“Everybody’s doing something but me,” said John, disconsolately. “What can I do?”
“You could sound for echoes,” I said, explaining how the captains of the coast ships in fog blow the whistle in narrow passes or inlets. By counting the number of seconds that it takes a blast to reach the cliff and come back they can work out the distance they are from the cliff. Radar sounds so dull after that. I took my precious whistle out of my pocket and looped it around John’s neck.
“It must be a big blast,” I explained, “or it won’t bounce back properly.”
He gathered up all the breath he had in his body—and a mighty blast fared forth into the void. We were all poised to count the seconds—but we had hardly started before back it bounced. I was shattered....I hastily kicked the engine into neutral, for it had bounced from dead ahead. I told John to blow again. Again he threw it out—shrill and piercing—and again it hit and bounced back, undoubtedly from straight ahead.
We inched our way towards it—now ahead, now neutral. I estimated it as perhaps fifty feet....I hung out on one side, Jan on the other. I glanced at the compass to check our direction—we simply must find out where we were and hole up in some place for the night. This fog was not likely to clear unless the wind came up. Jan and I both shouted at the same instant. I stamped the engine into reverse to kill her way. There, ten feet ahead, a straight wall of rock rose out of the sea. I stepped out on the after-deck to get a better look.
“It’s all above us too,” called Jan from the forward deck.
It was—it rose straight up out of sight.
It was the sea-pigeons that gave us the clue. “It’s full of birds,” cried Peter. “Sea-pigeons,” called Jan. “And cormorants,” added John. “One cormorant,” corrected Peter.
The fog thinned for a moment, and high up on the cliff we could see ledges and holes in the rocks. Agitated sea-pigeons and the odd cormorant were poking their heads out of the holes, or teetering on the ledges; peering below at the danger that had suddenly loomed up out of the fog.
“Why, its Deep Sea Bluff!” I practically shouted. I hadn’t realized we were so far north.
The fog changed its mind and closed in again—blotting out the ledges and the holes. But we had seen the sea-pigeons—it was all we needed. We were just outside Simoom Sound, which is at the entrance to Kingcome Inlet proper. In Simoom, which means “Place of the Winds,” there was a logging camp that had been there for twenty-five years. We knew the people who owned it and had tied up there several times before. I got out the chart and worked out the direction from Deep Sea Bluff to the entrance to Simoom.
“Hit on the nose,” commented Peter, rolling up his knife and string compass, as the floats and houses loomed up out of the fog.
As is quite usual on the coast, this small logging company was built on a series of huge log-rafts, planked over like wharf floats and connected with gangways. There were comfortable houses for the married men; bunkhouses for the bachelors; cookhouse, workshop and storehouse. Also bathhouse with stove and boiler and hot showers. And a school. If they didn’t have enough children of their own to rate a government teacher, they would board other isolated children for the school year. The teacher came and lived on the rafts with the owner’s family.
Two small children dressed in life preservers ran out and stared at us. Then the owner’s wife came down to greet us—scold us for wandering around in the fog—ask us up for supper, and offer us the use of the bathhouse and washtubs. We accepted everything. Then we tied a lifebelt on John and wandered around the floats, to admire all the flowers growing in tubs or window boxes, to look at the hens and baby chickens in a wire enclosure on one of the floats.
In the evening, when they heard our plans, the loggers told us that there was a deep water passage inside the reefs and kelp as far up as Blunden Harbour—if not farther. They said that the Indians from up there seemed to use it all the time—with their gas boats as well as their dugouts. Our charts showed nothing. They never do when they are used only by Indian dugouts, or us.
“Watch the weather, though,” the loggers said. “You don’t want to get caught in there with a gas boat if it blows.”
The fog was still thick the next morning, so we stayed over and took advantage of the bathhouse, and washed ourselves and our clothes. The fog cleared in the afternoon, and we said good-bye and ran over to Well’s Pass, anchoring behind an island just inside. That must have been the island where Captain Vancouver anchored the Discovery and the Chatham before he went farther north. Both ships went aground in Queen Charlotte Sound the next day.
