Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon. Pat Ardley

mountainsides on Calvert Island well defined by the blanket of snow, and the world seemed to be only soft shades of grey and white. Even the calm ocean was monochromatic grey as the dense snow mixed with the frigid water on the surface.

      John stopped by, towing a firewood log for his parents’ furnace. He tied it onto the beach under the wharf. He salvaged logs for a living, but this one had some rot in the end and he thought it would be rotten all the way through, therefore not good for a building or a float. John left, and the fellows started cutting the log into rounds. As they went, the wood became stronger and better. There was not one knot or bit of rot in the rest of the log! It was forty feet long and a good three feet thick at the butt end. Ray and George used the crane to lift the heavy blocks onto the wharf. Once they started chopping into the log there was no stopping them. Lorna and I stacked load after load of wood into the tractor wagon and drove it up to the house, then stacked the wood again in their basement. George liked to say, “Our firewood warms us twice. This time when we chop and stack it and again when the Salo family heats their house with it.” Over the next week we chopped and stacked our way through the entire log. John felt sick when he heard that the whole log was not rotten and they had cut it up for firewood anyway. Apparently it could have been worth a lot of money. It was a great fir log though, and fir makes some of the best and hottest fires. Ray’s family was warm the rest of that winter and most of the next, while our house stayed cozy all winter with the oil furnace in the basement.

      One nasty dark and windy night I caught a glimpse of a twenty-foot sailboat as the beam of light swooped past. It was bouncing and dipping in the waves in front of our house and then rearing up on the next swell. I put a jacket on and went out to the edge of our deck. The wind was howling so I couldn’t hear what the people on the boat were yelling. One of them grabbed a jacket and started waving it in the air. In a pinch, this is an international distress signal. I ran and woke George to come and signal that we would help. George yelled for me to grab his rain gear and ran out the door. I grabbed his jacket and boots and raced behind him. He was already lowering the skiff with the winch when I got to the wharf. It was bitter cold, and I was frozen with the fear of him going out into the storm in that ridiculously inadequate tin boat. He grabbed life jackets and climbed down the steps then pulled the boat onto the beach, stepped into it and pushed away from shore.

      I was afraid to watch and afraid not to. I ran back to our house and stood on the deck so I could warily follow the rescue. After many minutes of slowly pounding through the waves, with water sloshing over the sides, and wind tearing at his clothes, George pulled up close to the sailboat and threw a rope to the fellow who was on his knees in the back of the boat. It took a few tries but the guy finally snatched the rope with a long gaff and secured it to the back of the sailboat. Once the two boats were tied together, the fellow hauled in more line and was awkwardly able to tie the rope to the front of the sailboat to make it safer for towing. Meanwhile, George had made sure that the rope was secured to the stern of the skiff, and he let out a lot more rope before he cautiously turned back toward the bay and very slowly towed the sailboat through the storm to safety.

      The couple on board were so thankful. They thought they were going to end up washing out to sea but then they realized that their boat was being pushed closer and closer to the lighthouse. Their engine had stopped working and they couldn’t put sails up in the stormy wind and high seas. That’s the funny thing about sailboats: they almost always passed us using an engine and rarely did we see one go by with the sails up. We found out that they had no flares, or charts, or life jackets, or life rings, or extra rope or radiophone—and apparently no sense whatsoever to head out onto the ocean so ill-prepared. They stayed with us that night, and in the morning Ray and George and the fellow tinkered with their engine and got it working again. We gave them flares, some rope and life jackets and showed them how to get to Dawsons Landing where they could pick up more necessary supplies. They were so lucky that I just happened to look out the window when I did. Just a few minutes later and they would have been around the point and out of sight and no doubt crashing onto the rocks.

      After the storm passed and the swell settled down, we used Ray’s boat to visit a couple that were caretaking the BC Tel relay station on Calvert Island, Andy and Nell Olsen. I was always perched at the very front of the boat, so when we travelled through rough water I took a terrible pounding up my spine from the hard wooden bench. For weeks after each trip across to Calvert my back felt like someone had strapped hot coals under my shirt. But I had no knowledge of how to run a boat through waves and swells, so my spot was always up at the front, taking ten times the pounding of the happy driver who sat at the back holding onto the motor’s tiller arm. It was the price I paid for our excellent adventures.

      There was a huge tidal flat in front of the Olsens’ house so we tied the boat to the dock on the other side of the peninsula and walked about a mile and a half to their place on a little-used but very rutted road. All along the road there were signs of wolf—tracks and poop. As we approached the Olsens’ house, we could see a young wolf sitting about twenty feet from their kitchen window. Andy had intended to shoot any wolves he saw come around because they kill all the deer, but when this one showed up on his lawn, exhausted and starving, he didn’t have the heart to. So he fed it that day, and the day after, and it stuck around ever since. As we got closer, the wolf loped off to the edge of the lawn with its tail streaming out behind it, then turned and stared at us with huge yellow eyes.

      I had seen more wildlife in the year since I arrived at Addenbroke than I had seen in the rest of my life. Every day was an opportunity for new and often unexpected encounters with forest animals, whales and dolphins, as well as the tiny sea creatures that I was finding as I scrabbled along the rocky shores. The love that George and I felt for each other grew along with our sense of adventure and our growing sense that we really belonged in this wild country.

      In the middle of March of 1974 we wanted to get some mail out, but the supply ship would not be in for another two weeks. Ray told us we could take his boat to Dawsons Landing. The day looked clear and the weather forecast was good, but I bundled up in my warmest Prairie winter clothes and we headed off early in the day to make the trip to the store. Dawsons Landing consists of an assortment of buildings tied to shore in a sheltered bay just off the main channel of Rivers Inlet. The general store is built on a huge log raft locally called a float, and the building sits about three feet above the water. On another float is a gas station with the fuel tanks secured on the hillside behind it and great long hoses draped down the hill and across the water to the dock. There were other floats for the storekeeper’s house, generators and storage sheds. The whole place was floating.

      We handed in our mail to Lucky, the storekeeper, and turned to see all the wonderful goods for sale. The store carried everything that would be needed in town: clothes, shoes, rain gear, tinned food, books, housewares, tools, boat parts, plumbing parts and fishing gear. And if you timed it right and arrived just after the freight boat had been, there would also be some “almost fresh” produce. They also had the only post office for over fifty miles in any direction. The only thing missing was that in those days, there was no liquor for sale anywhere in the Rivers Inlet area or, as with the post office, for over fifty miles in any direction! The store was a little quiet in March but extremely busy in the summer fishing months with the hundreds of commercial fishermen living for weeks at a time on their fishboats. In the middle of the sockeye season, there could be a thousand commercial boats in the area.

      A fishboat drifted in to the dock then a couple climbed off, tied up and came into the store. I could hear them talking with familiarity to Lucky and I heard an English accent. A happy, rosy-cheeked face was smiling and stepping quickly toward me. Right behind her ambled a jovial-looking fellow with a blond curly mop holding fast to a pair of reading glasses. We walked to the front of the store and introduced ourselves and said that we had just come down from Addenbroke Lighthouse. They introduced themselves as Sheila and Richard Cooper, then Sheila turned to me and blurted out, “Are you the kelp-pickle lady?” I had to laugh. I was known for making kelp pickles? How would people have heard about them? Sheila turned red with embarrassment, but I insisted it hadn’t been an insult. We were all having a good chuckle when a couple of fellows came in to the store.

      We were introduced to Ken Moore, a commercial fisherman who lived full-time in Finn Bay near the mouth of Darby Channel, and the other fellow, John Buck, the owner