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Small Boat, Deep Water

I decided that I needed to overcome my fear of being in boats on the ocean. I wouldn’t last very long in Rivers Inlet if I couldn’t comfortably travel around in them. We were surrounded by islands, and if you did go to shore, you didn’t exactly walk around as much as slog, slip and scrabble through the underbrush, and over or under fallen logs and up and down ravines. There are no roads in Rivers Inlet. If you want to get from one place to another, you have to go there by boat. Most people lived miles apart and on separate islands. I use the term “most people” loosely since there were fewer than fifteen people living at the mouth of the inlet at that time.

Growing up on the Prairies I loved nothing more than to walk for hours out of town into the dry, dusty, flat fields. You could see all around you and miles away to where the horizon is swallowed up into the sky. I felt that I could see forever when I stared out the window of my elementary school class. From my desk, I could see one little copse of trees on the otherwise bald prairie and once watched a deer dive into the bush to hide in the only cover for miles in any direction.

I have a long stride. George always hurried to keep up when we walked together on a city street because his stride was short and uneven from his years of scrabbling through the coastal bush, and I had trouble keeping up with him when we headed onto shore and up into the woods.

I’m a Pisces, but having the sign of the fish doesn’t help me here. I learned from my first big boat trip that the ocean is something to be feared and now I had to try to unlearn this. I wanted to be able to help George rebuild and refinish the OM, but unless I could get a better feeling about being in boats, I would not be able to bring myself to work on it.

One afternoon while George was working under the frame covering the OM, I took our small skiff out for a ride. I slowly motored out of Sunshine Bay and picked up speed as I entered the large protected area called Klaquaek Channel. Klaquaek is surrounded by many low, tree-covered islands, and some people say it reminds them of the Lake of the Woods in Ontario. It was a beautiful sunny day with no wind to create even the slightest ripple on the water. When I was in the middle of the channel, I stopped the boat and drifted for a while. Then I shut the engine off and drifted along in the sudden peace. This would prove to be a big mistake!

There was absolute silence as the boat gently floated along with the tidal current. I sat up straight on the seat in front of the motor with my hand on the tiller bar. I knew the water was very deep here—between 450 and 550 feet at its deepest. And the water was very dark and I was all alone and far from shore. My heart was pounding and I started gasping for breath. I grabbed at the pull cord to start the engine. I had to stand up to get enough momentum to pull hard enough and yanked the cord three times, four times, five times and it still wouldn’t start. The darkness seemed to envelop the boat and I could feel it rising up to surround me. I braced my foot against the wooden seat and pulled with all my might. The engine kicked in and I dropped quickly onto the seat, threw the gearshift into forward, thankful that I hadn’t left the engine in gear or I would have been catapulted overboard while the boat took off on its own. I zoomed back into Sunshine Bay as fast as the boat would go, and not wanting to slow down I almost ran the boat up onto the float. I hadn’t even slowed down to let Bob, our neighbour with the automatic rifle, see who I was. I staggered into the house and threw myself onto the bed. I hadn’t quite cured my fear of water and possibly I had added fuel to the fire.

After that, every once in a while, I would have another panic attack, which is what I decided I had that day out in the boat. It’s funny how your mind can play tricks on you. They would come out of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of the night, or sometimes just before we were supposed to go out in the boat. George took his boating comfort for granted and thought that I was just being irrational. He had spent so much time in boats that he thought everyone should love them. “What could possibly be so scary about being in a boat?” he asked. Maybe nothing, but at times I thought my heart was going to jump right out of my skin. I wrote a letter to my doctor in Vancouver describing what was happening to me. He prescribed pills that would settle me down. I thought there must be a better way.

The beginnings of our lodge, 1976. The building with floor to ceiling corner windows is on a float that was built in 1938. This building became our house/lodge. The building/float to the right of centre originally had one room, a breezeway and a workshop full of fishing and logging gear. The Om is on a float to the right of the guesthouse.

I read about “behaviour modification” techniques. It was not unlike meditating your way through your greatest fears. I started practising the technique—deep-breathing while focusing on something completely outside of what is happening—and was able to rein in some of the worst attacks that I had that didn’t even seem to have anything to do with water. It was a good place to start.