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Clams, Tools and Protecting the West Coast’s Inside Passage

Very early one misty morning we went with Ray to a little beach made of broken clamshell. We brought buckets and pitchforks and a shovel. The tide was very low so there was a good mound of beach showing where we could dig. Most of this shore would usually be underwater for at least half of the day. We dug close to the waterline and pulled out big fat butter clams about four inches wide and dropped them in a bucket with salt water. We filled several buckets with clams and sloshed more water on them to wash off any loose shell or sand. When we got back to the bay by the wharf, we poured more salt water on them and put the buckets in the shade. We left them there for a few hours so the clams could clean the sand out of their systems.

In the meantime, we helped Ruth wash and sterilize cans that they bought by the case for canning clams and salmon. After the clams had soaked for the rest of the morning, we hauled them up to the house so George and I could shuck them one by one in our kitchen sink. George split the shell open and I cut the meat out and dropped it into a big bowl. Then we took the bowl of meat over to Ruth’s kitchen and filled the waiting cans, which we then fed to a machine that crimped lids onto the cans. We borrowed a very large enamel pot and carried it and our share of the cans back to our house and started the long process of boiling-water bath canning.

My cookbook said that you were never to can meat or fish in a ­boiling-water bath. The canning authorities felt that there was a very real danger of the bacteria that cause botulism contaminating the cans. But Ruth told us that she and everyone she knew over the years who lived on the coast had always used this method. You were just supposed to do it longer than if you were using a pressure canner. So instead of ninety minutes in a pressure canner, something none of the old-timers owned, the cans had to be covered with rapidly boiling water for four hours. I topped the pot up with more hot water every once in a while as it boiled away. Then at the end of four hours, I carefully lifted the cans one at a time out of the hot water onto a towel on the counter. After a few minutes the cans started to ping, a sound that indicated that the lid was being sucked down as a vacuum was being formed. When the cans had cooled for a few hours, it was easy to see if one hadn’t sealed properly because the lid would not be concave. Also, when you tapped on them, you were supposed to hear a high ping and not a klonk sound.

One of George’s favourite meals was clam chowder, but after handling the slimy things all day, the last thing I wanted to eat for supper was a clam. We piled the tins in the pantry and after a few weeks I was quite happy to make a big pot of chowder with them. I seem to have a short memory.

When we weren’t out clamming or catching herring, we liked to get cozy on the couch and read aloud to each other. During our stay at the lighthouse we read through my Complete Sherlock Holmes and then the entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit. It was a favourite part of the day, to sit down with a nice cup of coffee and read a chapter or two, or if it was raining, three or four. Ray and Ruth’s daughter, Lorna, who was a dark-haired, dark-eyed bundle of mischief, would come over and listen whenever she could get away from school work. Of course we had no telephone, TV or vcr or pvr or satellite or cable or computer, and the internet would have been the stuff of science fiction.

By this time both George and I had paid off our credit card bills from before coming to the lighthouse, so George, the only one with a paycheque coming in, was finally able to buy his first tool. We looked at the tools and machinery sections of Ray’s catalogues first and finally settled on a hammer from the Sears catalogue. George wrote a cheque and put it with the order form into a stamped envelope. The supply ship wasn’t going to be arriving with, or picking up mail for three weeks, so we watched and waited for a boat to be passing by on the way south.

A few days later George could see a commercial fishboat a couple miles up the channel. They don’t travel very fast so he had time to run past Ruth’s house to collect any outgoing mail that she had and then down to the wharf where he lowered the skiff into the water. He hurried down the steps and pulled the boat in closer so he could jump into it. Then he started the engine and headed out into Fitz Hugh Sound. By this time the fishboat was almost in line with the island but was quite a ways offshore. George headed out of the bay going full speed and happily bounced and bumped over the waves until he caught the skippers’ attention. (When George was young, one of his favourite things to do was to use up the tank of gas his dad gave him on a Saturday morning, going around in big circles on their boat in calm Cowichan Lake, making waves to bounce over! When his tank of gas ran out, he would row his boat back to the dock.) The fellow on the fishboat slowed his boat down and George pulled alongside, and with his engine still running, George reached up and handed the little packet of letters over to him with a friendly request that he mail them for us. The fellow shouted out to him that he would drop the letters in the first mailbox he passed but it may not be for a day or two. George thanked him and, slowing his engine, let the fishboat pull away and continue on its way. George then turned his boat around and headed back to shore.

