Читать книгу Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon - Pat Ardley - Страница 17

Working at a Fishing Resort

Two months later we left the lighthouse. We had been there for almost a year and a half. We had been perfectly happy there, but when a chance encounter with the resort owner turned into a job offer, we both were excited to try something new.

It was 1974 and we listened to ABBA and the Beach Boys as we packed our few belongings into boxes and loaded them into the tractor wagon for the ride down to the wharf. John Salo and his tugboat, the Robert G II, were anchored in the bay, and George and Ray used the hoist and a net to lower our things down to him. The most important piece of furniture that we had to take was our bed that George had so patiently and lovingly carved. There were also the two very heavy coffee tables, wooden planters and various jars of jellies, jams, pickles and canned clams and salmon. Also important was our record player, with quite a few records, that had been a godsend for me on crushingly quiet winter evenings.

We pulled the netting off our makeshift chicken coop and let the banty chickens run free. They were very adaptable and would be hiding their eggs in the woods again shortly. We left the chicken house for future junior keepers. I had scrubbed our temporary home from top to bottom and now walked through the rooms feeling just a little sad to be leaving. We had had such a wonderful time here and I didn’t quite know what we were heading into. But I was sure it would be more exciting exploits. I stood looking out the big picture window in the living room and memorized the vista: the always interesting and changing ocean as it rolled and roiled up the channel. The mountains rising three thousand feet on Calvert Island to the highest point on Mount Buxton, the lush shades of green of its tree-covered flanks and the contrasting starkness of the treeless craggy rocks at the very top. I had no premonition that one very sad day I would land in a helicopter on the very peak of that mountain to fulfill an important wish for George.

I finally turned to go, and bumped into Lorna, who was also unhappy to see us leave. She loved to have someone to play tricks on and would miss listening in on our story time. We walked over to the senior keeper’s house to say goodbye to Ruth, who was just sending the 11 AM weather report. She came into the kitchen and wrapped a bundle of cake for us to enjoy on the trip to Finn Bay. In the Robert G II, the trip would be a little over an hour. We had hugs all around on the porch and headed down to the wharf. John was waiting on his boat, which was gently swaying on the swell. They had everything already tucked safely on the boat, so we headed down to the shore where John could pick us up in his skiff. We climbed aboard the tugboat and with a forlorn wave headed out of the bay and on to our next excellent adventure.

The resort in Finn Bay was called North West Safaris and was built on log floats like the Dawsons Landing store, only on a much smaller scale, and was safely tied to shore in a corner of the bay just off Darby Channel in Rivers Inlet. The entrance to Finn Bay was about 150 feet wide, and the bay itself was a half-mile long by about five hundred feet wide in places and was surrounded by low tree-covered hills. The resort was there for the winter because the spot they tie to in the summer was too rough on the floats in the winter winds. John dropped us and our belongings off on the floats and headed out of the bay, leaving us in the stillness of the beautiful late-spring day. The lodge owner had a little cabin that we would stay in for the summer, so we carried our things in and piled them in the corner. The cabin was one room with a clothes rod along one wall, and a saltwater marine toilet and sink in a cubby hole in the corner. You pumped sea water in to flush the toilet but the sink wasn’t hooked up to fresh water yet. Very simple accommodations compared to our comfortable house back at Addenbroke—and it definitely didn’t have anything comparable to that incredible picture window. But I was excited and anxious to get started.

We had arranged to leave for a holiday in Vancouver before the fishing season started, and our flight was arriving shortly to pick us up. All commercial flights into the inlet landed on the water, so they either had long metal floats underneath the body like on a Cessna or Beaver, or they landed on their belly like the Goose. Also, most of the float planes had wheels underneath so they could land on the tarmac at the Port Hardy Airport. These are called amphibious planes. If they didn’t have wheels, they had to land on the water in the harbour, which was ten miles from the main airport and made it nearly impossible to make your connecting flight! We had very little time to look around the camp and get our bearings before we hopped on the Alert Bay Air Services Goose and flew to Port Hardy and then on to Vancouver.

