Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon

by Pat Ardley

  The exterior walls went up, the interior walls and room divider joists went up, then I put the cedar siding on the outside while George got the roof trusses in place. We were late. It was already April and we were running out of time. We worked morning, noon and into the night until we couldn’t see the hammer and nails in our hands.

  The building was almost closed in. George had put the wood stripping on one side of the roof and attached aluminum roofing. He needed to turn the float so he could get at the other side from a ladder propped on our float. He pushed the new float away from the dock and moved in between with the work skiff to turn it around. He manoeuvred it out and around and started pushing it back in toward our house. I had a long gaff in my hand and when the float came a little closer, I leaned over to snag the coil of rope that was piled on the corner of the log. As I leaned out, the tip, the very tippy-tip of the gaff caught in the log and jerked me off balance. I splashed into the water with the huge float heading right at me less than three feet away. George was on the other side of the building, unable to see what had happened. In panic, I turned toward the house float and kicked up so hard that I landed on the deck just as the giant float thumped into the side of the dock. It drifted back a little and there were my two socks, floating on the surface of the water, forced off my feet by my miraculous upward thrust.

  Aerial of Rivers Lodge, 1978, with two guesthouses on the far right floats. The second guesthouse was built when we realized two guestrooms were not going to bring in enough revenue. Our house/lodge is the building in the centre. To the left is the workshop with generator shed and a small boathouse.

  George ran the skiff into our float, threw the weighted line over a log and jumped over to grab a tie-up line. I was already tying up the other side. He turned to me and burst out laughing when he saw me standing there in bare feet, soaking wet, with water dripping from my hair. Then the look on his face changed to horror when it dawned on him what had really happened and with a gasp he crushed me in a bear hug.

  We closed in the four-bedroom guesthouse in twelve days from bare float to lock-up stage.

  One morning while George was cutting lumber, I walked past the radiophone and overheard one side of a strange conversation. When making a VHF radiophone call, the speaker can ask for privacy. The operator can then blank out the radiophone side of the call but the town people can hear the person and all I would hear would be beep, beep, beep. But I would be able to hear the person on a landline in town. The landline caller who was speaking was being evasive and secretive so, of course, I stopped to listen. Something about “Logs … middle of the night … close the area … head of the inlet.”

  I ran to the front of the float and blew the tinned foghorn to catch George’s attention. “Quick, come and listen, something strange is going on!” He lifted the saw up onto the pile of planks and jumped into the skiff. They were at the end of their cloak-and-dagger conversation, but George was able to pick up a few more hints and we guessed that there had been a major break from a log-boom site at the head of the inlet. George then made his own cagey call to our friend Richard to start heading up the inlet with as many dog-lines as he could grab and he would do the same with our speedboat. They would meet somewhere in the main channel. We both ran around collecting rope, dogs, axes, a can of spray paint and binoculars and put it all in the boat. George fuelled it while I threw a lunch together for him to take and off he sped to chase down the escaping logs. The valuable fir logs would be drifting out of the inlet and would be lost if not collected as quickly as possible.

  George and Richard knew what they had to do and didn’t waste time chatting. George raced from one log to the next, hammering a dog with a rope into each log and spraying a large “G” and “R” on the end of each one. Richard, in his slow fishboat, went from log to log collecting all the ropes until he had a long line of them that he then dragged over and attached to the shore. Then he would head out to collect more ropes and logs. At some point during the day, other people found out about the log break and also started collecting logs, so it was very important for George to mark every one he found with their initials. They spent the whole day chasing down logs and only stopped when it was too dark to see.

  The next day, George and Richard collected all the long lines of logs into one spot so the logging company could pick them up all at once. They had acquired quite a large collection of them. We knew that the logging company would pay us a fee per board foot or per log for rescuing them from heading out to sea. We waited with great expectation to find out how much money “G and R’s” logs were worth.

