Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon. Pat Ardley

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.

      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