Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  At the northern tip of the island is the remote and wild Cape Scott, and just to the east is the entrance to Queen Charlotte Strait. Nowadays it is possible to follow the protected Inside Passage south of the cape but Captain James Cook, although he recorded an inlet there in 1778, had no time to explore it. He was trying to find a new route back to England but, needing repairs, he was finally forced to turn south-west and sail back to Hawaii, where he was killed.

  Cook’s former lieutenant George Vancouver was sent to survey the waters between the island and the mainland.In his log book Vancouver, who grew up sailing the difficult waters of the English Wash, called these Canadian waters ‘one of the vilest stretches of water in the world’. In addition to rapids in the sea and massive whirlpools he also had to contend with the huge and dangerous underwater mountain called Ripple Rock that even at the highest tide came within two metres of the surface and blocked the passage. His guiding of the Discovery in 1792 through that nozzle-shaped narrow strait now called Discovery Passage must rank as one of the greatest pieces of sailing ever.

  In 1958, the Canadian government finally managed to blow the top off this giant underwater peak in one of the greatest non-nuclear explosions ever, and this made the route passable for modern ships. Large craft were slow to take advantage of this new way north but nowadays cruise ships are starting to use this spectacular route along the west coast. However, if one travels north of Vancouver Island along the coast of the mainland to see the wildlife, one needs a small boat to poke into the inlets and travel close to the shore. It is one of the most contorted coasts in the world and although it is now accurately charted most of it is never visited.

  Travelling on the plane from Sydney to Vancouver there were only a dozen passengers like me. The rest of the seats were taken up by a huge tour group of Australians mainly from inland country towns who spoke excitedly of their forthcoming trip to Alaska, although they were actually spending most of their time travelling through the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and Alberta. Their route was the popular twenty-first-century one: up the Fraser Canyon along the Icefields Parkway from Banff to Jasper then across to Prince George and then following the highway north to the big city of Anchorage and then coming back to Vancouver on the ferry via the Inside Passage. They said they couldn’t wait to get to Alaska to see the Kodiak bears. I told the old farmer I was talking to that he would see lots of bears everywhere, especially on the coast, but he firmly told me the Kodiaks were the biggest of all and they only occurred in Alaska and that would be the highlight of his trip.

  I didn’t disillusion him and tell him that in reality, in North America there are only three bears, just as in the fairytale. They are black, brown and white. The smaller, generally more dangerous and sneaky black bear can be any of those three colours. It is only this bear Ursus americanus that is exclusively North American. Brown bears (usually known as grizzlies) are widely distributed throughout the northern hemisphere and are found in Spain and Norway as well as right across Europe and Asia. Probably due to population pressure brown bears migrated to America like everyone else. The white polar bear has a smaller range but is also found further north.

  The present day confusion about bears is due to a misguided American, Clinton Hart Merriam, who never visited the habitats yet classified common brown bears into more than eighty-four different species based on skulls sent to him by American hunters. In 1947, after Merriam died, the distinguished American biologist Victor H. Cahalane, not wanting to be critical of the great man, politely said, ‘Probably no piece of research has brought dignified mammalogists nearer to name-calling and nose-punching than the question of correctly identifying the grizzly bears.’ Sadly Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney and people like Alaskan moose hunter Sarah Palin continue to perpetuate the Kodiak myth. Scientists search for truth, but for too many people today advertising and amassing money matter more.

  The world is full of surprises, perhaps because we tend to focus on the first thing that impresses us. Many Australians who think of Canada as a cold place are surprised when I tell them there are deserts with tumbleweed and rattlesnakes in British Columbia. English visitors are surprised to find that in summer southern Vancouver Island which they had been told was like England in climate is often more like Spain. Canada is generally thought of as being covered in ice and snow and full of people riding on sledges. Certainly it is like that in some places but it has considerable climatic diversity. It is also a vast empty land like Australia with roughly the same low population density.

  Canada has fifty per cent more people than Australia but it is half as big again with more time zones than any other country except Russia, which it resembles by having lots of snow and people dressed in fur hats. The big difference between Canada and Russia though is water; the northern Pre-Cambrian Shield is somewhat lopsided and gently undulating so Canada has many millions of lakes, which hold over half the world’s fresh water, whereas flatter Russia has mainly swamps and bogs. Canada’s coastline is the world’s longest at 200,000 kilometres, and most of the great rivers run ‘down north’ into the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay and were major routes in the early fur-trading days. Canada has always moved huge amounts of its natural resources by water and has always had a large mercantile marine fleet. Even now, around its own coast, it is still one of the world’s most maritime nations.

  Along the Inside Passage and towards the north on the west coast are a series of red-painted government wharves built to serve the public and for boats in transport to load and deposit goods. Most are still free much to the amazement of visiting Americans. That is why I was able to live on my boat and visit the north with relatively little cash. The west coast though, apart from a few isolated settlements, is still as wild as the day Cook landed at Nootka and claimed the coast for England more than two hundred and thirty years ago.