  After two long days on the water, we got right back into full cabin-building mode. George finished the other side of the roof and I started sheathing the interior walls. Next on George’s list was to run electrical wires through the attic. He climbed up into the small space and started running 120-volt and twelve-volt wires to carry generator electricity as well as battery power to each room for when the generator was turned off at night. I was attaching four-by-eight-foot sheets of medium-density fibreboard (MDF), to the wall studs. mdf is wood pressed with resin and glue to form a very hard, smooth finish. It is cheaper than plywood and is more suited to our moist climate than drywall.

  Unfortunately, I was still using the ringed nails from the thirty-pound box that George bought years ago. The nails were thin and bent easily in the hard material, which was frustrating beyond measure. If I hit the nail slightly off-centre, it would bend. Once it bent, there was no fixing it, and you couldn’t pull it out because of the rings. I started counting out loud as I snapped off bent nail after bent nail with the hammer. My voice got louder and angrier as I went. “Fifteen.” Smash. “Sixteen.” Smash. “Seventeen.” Smash. By this time, I couldn’t have hit one straight on to save my life. George called gently down from the attic, “Why don’t you slow down?” “Eighteen.” Smash. “Why don’t you shut up? … Nineteen.” Smash. By the time I got to twenty-nine smash, I knew I had to get the hell out of there or before I knew it, my hammer would be aimed at George’s head. He was keeping very quiet up in the attic since he was the one who had insisted that I had to use those nails.

  I finally stormed off after thinking the better of kicking the ladder down from the attic. It would have been funny except that if he jumped down when the coast was clear, he would have landed in all my sharp, broken nails.

  There was a super-low tide early the next morning and we could see the bottom of our bay very clearly behind the greenhouse float. There were crabs scampering across the silty bottom and lots of gem-coloured starfish clinging to the rocks near the tide line, huge sunstars barely moving along the seabed, and sea cucumbers. Yes, sea cucumbers. They were about a foot long, two inches thick and greenish with burgundy colouring and bumps all over—just like cucumbers! I had read that they were edible so we had to check it out. I scooped several up in a net and carried them to the cleaning table. In my hand, they felt like half-full water balloons. The moment I poked one with the tip of my knife, all its guts spewed out all over the table. Eeesh! It was so gross. Okay, so this was my worst experience with trying new seafood. But I persevered and cut down the length of the now empty skin. There are five muscles running head to—umm—toe. These are the most edible part. The guts are poisonous so I washed them away. There is not much meat in the five muscles so I poked, emptied and sliced the other two and had a little mound of slippery cucumber muscles. Fried in butter they tasted like … butter—delicious sweet, salty butter with just a hint of a sea breeze.

  It wasn’t long before a cheque arrived for our two families to share. Collecting the logs was worth sixteen thousand dollars.

  The Ugly Carpet and Other Stories

  We finished the cabin and I spent the next week getting the rooms set up and ready for another summer fishing season. George did the wiring on the four new twelve-foot speedboats that had just arrived, which were a great improvement over our open skiffs. There was a to
p on each boat that covered the seats so our guests could stay out of the rain, and a steering wheel instead of the tiller arm at the back, making the fishing experience much more enjoyable. We were looking forward to a very good summer with more guests than ever before. We hired two teenagers to help with cleaning boats and salmon, fuelling and garbage and any other jobs that we would like to have help with.

  The lodge that tied up in Finn Bay for the winter had a devastating chimney fire that quickly got out of hand. They lost several buildings as well as a couple of new boats and motors that were pulled up on the float. This inspired us to research insurance for the lodge. We were told that we would have to get a land survey done of the area first. We had held off as long as we could because we didn’t have any reference pins for the surveyor to start from, and the extra cost involved in having the surveyor search for the pin or finding a reference point was prohibitive.