I woke at about four-thirty and poked my head out of the curtain. The deck was wet with dew—which should mean a fine day. A mother merganser with her brood suddenly caught sight of me. In horror, she turned and fled, her crest streaming out behind her like red hair, her brood paddling desperately after her—on the surface, as though it were mud or snow. A kingfisher started shouting at another one to keep off his territory or he’d split him in two....It was time I was up.
Jan, in the bow bunk, was still asleep. I would leave her for a while—we could have breakfast later when we got near Blunden Harbour. Young Peter was scrambling into his clothes. He loved to be mate when no one else was around. I started the engine, pulled up the anchor, and nosed out into the Pacific.
It was almost high tide now. It ebbed north here, and we would have the tide with us most of the morning. We kept the main shore in sight. Over to the south-west, where we should have been able to see the north end of Vancouver Island, it was misty and we could see nothing.
The sea was perfectly calm, not a ripple. But when we rounded the last cape at the outer north point of Well’s Pass we struck our first Pacific swells. They were wide apart and perfectly gentle. But up we gradually rose...and down we gradually sank....Up again...down again....A wondering head poked up through the hatchway and made descriptive motions with its hands.
“Where are we?” demanded John, from his bunk. “Why is the sea so funny?”
“It isn’t the sea,” explained Peter loftily, “it’s the ocean. It’s been doing it for ages.”
The swells had an entirely different feel about them than the waves. Not dangerous exactly, but relentless—an all-the-way-from-China kind of feeling about them. Whatever the sea was doing, I felt that I should like to locate that inner passage as soon as possible. There were cliffs at the moment, so it probably started farther along. I didn’t care for the unexpected breaking and spouting of the breakers on a calm surface—breaking on something we couldn’t see. We rounded another cape with a great mass of kelp off it. Then I made out a line of kelp extending along the coast as far as the eye could see. From where we were it looked much too narrow to be the Indian passage. Jan went up on the bow, and I worked in closer. It began to look wider and there was evidently a reef underneath or alongside the kelp. Then we came to a gap with no kelp and evidently no reef—nothing that would bother us anyway. We slipped through on top of a swell...and here certainly was the Indian channel. It seemed deep right up to the shore, and about thirty feet wide. What low water would show we couldn’t tell. There might be no room for the boat at all—the Indians might only use it at high tide....At least the wide kelp bed broke up the swell and none was breaking on the shore.
This was no dash we were making—it was a crawl. There would be no help in these waters if we ran on a reef. We had a good dinghy, but how humiliating to have to row away from our wrecked boat, with no one to blame but ourselves! The tide was dropping rapidly, still helping us on our way. The reef outside of us was now above water in many places; but that only made our channel more secure. The shore, as we had hoped, shelved very steeply. Evidently we were not going to be squeezed between. Around eight o’clock we came to a small group of islands—the Raynor group. Tucking in behind them out of the swell we had our breakfast. We landed on shore for a run, and found our bodies strangely unstable and hard to adapt to the solidness of the rock.
&nb
sp; We knew that there was an Indian village in Blunden Harbour and were very tempted. But it would have been foolish not to take advantage of this sunny, quiet day for the run up to Seymour. We passed the entrance to Blunden Harbour—all necks craning. There was no sign of any habitation. So the Indian village must be farther in round the bluff. The entrance seemed quite exposed.
It was lunch time when we pushed thankfully into the Southgate Islands—the end of the open run. We hadn’t had any wind at all, but the rollers were distinctly alarming at times. Very frightening when they suddenly broke right ahead of you on a completely hidden rock. They would throw a mass of spray high into the air. The reef would show for a moment in the hollow, and it wasn’t hard to see what would have happened to our boat if we had been there.