We arrived back in the middle of June from a lovely month-long vacation and jumped right into getting the fishing resort ready for the summer season. The lodge had already been towed to its summer location in Kilbella Bay at the head of the inlet. The floats were tied to shore with stiff legs, which were usually at least sixty feet long and straight and attached to a series of logs that held everything away from the rocks like the Dawsons Landing store floats, almost but not quite out of the afternoon westerly. There was a mountain rising up right behind our cabin, and our view out the front was of the Kilbella/Chuckwalla River delta with the snow-capped Coast Mountains all around. In the distance we could see the Monarch Icefield and Silverthrone Mountain. We were the only crew hired. George was hired to be the manager/handyman. I would be the cook and housekeeper, and John and Norma Buck served as the hosts. There was a lot to do to clean up after the long months in storage and to sort out all the boats and fishing equipment. The boats were all piled on a float and each one had to be pulled into the water and then have the small motor attached. After each boat and motor was assembled, George took it for a test run, bouncing across the waves and sometimes zipping up the river, hair flying and grinning from ear to ear when he returned to the dock! Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time on my knees scrubbing the kitchen and its equipment and then making beds and cleaning bathrooms. Hmm! I thought and squinted out at him through narrow slits.

Every sunny day there was an afternoon westerly wind that brought waves crashing into the floats. Our little cabin heaved and bobbed and banged, first into the float that it was tied to, and then into the logs that were holding us in place. There was just enough time for the floats to all drift back out toward the churning sea, before the next wave crashed them backwards again. The worst of it was that all this bumping always made the needle skip across my much-loved Jim Croce and Carly Simon records if I tried to listen to music. If there was a stormy night, sleeping was not an option and there were quite a few stormy days and nights throughout the summer.

One lovely and, thankfully, calm night I got up to use the washroom. When I flushed the toilet, the water flashed bright enough for me to “read my lover’s letters.” I flushed again and again and finally woke George with the noise. He told me that it was phosphorescence—a natural light emitted by micro-organisms in the ocean water. He said that you can sometimes see from far above that there is a trail of phosphorescence for twenty miles behind a large ship travelling at night. So now every time I flush the toilet I’m bringing light-emitting organisms into my bedroom? I felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone.

I was cooking and cleaning for eighteen guests plus George, myself and the owners, John and Norma. It was an endless job from 6 AM until 10 PM. Cutting, chopping, baking, roasting, washing dishes, serving, making beds, cleaning bathrooms, laundry, more cutting, chopping, serving, washing dishes, day after day after day after day. There was about an hour in the middle of each afternoon that I had to myself when I could catch my breath and, most of the time, as long as there wasn’t a westerly blowing, I would just drop on my bed and sleep. I felt like a zombie when I first headed into the kitchen in the morning. I never got enough sleep and relied heavily on the first pot of coffee to get me going and I still felt like a half-dead carcass when I finally left the kitchen late at night.

One morning before the guests had started to come in off the water for breakfast, I was standing in the quiet kitchen washing a bowl in the sink. There was a door behind me and a counter with a coffee thermos where people would come to fill their coffee cups. I had a sudden feeling of warmth slide along my leg and had a moment of panic thinking someone had come up behind me and put his hand up my pant leg! I looked behind me and no one was there. Then I felt my leg and there was a bump in my jeans. The bump turned out to be a pair of my underwear that I had missed when I dressed in a stupor in the dark before coming in to make breakfast. They had been stuck up my pant leg and had finally made their way, warmly down the inside of my jeans. I looked around to make sure that no one was watching as I snatched them up and stuffed them into my pocket.