  One day George headed to the store with the mail. On his way back, he followed the shore along the west side of the beach. He turned the corner past an island just half a mile from our bay and saw a yellow rope hanging high up in a tree. It was strange that he had never noticed it before. He beached the boat and went up to investigate, thinking that it must be marking something interesting. It was a perfectly good piece of poly rope about twenty feet long, so he coiled it up and headed back to the boat. As he stepped across from one slippery rock to another he looked down and, lo, hidden down in a crevice of the rocks there was a brass surveyor’s mark about the size of a quarter, cemented to a huge boulder. It was like it had been placed there for him to find. Coincidence? I think not.

  When George got back to our house, he was so excited that he ran the workboat up on the ramp attached to the side of our house. There were two long planks that projected out over the water that were attached to the float at one end and not attached to anything at the other end. George could nudge the bow of the skiff up to the planks then gun the motor and the skiff would ride up on the planks. We usually threw the heavy, weighted bow rope over the lash log and wound it around the cable. This time, he just threw the weight and ran in to tell me about the pin.

  The wind picked up that night. Picked up the boat too. Picked it up and dumped it into the salt chuck, and since George had brilliantly taken the plug out of the bottom—it sank! Along with my twenty-horsepower Merc on it that he had taken off Patty’s Page. As it happened, Richard and Sheila had stayed over that night, so in the morning they hooked onto the boat, and using Richard’s fishboat, the Red Witch, they pulled the skiff up off the bottom. Richard towed it to the surface and with the bow high in the air, water sloshed out over the stern. George jumped into the front and bailed like mad, faster than it was coming in. The forward motion also helped push the water out the plughole. He was finally able to make his way to the stern and put the plug back in.

  The surveyor arrived two weeks later and did his work so we could get proper insurance. While the fellow was with us, George pulled the old forge out of the workshop and cleaned it up nicely. Axel had used the forge to make his own logging staples and dogs. George got a wood fire going in the base of it and, using the bellows, cranked up the heat. I had a lovely salmon that I marinated in the afternoon, and after baking some foil-wrapped potatoes in the nice hot coals, I placed the salmon on a wire rack and draped it across the top. What a luxury that dinner was, with our surveyor there to enjoy it with us off our own forge barbecue. So luxurious that I felt I should “dress” up my usual work outfit featuring my new pretty hanky. My sister Marcia had sent it to me for my birthday. Her husband, Murray, had laughed and said, “What on earth does Pat need a lace hanky for?” To which Marcia replied, “Every lady needs a handkerchief.”

  So here is the description of this lady’s outfit, straight off the Rivers Inlet Runway:

  Here comes Pat, wearing a dashing purple and grey toque cleverly folded twice, creating the impression that it might dip down to modestly cover the eyes. A trim blue turtleneck covered by a warm pale pink and white long-sleeved wool bodice Stanfield’s-style undershirt, followed by a red and black plaid cotton work shirt. Together they combine to form the new charming layered look, very “in” this season, with the second layer surprisingly longer than the first and third layers, which is a very thrilling revelation. On the bottom, a pair of corduroy pants, extremely worn-in—so extreme that the fabric is near see-through in spots and of the faintest blue with just the hint of red long johns peeking about the knees and ankles, where one should note the thickly layered grey wool socks, which are jammed into tall, dark-brown, compost-slicked boots with a one inch heel and startlingly playful decorations in the tread. The pièce de résistance is the dainty white cotton and lace hanky, minutely embroidered with tiny white daisies, being held aloft with quiet nonchalance between thumb and forefinger of the as-yet un-smudged right hand.

  That’s what Pat needs the hanky for, Murray!

  Our fishing season started with a bang. Literally. Our newly acquired second-hand fifteen-kilowatt generator flashed and banged when George started it one morning, so we had to send it to Vancouver for repair. We had been running the auxiliary five-kilowatt gas generator all through the spring, which had about one-fifth the power of the diesel one, and we hoped that it would last until the diesel motor could be returned. Because of this, I was left to choreograph power all summer. This can run, that can’t run, these need freezing, those need chilling, heat that up, cool that down, wash those, dry these. I felt like I might go mad. And then the washing machine broke down.

