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Wilderness Wedding

In the month before I left Winnipeg for the West Coast in 1972, I had been looking for a particular piece of music that I heard on a TV show. The music spoke to me, and I wanted it at my fingertips. In the credits of the show, the piece was called the same as the title of the program, Narcissus are Forever. I can’t recall details about the show other than that I loved the music and that Canadian actress Margot Kidder starred in it. I had asked for the song in many record stores since then but received many blank looks and no luck. I was surprised one night at a dance at the Winnipeg Cabaret, when the piano player of a local band started noodling on the piano during their break and he played my piece! I worked my way over to him on the stage and asked what he was playing. “Étude in E, Opus 10 No. 3 by Chopin,” he said.

Now that I knew the true title, I looked in music stores in Winnipeg expecting to have no trouble finding it on an 8-track tape. But no luck. Shortly after, I crammed my meagre belongings into my car and drove west. On the way, I picked up a friend in Regina who also wanted to escape to Vancouver. I had an 8-track player in my car and we sang along at the top of our lungs to my tapes on repeat all the way across the Prairies. We decided to pick up another Cat Stevens tape to fill out our repertoire. We checked a few stores in Saskatoon, then Edmonton, Kamloops and anywhere else we stopped and picked up more music to sing along with, but I couldn’t find my favourite Chopin. We listened to Cat Stevens all the way to the coast. Once we left the flat Prairies and the gentle rolling foothills of the Rockies behind, my friend and I chain smoked as a way to cope with the fear of driving off a cliff, and she covered her eyes through some of the most beautiful scenery on earth.

And now, two years later, I flew with George sixty miles north of Rivers Inlet to Ocean Falls where we could pick up a marriage licence. The little town was virtually closed. The mill that created the once-thriving community had shut down and the co-op store was barely surviving with a bit of tourist boating traffic in the summer and a few local people in the winter. I flipped through a cardboard box of records in the store, though I didn’t expect much but I always checked anyway, just in case. And there it was! Chopin’s Étude in E, one of the most romantic pieces of music I have ever heard. We picked up our marriage certificate and the music we would play at our wedding, in the almost deserted town of Ocean Falls.

We were near the end of September, the fishing season was over and we were looking after the lodge until it was time to head to Vancouver with the lodge owner and a couple of boats. We were organizing a party to celebrate our wedding. There was a bit of a problem with the logistics though because we didn’t have a firm date for when the Thomas Crosby V would be in Rivers Inlet with the minister on board who would marry us. Like most traffic on the coast, they had an unpredictable ETA. Our guests would be coming from miles around and sometimes it was difficult to get a message to people that lived far away. There was no reliable phone service in the inlet and we were trying to contact people who lived outside of local VHF radiophone range. We finally decided on a date that was around a time we figured the Thomas Crosby V should be in the general area and that’s what we told people. “Come for a party to celebrate our marriage, and we may be married or not, depending on whether the minister can get here before the party.” We were going to be the first non–First Nations couple in twenty-six years to be married in Rivers Inlet.

We planned the party for Friday, October 11, 1974, and let everyone know to be at our place on that date, minister or not. People started arriving in the afternoon in skiffs, speedboats, fishboats, tugboats and private planes. Everyone was bringing food and drinks and plenty of good cheer. About 6 PM, we had a call from friends at Dawsons Landing who said, “The Thomas Crosby V just pulled into the dock and the minister wants to know, should he come down now and marry you?” Well, there was so much bustle and banter and people were already drinking and eating and the music was blaring. We didn’t want to ruin a good party so we told them to tell the minister to come on down tomorrow. The party was grand, and there were so many people dancing and bouncing on the float that we actually made waves that rippled and flowed out across the bay.


Wedding day, 1974, with the Thomas Crosby V in the background. Humpback whales, orcas and chum salmon joined us for the ceremony.

We were still at the fishing resort so there was room for people to stay the night. Some people who lived close by left in the wee hours of the morning, some stayed on their boats and quite a few slept in the extra bedrooms. The next morning I made a big pancake breakfast for the fourteen people who had stayed overnight, and then everyone started heading home. Just in time, I suddenly realized that we needed witnesses for the ceremony, so we asked the last of our guests, the Broom family, to stay and be the wedding party.

The church boat finally arrived, and the minister, Bob Ferris, and his wife, Celia, joined us for tea and we went over the plans. Darcy Broom would be in charge of the music, Étude in E of course; Jack Broom would film the ceremony to show our families; and their daughter, Shannon, would be our flower girl with a bouquet of wildflowers picked from between the logs and around the floats.

Darcy started the music, and she and I walked outside to where the minister was standing with George. George was dressed in his jeans and brown corduroy sport jacket and looking a little nervous. I was wearing the full-length colourfully embroidered white cotton dress that I had bought on a very quick trip to Gastown in Vancouver. I was carrying a little white Bible and the pretty wildflower bouquet. Two humpback whales had just passed the floats in search of a good rocky shore to rub against and the bay was full of chum salmon. While the minister was conducting the ceremony, the background music changed to the constant plopping and splashing of fish leaping out of the water and belly-flopping back in.

The sun was shining and an hour later there was a rainbow over the Thomas Crosby V as it chugged out of the bay surrounded by orcas that were on their way into the bay for a feast of salmon. I had married my sweetheart. The honest, charming, principled, funny, hardworking love of my life. A lot of water would flow under our house before we were parted.

Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon

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