. I had tiny little jars and put two abalones in each with a bit of water and salt. Then I covered the jars with boiling water and boiled them for four hours while I started on my lunch menu.

  Fifteen minutes before we were expecting the guests to arrive, George made his way over to the old boathouse where we kept the garbage to be burned. He was carrying a couple of big cardboard boxes that partially obscured his view. He took a step off the generator float and missed the boathouse, which had drifted slightly away, and went straight down in between the floats and into the water all the way over his head. After clambering out, he sloshed his way back in the house with seaweed dripping off his head and beard. After that, he made a habit of waiting to dress in his good clothes only once he’d heard the plane fly over the house.

  I was feeling very organized and had plenty of confidence from watching my mom cook. I had spent the last year studying cookbooks to learn the art of making sauces and cooking meat and fish. I had fresh vegetables and herbs to use and by now could make beautiful bread of any kind. My first dinner menu was: