Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon

by Pat Ardley

  On another Christmas Eve, when Casey and Jessy were six and three, it was a bright and beautiful sunny day. There was crisp, blinding white snow everywhere, with a cerulean sky above. We shovelled enough snow to make a path out to the front of the float so we could help tie up our friend’s boats. Partway through the afternoon, there was water dripping off the eaves and the air was fresh and sweet. We had our buffet dinner and then sat listening while George read A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. When it was time to leave, we all headed out to help everyone into their boats. Everything was frozen again, and the snow crunched under our boots. The planks made a hard solid sound as if we were walking on concrete. George walked over and turned the generator off, thrusting the night into soothing silence.

  The moon was up just over the treeline and the reflection glimmered and glowed across the water to our float. The entire bay was alive with twinkling light. Every surface of the buildings—the windows, the walls—every surface of the boats tied to the dock, and all the trees on the surrounding hills were sparkling. There were large shards of broken ice glistening along the shore as if someone had spilled the contents of a gigantic treasure chest. We all watched in wonder as each breath we puffed out drifted glittering in the air. It was magic. Christmas magic!

  The tide was so low that John volunteered to leave first in his tugboat. He had the deepest draft so if he could make it, the other boats would too. He read his depth sounder as he drove slowly out the shallow entrance on the south side of my island. The other entrance was completely dry. When he had passed the trickiest part, he radioed back that it was safe for everyone else to leave, saying that he had “only scared a few barnacles on the way.”

  The Storm

  One morning in late January 1988, George was supposed to fly out of Rivers Inlet. The wind had come up and we could hear it roaring through the trees. The sound of the building wind was coming from far away and there was a heaviness to the air that told us the wind would hit our quiet bay before long. The sky was a dull grey with high clouds scudding swiftly past. We knew the airplane would not be in to pick him up that day. We did not know that it couldn’t fly into the inlet for five more days. George was scheduled to promote Rivers Lodge at a sports show in California the next weekend, but it was clear he would not make it. On one hand, I was happy that he couldn’t leave, but on the other hand, I remained anxious about the coming weather. Big storms were always nerve-wracking and scary, and we were at the mercy of the wind gods. Would our tie-ups hold, would our roof hold, would we be safe and not risk our lives if there was an emergency while planes could not fly?

  George’s birthday was the very next day, February 1. We were thrilled that we could celebrate together. We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon making sure that everything that could possibly blow overboard was secured or put away. George checked all our shorelines again, even though he had already added extra lines and made sure the boom chains would hold while he was gone. I brought extra firewood into the kitchen box and piled big pieces of knotty fir by the living room fireplace. We had a forty-foot fir log that George had towed home one day. It was five-and-a-half feet thick at the butt and almost as thick at the other end. We burned that log for years! The oil stove in the backroom between our bedrooms chugged along putting out a constant low wave of heat. We would be warm and dry. George started the generator around 4:30 PM, and the kids played while I made supper. Ah yes, the calm before the storm.

  During the evening, the temperature started to drop. The wind was howling around us but, strangely, there was ice forming on puddles and frost on the walls of the buildings. We put the kids to bed, and then George walked around with a big flashlight to check all the lines again. We climbed into bed with a feeling of trepidation. It may have been the drop in air pressure, but we could feel a strangeness to the storm. I was wakened often during the night by the bumping of our floats. They were tied very tightly together but the amount of strain on the lines could still push them around. At one point when I awoke, George was not beside me, and I knew he was outside looking around. I had to get up and check to make sure that he was okay. We both had a bad feeling and would not sleep well for days.

  George was up first in the morning, got the kitchen fire going and opened up the living-room fire. We all huddled around the fireplace with extra layers on and had a special birthday breakfast. The temperature outside was now far below normal and, with no insulation in the walls or ceiling, we had to keep the fires cranked and blasting out heat to stay warm. The kitchen fire always died down during the night but George had stoked it several times when he was doing his rounds, and our Jøtul fireplace that we had re-installed in the fall acted like a furnace when it had a big knot in it and burned slowly all night. The wind was howling around the house and I could see the curtains in the kitchen blowing away from the windows. They didn’t have any weather-stripping so the wind easily found its way in. I made a birthday cake with the kids, and we had a little celebration with a fancy dinner and treats.

  We listened to the weather on our VHF radio and heard that there was no end in sight for the storm. We also talked to our neighbours on the local boat-to-boat channel to make sure everyone was all right. Over the next several days, that was our only contact with people since no one could get in a boat and travel, even across the bay because of the freezing wind. We could see walls of water, or “williwaws,” as high as the trees, racing through our main bay. The temperature dropped to -12 degrees Fahrenheit, which was a record for all the years we have been in the inlet. When I walked outside, the frozen planks popped and snapped because the water in the wood was frozen solid. I stepped very carefully to avoid slipping overboard and was only outside if I had to collect firewood or kerosene for emergency lamps. Otherwise, I was busy stoking the fires and keeping the children entertained. One old-timer told us that once there was ice on the water between Finn Bay and Dawsons Landing. At the time we thought he was making that up, but if the wind would die down for even a minute, I knew there would be ice on the way up to the store.

  This is the forty-foot fir log that George towed home one day. We burned that log for years! And then we found out how much it was worth. Someone stole a fir log from a log dump on Vancouver Island, and the logging company it belonged to hired a helicopter and pilot to find it. Apparently the stolen log was worth sixty thousand dollars.

  One family living in Finn Bay at the time was having a terrible go of it. They had an oil stove that stopped working the first day, when the oil froze in the line, and they only had heat from the oven of their electric stove for one more day. Then their generator wouldn’t start so they no longer had heat and the fresh water they collected in their bathtub froze solid. They were wearing survival suits, wool hats and gloves to stay warm. Our fisherman friend Ray Reese came onto the radio and said, “I’m not going to so much as pick up a sharp knife until this blows over.”

  I collected quilts that had been wrapped at the lodge for winter storage and brought them back to our house. Using pushpins and the quilts, I covered all the exterior doors and some of the windows in the house to keep the wind from blowing in. We were getting along just fine, and then the oil stove behind our bedroom stopped working. George said that there must be ice crystals in the line. I closed the doors to the bedrooms so we wouldn’t lose too much heat through them. They were going to be cold that night, but we had lots of quilts. Phew—we were warm, we had electricity. We were still doing well. I heated two cast iron frying pans in the oven and put them into Casey’s bed to warm it before the kids climbed in. We had Casey sleep at one end and Jessy at the other to conserve their heat, and I piled on extra quilts. George and I were cozy because sleeping with George was always like sleeping with my own furnace.

  It was strange to have so much wind blowing with clear, blue skies. And the colder it got, the more crystal clear the air became. The next day, the third day of the storm, George went out in the afternoon to s
tart the generator and it wouldn’t kick in. He brought the battery into the cabin and set it on a chair near the kitchen stove to thaw. Later when it started to get dark, I made dinner by the light of the overhead battery lights. After the generator battery warmed for a couple of hours, George tried again and the generator started and hummed along nicely. We had power for several hours and then the generator stopped, the lights went out and we were plunged into deep darkness. We curled up on the couch and watched the shimmering stars. Once again mom’s old adage came to mind: What doesn’t kill you outright, will only make you stronger. We were undeniably strong and were making the best of a dicey situation.

  In the morning of the fourth day, George again brought the generator battery into the kitchen as well as a five-gallon drum of diesel oil and set them on chairs beside the stove to warm up. The only thing that I was accomplishing was keeping the house warm and cooking meals. I kept the wood boxes and our bellies full, and it seemed to take all day just to do these two chores.

  George headed out in the early afternoon with the warm battery and oil and I was standing at the kitchen window when the generator chugged on. He came around the corner of the generator shed and we both did our special dance to celebrate that we would have power that night. He ducked back around the corner and a split second later the generator clunked off. I stood staring, shocked that it just died like that. Then George poked his head around the corner of the shed with a very large shit-eating grin on his face. He had come to tell me that, for some strange reason, he used the rag that was in his hand to wipe a spot of oil off the fan-belt cage and the rag got sucked into the fan belt, slamming the generator to a stop. He spent the next half-hour picking pieces of rag from the belt and housing and finally started the generator again. We were lucky that the oil and battery hadn’t frozen in that time. Also, thankfully, he had started the process early enough in the afternoon so he still had daylight to work by.

  The wind was still roaring around our buildings and the floats were creaking and groaning. Again George walked around checking lines and tie-ups and made sure any boats that were in the water were still tied up tight. We were not going to lose a boat; there was no way we could go after it in this storm. Everyone living at our end of the inlet was still in touch on the radiophone, and we talked with each other to buoy our spirits as well as theirs.

  The northeast wind was still rushing down Darby Channel right past the entrance to our main bay and, two miles further on, straight into Finn Bay. It carried frigid water and slammed into a sixty-foot fishboat that was tied to a float in Finn Bay just twenty feet from the fisherman’s family’s house float. Later that day, the ice had built up so much on one side of the boat that the weight snapped the tie-up lines and the boat rolled over and sank. There was nothing they could do but watch it go.

  The generator kept running and we had another evening of adventure with stories and hot chocolate by the fire. The wind was still blasting around the buildings, but by now we were quite used to the sound and the bumping floats. We heard that we were not the only ones being held hostage by the storm. People from Vancouver to Abbotsford were also suffering from the cold with power outages and trees down everywhere. New spring lambs were dying because there was no power to heat the barns. All in all, we were feeling pretty good about how we were coping with the freak storm. Sometime during the fourth night, the wind died down and both George and I woke up in the eerie quiet. No bumping floats, no howling wind, just quiet and dark. In the morning we were met by a bone-chillingly cold but sunny day with almost no wind.