  We had a stockpile of parts to make sure the five-kilowatt generator kept producing power, so the only thing that could go wrong with it would be if the motor straight up and died, which we thought was unlikely to happen. Well, the motor died and we were reduced to using our 2.5-kilowatt portable generator that struggles to keep the freezers freezing. I was washing dishes by hand, running out of fresh towels, and had to let the guests know that they wouldn’t be able to blow dry their hair until the new motor arrived, hopefully on our flight later that day.

  And on top of that, we hadn’t had rain for weeks and weeks and I had to be so careful with how much water I used in the kitchen.

  The fuel barge was scheduled to arrive in about an hour, but it was far too large to enter our bay. George pushed the new float with the new three-thousand-gallon gas tank out to meet it as it floated around in the channel. They lowered the hose down to George and he placed the nozzle end in the open pipe on the top of the tank. He left one of our crewmembers holding the hose and climbed into the speedboat to put pressure on the float, pushing it toward the barge so it wouldn’t be able to drift away. The crewmember climbed on top of the tank for a better hold of the hose, and after the gas had been pumping for about twenty minutes he suddenly shouted to George that the tank was tipping. George shouted to the guys on deck and they quickly made the hose suck out gas instead of pumping it in. Well, that was a disaster averted. A quick response on everyone’s part and maybe a horseshoe in George’s back pocket. George slowly pushed the fuel float into the bay and spent the next several afternoons adding outriggers to the float to stop that from ever happening again.

  It had been a complicated summer, but on the plus side, Fisheries needed a guardian with a speedboat to patrol the inlet during that fishing season. George got the contract and bought a great, newish boat enclosed with a hardtop and lots of glass windows all around from our Merc dealer and called in a friend to drive it for the summer. The money from the contract would pay for the boat, which was interesting, and possibly a bit of a conflict of interest because this friend of ours would sometimes be patrolling commercial fishing, but also patrolled sport-fishing boundaries. Luckily, that didn’t come up in the negotiations. We had to install a single-sideband phone on the boat, as per Fisheries instruction, but we would be able to continue to use it at the lodge after the summer.

  Partway through that hectic summer, we were expecting a large or
der of fishing rods to be delivered to the inlet. George gave the fellow who sold them the address of our freight boat and told him exactly when they should be delivered. I picked up a call from a passing tug and barge—not our freight boat—saying they had our rods on board but would not be able to stop, so please send someone out to grab them as they passed by. George had his friend, Chas, jump in the speedboat with him, and they raced out as the tug passed in front of our bay. There was a man standing at the back of the barge. They could see a few long bundles at his feet. George had to cautiously run the boat up to the back of the barge, careful not to go too fast or too slow while Chas climbed onto the very front of the boat, reached up on his tiptoes and grabbed the bundles one at a time from the barge man and leaned them over the windshield for George to balance. Why was there never an easy way to receive freight?

  One of our guests gave me a pile of magazines, one of which was ArtReview. I thumbed through it and saw pictures of Persian rugs that in 1965 were worth about five hundred dollars but in the then-current market could fetch as much as five or ten thousand. George had acquired a carpet from a friend when he worked for a moving company in his teens. He had used it on his floor at university, had mad parties on it, dropped food on it and hauled it around to the various apartments he had rented, dragging it up and down stairs. We had it rolled up in the dusty attic because it was very strange and off-putting with faces all around the perimeter that corresponded to a story on the border. There was Jesus, Buddha, Lord Nelson, Confucius, a pope and many others we couldn’t name.

  I knew the man who’d given me the magazine was interested in collecting carpets, so I asked him if he would like to see the one that we had (the one that had barely escaped the lamb’s wool moth colony incident). One look at it and the man’s eyes started to glow. He said it definitely had 350 hand-tied knots per square inch and was a blend of wool and silk. He also said it was probably worth at least six thousand dollars. He told me that there was a Persian carpet show coming to Vancouver and we could probably sell it there.