Three weeks later when the supply ship dropped off our mail, there was a parcel from Sears. George’s hammer had arrived. We did a little happy dance and would remember this for a long time as the start of a very extensive tool collection. Behind the shed on the wharf, there was a pile of two-by-fours that had been left behind from previous government projects. The government wouldn’t bother retrieving surplus building supplies because of the cost of transporting them back to town. George made two coffee tables and a few indoor planters using the old wood. His first big project was to make a bed for us. Until this point, we just had a mattress on the floor. He borrowed some of Ray’s tools and, using more of the leftover wood, he made a four-poster bed with a carved headboard and footboard. He spent hours and hours carving the top of each four-by-four post into a round ball.

Our lighthouse living room with George’s handiwork with two-by-fours. There were amazing views from the front window. We spent many hours lounging here with one of us reading aloud through The Complete Sherlock Holmes and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

During my late-night shift one night when I was the only one in charge of the safety of boats and ships travelling in front of our lighthouse along BC’s Inside Passage, I heard a thump on the side of our house. Then another, and another. At first, I thought it might be Ray and Ruth’s son, John, who lived in Rivers Inlet and worked as a logger and log salvager and sometimes came to visit his parents. John had a bushy beard and wild hair, and his everyday uniform consisted of heavy wool pants, a grey Stanfield’s shirt and suspenders—and he seemed to be joined at the hip to his tugboat. He was often visiting his family here, and now I thought he might be playing another trick on me. Something he and Lorna loved to do. The thumps continued while I crept from room to room trying to see out the windows. It got spookier and more disturbing as I went. Were there a whole bunch of people attacking our house from all sides? But why? I knew I would already have been seen by what sounded like a huge mob because anyone could easily see in the windows at night since the rooms of our house were always lit up like a used-car lot. I couldn’t see out, but while standing at the kitchen window, there was another thwack! right into the window, inches from my face. It looked like a bird. It was a bird—and birds! Hundreds! Thousands! I was in the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The thudding on the walls woke George and, curious to find out what was going on, he joined me at the kitchen window.

He was intrigued and wanted to get a closer look. I put on a big sou’wester and, holding my hands in front of my face, followed very closely behind George out the door onto the deck where we could see swarms of birds kamikaze-flying into the house and lighthouse tower. Short of turning off the navigation light, there was nothing we could do to stop the deadly deluge.

In the morning, Ray told us that they were rhinoceros auklets. They nest in burrows along the coast and often feed at night to stay safe from predators. They were being blinded by the lights, especially the huge spotlight that could be seen for miles. Ray said that this strange behaviour happened every few years. Such a sad waste. Some managed to escape with only a bump, but we collected hundreds of little bird bodies in the morning and gave them a burial at sea.

One day, the helicopter arrived with our mail a week before the supply ship was scheduled to be there, which was such a nice surprise. But then when the supply ship did arrive, it was so anticlimactic, since it brought no mail. So disappointing—we lived for the mail service. I began to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this kind of wilderness of the spirit. Then John arrived with a load of mail for us that had been sitting for two weeks in the post office at Dawsons Landing, our alternate mailing address. The general store at Dawsons Landing has the closest post office and is about six miles south of Addenbroke and eight miles up a side channel of Rivers Inlet called Darby Channel. We didn’t realize that it would be so hard for us to get to the store, quite impossible really, since we didn’t own a boat. We would have to see if we could borrow Ray’s boat once we knew the area a little better.

There were cards and letters and a parcel from George’s sister Gery. She had mailed us a bottle of wine! Unfortunately, she didn’t want to get into trouble with the feds at the post office if the bottle gurgled en route, giving away its true identity, so she opened the bottle, topped it up with water and re-corked it, then covered the top with wax to seal it! It was not the best glass of wine, but even watered down it was better than no wine, which is the usual sad state of affairs when one is so far from civilization!

We had been there for almost three months and, in spite of the warm weather, we had yet to receive a fridge.