The loggers at Simoom had told us that the tugs towing log booms were often held up for as long as two weeks in the Southgates by wind. They would have picked up the booms in Belize or Seymour Inlets and come down with the tide to these islands to wait for favourable weather to make Well’s Pass. That is the farthest north from which they would try to bring booms. Above there, they would make up Davis rafts—great mounds of logs all tied and wound together with heavy steel cable. Like an iceberg they were mostly below water, and waves and rollers could not wash out the logs—the way they can in a boom.
This circle of the Southgates completely protected the enclosed water and made a perfect booming ground. And it was deep right up to the steep sandstone shores. Cables tied round trees were lying across the slopes, ready for the booms that would come.
The names of various tugs, and the dates, were painted in red or white on the low cliffs. Under some of the shallow caves and overhanging ledges in the sandstone we found oil-paintings, on wood, of various tugs. Amateurish, but some of them quite good. Two weeks is a long time to wait for wind to go down.
The tide was very low now, and we fooled around in the shallows looking for abalones. I can never quite bring myself to the point of eating an abalone. These virile animals, which the Norwegian fishermen tell us should be beaten with a stick before cooking, probably taste like beef-steak with a fishy flavour.
Then, calls from the children to come and see. Up on a dry, grassy point they had found dozens of the abalone shells of all sizes—cleaned out by the seagulls. They nested them together in high stacks. Trading was brisk. Then the air was filled with their unspoken longings. I ignored it—swirling around me, beating about my head...then I gave in, “All right,” I said, “but down the bilge.” If I allowed everything they found, on board, there would be no room for us.
We had a swim off the smooth rocks. Lay in the sun to get warm and dry. Then started up the engine and wandered on up to Allison Harbour. We had been told that we might get gas there, and somebody else said he thought there was a store. There was neither. There was a float, and a cabin up on the bank. From the sign nailed up on the wall, it was evidently where the fishing inspector for the district lived. His boat, a heavily-built forty-footer with a high bow, was tied up at one end of the float. He came out on deck when he heard us—then came over and sat on the wharf with us.
When we said we were going into Seymour he told us that he had spent most of the last night caught in the Nakwakto Rapids in the narrow entrance. He explained that you are only supposed to go through at slack water—and the slack lasts only six minutes. He had been twenty minutes late, but thought he could still make it as the tide would be with him. He had barely got started before he knew that he should never have tried it. The current caught his stern and swung him round and rushed his boat against the shelving cliff. That was the end of his propeller. For the rest of the night the rapids that run sixteen knots had played with him. They would rush him along in a back current, swing him out into the through current—then rush him sideways. Then his bow would hit with a splintering crash against the cliff—and the back current would catch him again. Again and again he hit the cliff, and as the tide fell and the contour of the cliff changed, each time he hit in a different part of the stern or bow. Soon he had to pump steadily, three hours of it, as she began to take water. Then, just before slack, when the strength of the current let up and the back currents were not so fierce, Nakwakto Rapids had let go of him. He drifted out of the narrow entrance into Schooner Passage, got out his dinghy and towed his boat into a cove just round the point to the south—a little bay with a shelving beach and an empty Indian shack. He had beached the boat, bow first, which was where the worst damage was, to keep her from sinking, made a hot drink and fallen into his bunk. He hadn’t wakened until the sun was high.
A fish-boat had come through Schooner Passage and he had hailed him. They had patched up the bow a bit, and the fellow had towed him back to Allison Harbour.
He showed us the splintered bow—a major job to be repaired. The stern was almost as bad, not to mention the propeller. Plainly, he himself was badly shaken. He strongly advised us to keep away from the place. Finally, he suggested that we spend the night at his wharf, and go up next morning to the little cove with the shelving beach and the Indian shack. There, if we climbed the steep mound to the side of the shack, we would overlook the rapids. We could watch for a while and see what we would be up against. Then we could go through with the flood at lunch time.
“You’ll see the little island in the middle that splits the flood tide in two with its pointed bow—a great wave to either side. The fellows tell me that if you stay on it for a tide, the whole rock shakes and trembles with the force of the waters. Turret Rock, they call it. But don’t forget, slack only lasts six minutes,” he warned.