  8

  How to Fillet a Fish

  I used to go to the western edge of the southern part of the island when I lived in Meade’s cabin in 1968 because of another amenity, the remote West Coast Trail. The trail was built during the last days of sail early in the twentieth century by the government to help shipwrecked mariners who had come to grief attempting to enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca after crossing the Pacific.

  One of the world’s most dangerous coasts, that stretch was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, and many square-rigged ships, as well as some steam-driven craft, were driven onto its lee shore. There were more than a hundred wrecks. The government cut a walking trail through the great forest running south along the top of the cliffs towards Victoria, and built a shelter cabin about every thirty kilometres. They also rigged a crude telephone line attached to the giant trees, and in each cabin there was a box where one wound a handle in order to generate enough current to ring the coastguard to the south. Cables were strung across the numerous rivers, some with metal passenger baskets so survivors could follow the wire to meet rescuers.

  After the advent of radar in the early forties there were far fewer wrecks and by the sixties the trail had been abandoned for years. I reached it at Tsusiat Falls by paddling my canoe part of the way down Nitinat Lake, then up the Hobiton River into Hobiton Lake from where I shouldered the canoe and cut a portage to Tsusiat Lake. I paddled across that and then down the Tsusiat River until I reached the falls getting out quickly before they poured over the cliff into the sea. There I left the canoe and walked north along the beach. I then had access to many unfished rivers where I caught salmon and steelhead.

  In an effort to save this empty area of wild country from complete destruction by the logging companies I wrote articles describing its virtues and calling it first the Nitinat Triangle and at other times ‘Vancouver Island’s Own Lake District’. I began writing about the beauties of this wilderness and the magnificence of the West Coast Trail in order to encourage people to go there. The Sierra Club in California became interested and they asked me for photographs, notes and sketch maps of the area, which they turned in
to a guidebook.

  During the next few years people from all over the world started coming to walk the trail and it is now perhaps the most popular wild trail in North America. I am somewhat resentful about this and I no longer respect those people from California because my work and the photographs I supplied were used but I was never acknowledged. The popularity of the trail and the crowded bays and new campsites wrecked the place for me as well as for the few native people of the area. However I believe that the number of hikers is now limited, and one good thing did come out of it: the forest on the west coast was partially saved and the trail is now part of the surviving wilderness Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.

  It is also true to say that influential people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr are using their money and power in an attempt to save the whole of British Columbia’s beautiful west coast. The popular name for the coast now is the Great Bear Rainforest after a wonderful book of photographs by Ian and Karen McAllister written by Cameron Young that was published in 1997. The McAllisters pointed out that although the coast is clearly a World Heritage area many parts of it were still being logged. I cannot understand why more people don’t protest about the killing of something that takes more than a thousand years to grow. I can only suppose it is because most of them live in cities and have never seen anything like it. Few people seem to recognise that all these wonderful life forms are connected and that there is a reason for everything.

  The natives of the west coast are quite different from the east-coast Salish at the mouth of the Cowichan River. One of their villages, Clo-oose, was just south of the Nitinat Gap where at one time all the waters of this southern part of Vancouver Island had emptied into the sea. Perhaps I related to them well because, although they had been hit by many of the white man’s diseases, they seemed completely independent in their thought and uncorrupted by the white man’s culture. They were isolated because there was no road.

  I once asked the people who lived at Clo-oose and who netted the mouth of the Hobiton River for its sockeye salmon if they ever went further up the river into the two upper lakes, but all they said was, ‘Why?’

  When I acquired my gaff-rigged sloop with its two headsails I moored her at the public wharf in the tiny port of Sidney just north of British Columbia’s capital, Victoria. I got to know the craft first by sailing her south into the fairly busy American waters of Puget Sound and then back up into the Canadian waters of the Strait of Georgia. This area is a sailor’s paradise because it’s easy sailing and there are many fine harbours and several hundred islands to explore. It is completely different from the west coast. My plan was to become so familiar with the boat that I could operate her in pitch darkness without thinking. Finally, when I knew the boat and she knew me, we sailed north together through Desolation Sound, the world’s most dangerous waters, and into Queen Charlotte Strait, and I looked at the Pacific Ocean’s tricky lee shore.

  The mountains and the tides to the north had terrified Drake and scared Cook in their square-rigged craft, but an old remittance man called Grey Hill, who lived on an ancient and strangely painted motor cruiser called the Cape Saint Elias, admired my little sloop. He told me my smart little sailboat could easily reach the mythical place after which his boat was named. He hadn’t been there but he seemed to know a lot about British Columbia’s coast. With modern charts, he said, anything was possible with a small seaworthy sailing vessel like mine. He wore heavy glasses and was almost blind but legend had it he knew more about the coast than anyone else, so I thought it was a good sign when he said I should have a go. The important thing, he said, was to always have an alternative plan. After my voyage, the old curmudgeon told me he meant anyone with sense would know it would be easier to beat across the ocean to Japan.

