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 the snow stopped falling we could see the 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
