Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon. Pat Ardley

shy. It wasn’t long before Ed brought out his homemade salal-berry wine. We sipped politely for a little while before he plunked a bottle down beside each person and that was the end of polite. The salal berry doesn’t taste very good just picked off the bush, but it can be turned into a great wine. Or so we thought at the time. Why, that wine was some of the best that I have ever had the pleasure of drinking! George managed to keep his wits about him just enough, and asked Ed to call the Coast Guard to pass along a message to Ray at Addenbroke that we wouldn’t be returning that day but would come back in the morning. Ed convinced George that he shouldn’t worry, that Ray or Ruth could cover his middle-of-the-night watch. I convinced George that we sure as hell couldn’t drive back to Addenbroke after we had been drinking all afternoon. It was all Ed’s fault!

      We did manage to get out of bed in the morning and made our way back to the wharf. Ed lowered our boat into the water and we sadly hugged our new best friends goodbye then scrambled down the rocks to climb into the boat. The trip back to Addenbroke was much longer and more uncomfortable than the day before because there was a bit of a chop on the water that slowed us down, and our heads were still feeling the effects of all that wine.

      As we got closer to Addenbroke we were suddenly travelling with a pod of huge orcas. There must have been twenty of them and I think they just happened to be going in the same direction as we were. I was startled at first then scared half to death. We all seemed to be travelling at the same speed. They kept surfacing and blowing great puffs of smelly, fishy mist and because we couldn’t speed up in our tiny boat, we couldn’t get away from them. I kept watching off the front of the boat in case one came up and we ran into it. I had no plan—I just wanted to be the first one to know if I was going to die.

      The whales travelled with us for several miles and then they just seemed to melt into the ocean and disappear. When they didn’t reappear anywhere that I could see, I started to breathe a little easier and unglued my eyes from the front of the boat. I turned to George, and he called out over the engine, “Wasn’t that amazing, wasn’t that fantastic?!”

      Oh yes, it was amazing to me, but deep in my heart I am a Prairie girl. About this time I was thinking a farm in Saskatchewan might be a nice place to be.

      We had been back on the island for a few days when I decided to use some of the salal berries that were ripening everywhere and turn them into jelly. They taste awful and they had a funny texture but when you added a whole lot of sugar, and strained the lumps out, the flavour was like an intensely delicious blackberry sauce. Unfortunately, I was a little late picking the fruit and little white worms had gotten into the berries. As I boiled the berry and sugar mixture, a worm-filled foam formed on the top as worms floated up to the surface. I stood bent over the pot for what felt like hours, skimming the top and picking out worms. I had to stop occasionally when the salal fumes steamed up into my face and I started gagging with the memory of drinking too much salal-berry wine. Maybe the worms added to the flavour, because the salal-berry jelly that I made at Addenbroke was so good it could have won awards.

      We were due to have six weeks’ holiday after being at the lighthouse almost nine months. It worked out that we would be in Vancouver through the Christmas season. I had missed being with my family the previous Christmas and couldn’t possibly miss another one. We flew off the island on the Coast Guard helicopter. What a thrill as it lifted straight up off the helicopter pad. I was surprised to see from the air that the island was completely green. Other than the few buildings on the west side, the island was lush forest. No clearings, no streams, no meadows, no wide-open valleys. No wonder we got lost! We went to Vancouver and visited our friends before I flew to Winnipeg and George went to Lake Cowichan to spend the rest of the Christmas holidays with our respective families. One afternoon in Winnipeg before New Year’s, there was a knock on my sister Marcia’s door. There was George with a big grin on his face!

      We had a great big reunion hug. We missed each other so much after living together where we were practically joined at the hip, day after day, morning, noon and night for nine whole months. I made a pot of coffee and we sat in the living room telling each other everything that had happened in the last week and a half. I couldn’t believe how much I had missed him. I had trouble taking my eyes off him when he tried to show me something. I finally saw that he was holding a ring in his hand and was trying to give it to me. He asked me to marry him, and I said, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

      Lighthouse Keepers Sometimes Save Lives

      We headed back to the lighthouse at the end of our holiday. George liked to say, “We had six weeks of holiday after nine months of holiday.” We got right back into the daily routine of more holiday. Since it was now mid-winter, there was no garden work for me so I spent a lot of time reading about gardening, and knitting and cooking. I looked after the chickens and wrote a lot of letters documenting our life. I didn’t get bored with the routine, there always seemed to be something interesting to read, learn about or do. I became fascinated with food and studied all the cookbooks that I could get my hands on. George was my very willing guinea pig and was happy to try anything that I put in front of him. There were a few hits: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, carrot cake, Manhattan clam chowder. There were also a few misses, like canned-salmon soufflé. “I feel like all I’m eating is air,” George said, which of course was the whole point! I’ve already mentioned the awful fried herring, and I won’t go into what he said about the stuffed and baked green peppers, but he would hold on to a long-lingering hatred of green peppers after that.

      Another miss, for some reason, was that my bread would not rise. For the most part, I did what the books said. I mixed the ingredients well, I kneaded the dough for as long as they told me to, I left it for ages hoping it might rise more on the counter before putting it in the oven. I even thought, maybe it will rise after I put it in the oven. Once I put the loaves into the oven, though, what few bubbles there were would flatten and not rise again. George started calling them “bricks of bread” instead of loaves. Many years hence, after having made thousands of beautiful high loaves with perfectly proportioned air pockets, I now know part of the problem was that I was trying to make super-healthy bread and it was simply too heavy. All those great ingredients like whole-wheat flour, oatmeal, bran and wheat germ cut through the air pockets made by the rising yeast and elastic gluten. You really can’t substitute all of those ingredients instead of white flour and expect to produce a nice high fluffy loaf. And I no doubt heated the liquid too hot and mostly killed the yeast. I might as well have been making porridge. But hard and flat or not, it was healthy. And with butter slathered on and homemade jam heaped all over it, my bricks of bread were a real pleasure.

      While we had been off the island for our holidays, mechanics came to the lighthouse and hooked up the new foghorn. They didn’t hook up the automation equipment that would turn the foghorn on, but it was now set up for us to push just one button to manually turn the fog siren on. They had pointlessly replaced the lovely low rumble of the old horn with a new high-pitched, screechy, dentist-drill-shrill siren that would jangle my nerves every time it was foggy. Every twenty-five seconds for a full five-second blast. Making it almost impossible to fall asleep. On a foggy night I would find myself levitating off the bed for five seconds every twenty-five seconds, until it was either not foggy anymore or until morning had arrived to drag me out of bed.

      One chilly evening we looked out our big front window onto the most beautiful, sparkly, snowy night that had come to envelop our island. When it snowed, visibility for ships in the channel was almost non-­existent, so the loveliness of the evening was shattered by the shriek of the new foghorn. For five seconds … every twenty-five seconds. Great huge flakes were drifting down and glittering each time the light from the tower swept past. We watched as the snow built up and covered the walkway and how it left a huge white square on the helicopter pad. We showed Lorna how to make snow angels and covered the front lawns with them. Enough for an entire angelic choir!

      In the morning, Ray found their old-fashioned sled and we all piled on and went flying down the winding walkway to the wharf, doing about fifty miles an hour. Only on the last hairpin turn did we lose the top two people, who went skittering off in a hysterical pile of loose hats and mittens. After a childhood of sledding on the gentle Prairie landscape, this was the best sledding ride ever! Our shrieks of laughter were muted by the low-slung clouds and the thick covering of snow. After