  During my time in the northern waters most days I fished for salmon in the sea. The great chinook salmon did not interest me much although I have hooked them and been towed by them more than once. The most fun fish, as well as being one of the best to eat, was the smaller coho. I took a lot of these aboard my little ship by trolling, towing behind the boat, a torpedo-shaped pink wooden plug about ten centimetres long called a Lucky Louie. It wriggled like a mad thing, didn’t need to be made to look alive by the angler and was almost irresistible to the fish. But I only did this when I was very hungry.

  Whenever I could, I would catch the coho casting a fly. Never though did I catch as large a coho as the one I hooked, and Big Arthur landed, on that fateful day at the waterfall.

  9

  The Arrival of Ned

  Like most old men, I am at my best in the mornings. So after deciding it must now be Wednesday and having spent a couple of days thinking about things that happened in the past, I was hoping that my grandson’s arrival would bring me back into the ever-present now. I knew it was difficult for families with young children to get started early in the morning, so I remained patient. I am not sure now what time they did arrive, but I was sitting on the veranda writing about the coast in my notebook when I heard the sound of someone coming down the trail. I felt quite nervous about the meeting. I closed the small black book, slipped the elastic around the cover and put it in my pocket. I crossed the bridge over the gully and started walking towards the place where they would have left the car.

  Ned was ahead and obviously excited, but when we met and my son Matthew introduced us he was really quite shy. Ned had blue eyes with a hint of green, fair hair and a slight figure. He was like his father had been, a bit short for his age, probably about a metre tall. In his right hand was a small fishing rod about the same length as he was.

  Shyness, I supposed, was a normal reaction, and suddenly I was transported back to my first meeting with my soldier grandfather: I was the first grandchild and a lot younger than Ned when my parents became reconciled with my father’s parents, but I do remember I was the reason for the reconciliation. It was early one Sunday morning and my giant grandfather had not yet shaved. He picked me up, rubbed his rough cheek against mine and roared with laughter at my adverse reaction. He was a huge man and he had an odd sense of humour.

  Now, with Ned, I decided the best thing was to simply say hello and that it was good to see him.

  ‘Show me the fish Grandpa,’ said Ned.

  ‘We need to look at the cabin and dump your other gear first,’ I replied.

  When we got to the cabin there was great excitement. Ned pointed out that it was made of larger than usual logs. He caused me to look at the whole structure with new eyes; in my mind it was just a cabin, a place to stay for a night or two, but I suddenly realised it was a large log house. The logs were thirty centimetres or more in diameter and there was a feeling of spaciousness once we were inside. Ned measured himself against them. He was just over three logs high.

  I hadn’t noticed the size of the logs before, because I was so jet-lagged when I arrived. Four large logs, about two and a half metres above the floor and five metres apart, ran across the huge living room. Beyond the third log there was a wall reaching to the roof. The end of the cabin was screened off to form four bedrooms, two up and two down. Each bedroom had four bunks and there were also a couple of beds. There was so much for a boy to explore; outside there were things like the woodshed and the pit toilet to examine as well. It was every boy’s dream, as well as mine.

  In the centre of the cabin was a big metal-box stove designed to heat the whole area. Ned peered into the stove, turned and looked back through the open door to the woodshed. I knew he was thinking about the amount of wood it would use. He inspected the small open kitchen area at one end near the veranda, and the two downstairs bedrooms at the far end, saving to last the best of all: the ladders to the upstairs bunkrooms.

  I could tell Ned was impressed. He was thrilled when I told him he could have the first choice of where to sleep. He climbed all the ladders, tested all the beds and bunks, and eventually chose a top bunk upstairs at the far right-hand end of the cabin.

  ‘Will this one be all right, Grandpa?�
�� he asked.

  ‘Yes, it is the best bunk in the house,’ I replied. It was the one I would have chosen myself at his age.

  When we got down to ground level again, I told him that living in the woods was different from living in the city because things were so much simpler. Here we concentrated on the most important things in life, like catching fish and not falling into the river. He wanted to rush off and see the river, but I told him that to go near a river first you had to have the right hat. We talked about hats for a while and he said they helped keep you warm and dry. I said that was true, but also pointed out that because of the way light was refracted through water, a light colour, particularly if it was high up, could scare away the fish. Then I pulled out a selection of old hats from my swag and allowed him to choose one. He picked the best one. He took special care to pick a nondescript hat, dark green to blend in with the forest, with a small brim so it wouldn’t get in the way of his casting. I could tell he was a quick learner.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘can we go down to the river?’

  We could, I said, but when we were within about six metres of the river’s edge we would have to move slowly, rather like a deer does when it is browsing, because fast movements also scare the fish.

  So Ned and I set off for the river, leaving Matthew back at the cabin. We moved the whole way through the woods like a couple of ancient mountain men, keeping low, crouching at times, and turning our toes slightly inward in the kind of walk that the mountain men learned from the natives. We were always careful to glide, as jerky movements were not acceptable to the wildlife around us, and we were extremely careful not to get entangled in the spiky devil’s club.

  Our ‘stalk’ to the river took a little longer than perhaps it needed to. We didn’t see any wild animals, probably because it was the wrong time of day, but we were well satisfied because the few hundred metres we had to travel to reach the water were covered with great skill.