The next morning found us lying on top of the high mound above the rapids, watching that fearsome roaring hole in action. Turret Rock was not breasting the current, but bracing itself against it on its tail. It was hard to tell whether our mound was trembling, or the island was trembling, or if it was just the motion of the rushing water. Probably the air was in motion from so much turbulence. I am supposed to look calm and collected at such moments, and my crew watch me furtively to see that all is well. I was busy, furtively arguing with myself. It was stupid lying here, holding onto the ground, working ourselves up into a panic. We were used to all the other narrows on the coast—Yuculta, Surge, Seymour, Hole-in-the-Wall. They were all fearsome, and how flat they were at slack! Six minutes slack, I told myself, is not much worse than twelve minutes. In all the other narrows you don’t worry about twenty minutes either side of slack. We would be going in on the flood. If all went well we could get past Turret Rock in six minutes. We always tow our dinghy—even if the engine stopped we could tow the boat past the island in ten minutes and then we would be through the worst. The fishing inspector had been in the dark, and he had lost his propeller at the first hit. Looking at the cliffs below I thought there might be fewer back currents on the flood tide—always supposing you got past the island. If we hadn’t met the inspector I wouldn’t be thinking any of this.
“Come along, youngsters,” I said. “Let’s get lunch over, and get things ready.”
“Are we really going?” they asked, as they slid down.
“When it’s dead flat,” I said.
I left them on the beach and went back to the boat to get an early lunch ready—preparing for the six minutes. While waiting for the kettle to boil I cleaned the sparkplugs and checked the gaps. Then I cleaned the points on the magneto. Then I wished I hadn’t touched anything. Far better to leave an engine alone if it is running well. What possessed me to touch it?
Then I called the children out for lunch. I snapped at everybody. Then someone raised the question whether our decrepit-looking clock was right. I hadn’t the faintest idea. We usually judged time by the sun. How could anyone judge slack water in a roaring hole by the sun? I should have to go up on top of the mound and watch it. I pulled up all but the last few feet of the anchor rope, then rowed ashore, leaving a worried-looking crew behind me. I started whistling to cheer them up. Usually, if I whistle, they know that t
here is nothing to worry about. It was hard to keep in tune...a silly, whistling woman, climbing up a mound...whistling out of tune.
I watched....I saw the current hesitating....I threw myself down the mound, I rowed breathlessly to the boat. I tossed the painter to somebody and told them to tie her close. I pulled up the crank. The engine started first pull. I tried to swallow—for some reason I was breathless. I yanked up the anchor, and worked out the bay—stood well out, in case we were pulled in....
There was nothing there to pull us in. A still passage lay ahead of us. Turret Rock stood in the middle, looking perfectly quiet and relaxed. We went gently through, resisting the temptation to speed up. The channel opened out into a comparatively wide section. Then the swirls began to form around us—the six minutes must be up. But we were through. I only speeded up because I didn’t know where those treacherous back currents might start. How stupid it had all been! Just because we had seen a smashed-up boat, and heard a first-hand account from a worn-out man who had had a bad experience.
Peter shook his head sagely, “You were scared, too, weren’t you, Mummy?”
I winked at him. “Weren’t we sillies!” I said.
The day had turned out dull and grey and the clouds had settled lower and lower. Whenever I think of Seymour Inlet, I think of it as being low and flat and uninteresting. It is really made up of a series of very narrow, very deep inlets running north-east. These are separated by narrow ridges of high mountains. The whole inlet must be spectacular, if you can see it. I was never sure whether we turned up Nugent Sound and spent the night there, or were at the beginning of Seymour Arm. The first is a blind arm that runs in about eleven miles—while Seymour runs in for twenty-five miles, and ends at a river on which is the winter village of the Wawatle Indians. Nugent and Seymour are separated by a great rib of high mountains—to us it all appeared as low hills.
The Curve of Time Page 8