Later that day I sat on the steps of our cabin sewing a button back onto my shirt. The afternoon was full of sunshine and light and as I reached for the spool of thread my hand knocked it off the edge of the step. No problem, right?! I watched as it rolled across the plank. I watched as it kept rolling and suddenly dropped overboard off the side of the float. I leaped up to rescue it as it floated off and was about to disappear under the next float. This was going to take some getting used to!

Before working at this lodge, the only cooking I had ever done was for George and myself at the lighthouse and fluffy egg and tomato sandwiches as a kid before that. I was stretched beyond my comfort zone, but being the only one available I just had to keep going. Whether or not I had any skill, I had acquired the necessary confidence from watching my mom. Everything she made was delicious and she never seemed bothered by the mechanics of cooking—except on goldeye night. With five kids in the family and half the neighbourhood kids wanting to eat at our house, Mom was a wreck by the time we all had “boneless” portions of iconic smoked Winnipeg goldeye. Getting the bones out of those fish in order to safely feed half the neighbourhood children was a loathsome job.

One lovely cloudless afternoon near the end of the summer, when there was a bit of a lull and not very many guests, I put on a life jacket and took a little skiff for a ride. George had shown me how to run a boat and this was the first time that I was trying it on my own. The floats were tied up only a few hundred yards from the mouth of the Chuckwalla River, so I headed across the tidal flats dodging half-sunken logs and continued a couple miles up the river. The river valley was about one mile wide and surrounded by mountains, which by September no longer had snow on them. There were soft sandy beaches in many places and lots of logs jammed into the sand. The water was very clear and I could see the clean sandy bottom and lots of salmon as they darted away from my boat. I couldn’t get very far up the river because it suddenly became very shallow and I didn’t want to hit the bottom with the leg of the motor and get stuck so far away from everyone. I put the engine in neutral and drifted back down the river, listening to the birdies chirping and lots of rustlings in the bushes that I couldn’t identify. I felt brave and refreshed by the time I headed back to the lodge. All of a sudden I understood why George loved being out in a boat so much.

In the meantime, George had been working longer days. I was only half joking when I said that he would have to show his identification before I let him into our cabin at night. He spent a lot of time cleaning boats and fish, but he spent even more time out in the boat guiding guests into catching fish. A part of his job was to take guests on sightseeing trips. He would run three or four people up the inlet pointing out interesting local sights, like where there used to be canneries or where there was once a hospital years ago when the inlet had thousands of summer residents, all working in the commercial fishing industry either catching or canning salmon. There was even an old jail site to point out. The metal bars were still clearly visible where they had sunk when the float the jail was on broke apart in a storm. Sometimes he would take the guests up the river in a flat-bottomed, jet-powered riverboat to see the beautiful valley. He spent a lot of time with guests out on the water and the country just grew into his soul. My soul was still deeply seated in the Prairies, but I loved our experiences, the incredible wild country and the man. Before the summer was over, he was talking about staying in the inlet for the winter on our own.

Late in September when the last of the fishing guests were long gone, the floats were tied together and towed back to Finn Bay. George and John Buck had been fishing first thing in the morning before John Salo and his tugboat arrived, so I spent a lot of time cleaning the beautiful bright coho while the floats were being towed. Of course the fellows needed a nap after their early morning fishing! It was silly of me to expect help. The discordance of living in this man’s country where the men, George, had so much fun, and the women, me, had the cleaning and cooking to do, was really getting to me now. It was perhaps the last time I cleaned a salmon. The tow was long and slow, taking about seven hours to finally arrive in Finn Bay. We stayed in the little cabin while the owners went to town and we were able to catch our breath and visit some of the people who were living at the mouth of the inlet. One day while we were picking up mail at Dawsons Landing we met Jack Rendle, a friendly, toothless old commercial fisherman who had a small house on a float that he wasn’t using. He agreed to let us rent it for the winter. At that time, it was tied up in Sunshine Bay, on the west side of Ripon Island, about four miles from Finn Bay and about one hundred feet from John’s own collection of floats. We would move our belongings again sometime in the next couple of months, after we were finished working for the lodge.