  I refused to think about how things might have gone if George had left the day before the storm. Timing is everything.

  Midnight and Computers

  I was sitting at the computer in our bedroom. It was about 11 PM. George was in Vancouver and the kids and I had been visiting friends in Sunshine Bay most of the day. We don’t run the generator when we are not at home, so I was now trying to squeeze a little more time in with the generator to properly cool the freezers and fridges. Up until now, I had not spent any time just fooling around on the computer. It was either work or kids—no time for surfing the net. I thought I would see what the “internet” was all about. I typed “Martha Stewart” into the search line and a dialogue box came up asking me if I would like to receive her newsletter. The kids were sleeping at the time. So I put my information into the form, clicked next and, lo, I had a nice warm “Welcome to Martha Stewart” letter sent to me in less than one minute. There I was, sitting in my little house, surrounded by water that was surrounded by hills that were dark, dark, dark, surrounded by miles and miles of wilderness mountains and ocean and I had just received a welcoming letter from Martha from somewhere in Connecticut!

  Years before, we had bought the new state-of-the-art single-­sideband phone for our contract with Fisheries and we had it for our own use after that summer. The single-sideband had to have a better antenna or it didn’t work at all. George constructed a tower that took the antenna up about thirty feet. The phone didn’t always have the greatest reception, but some calls were perfect and both parties could hear each other. The best reception was at high tide when the whole lodge could be another fifteen feet higher than at low tide.

  Our next single-sideband phone had fax capability! This was like magic. This new system required a big fat antenna to be attached to the side of our house. I had been phoning in grocery orders to various suppliers in Vancouver and Port Hardy that sometimes took half a day to complete. I would be ten items into the order and the phone reception would drop and I would have to call back numerous times to finally finish the list. It was always a challenge to get the shipping instructions through to someone in town who couldn’t picture their truck delivering to a freight boat. “No! I mean deliver to the freight boat on Mitchell Island for furtherance to Rivers Lodge in Sleepy Bay, Rivers Inlet, and the mailing address is Dawsons Landing, BC … Let me speak to your supervisor.” The fax machine would eliminate these problems.

  Then, miracle of miracles! In the mid-nineties satellite phones became widely available. We ordered a satellite system from BC Tel. It was to cost sixty thousand dollars to buy the equipment plus the cost of flying a technician in to the lodge and his time installing everything. Before the technician arrived, George had to construct a concrete base two feet high on the rock shore behind the lodge. This would be the base to which the eight-foot satellite dish would be attached. We had to pay for the dish and various boxes of equipment to be shipped on the freight boat. George also had to construct a little shed on the hill behind the lodge to house the equipment and batteries needed to keep the satellite working. Then there was all the wiring that had to be strung from the dish to the shed and down to the back of the woodshed float and along the back of the buildings to the house. More posts and more wiring.

  We bought the satellite system on a four-year term. We paid sixteen thousand dollars per year for the equipment plus the very high cost of each and every phone call, whether it was coming in or going out. At the end of the fourth year, I signed the final cheque and the ink wasn’t even dry when BC Tel informed us that the satellite system was no longer viable, that the satellite was down, that we would have to get a new system! Telus had their sixty thousand dollars and we didn’t have a phone.

  In those four years though, the satellite companies had come a long way. The following summer, we bought a new system from Globalstar. This system could also have a pay phone attached to it. Finally we would have a private phone for guests to use. George built a little phone booth attached to the lodge. Guests could use their own credit card to access the phone line after I flipped a switch to make the pay phone work. The only drawback was that some groups of visitors that included businessmen were wanting to use the phone so much that we were finding ourselves once again in line to make phone calls because there was only one line useable at a time—it was either at our house or at the pay phone. Sometimes I just closed my eyes an
d flipped the switch back to the house so I could make an important call. There was a large horn connected to the phone that was attached to the outside of the house, so wherever we were we could hear when the phone rang. We now seldom missed calls but were sometimes quite breathless by the time we ran the hundred-yard dash to answer. Then this satellite ran into trouble and we had to search for another system.

  It wasn’t easy to communicate with the outside world from our remote location. We kept having to replace antennas and later satellite dishes.

  A few years later we found another company, Xplornet, with a trustworthy satellite. The equipment was simpler, the wiring was simpler and the reception and internet capabilities were more reliable. A smaller dish, less than two feet across, was attached to the concrete base. We had internet and telephone separate but in one system on one wire. By this time, the satellite systems cost much less to buy. This one cost about $2,400 in total, purchase price and set up, and was finally quite dependable.