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 of a fishing resort who wintered in Finn Bay after the sport-fishing season was over. Everyone finished their shopping and we were all leaving about the same time. While we had been standing around talking, the sky had darkened and by the time we walked out the door, snowflakes had begun to fall. Ken asked if we would like a tow as far as Finn Bay and we gladly accepted. They were in a thirty-foot cruiser with a nice warm wheelhouse and cabin. George sat up front talking to the resort owner, and I sat below at the table having tea with Ken—the first of many cups of tea shared with him over the years. When we were almost at Finn Bay, George leaned through the small door and yelled to me over the engine noise, “Do you want to cook for eighteen people at John’s fishing resort this summer while I manage it?” I shrugged and shouted back up to him, “Sure!”
PART TWO
Rivers Lodge
Working at a Fishing Resort
Two months later we left the lighthouse. We had been there for almost a year and a half. We had been perfectly happy there, but when a chance encounter with the resort owner turned into a job offer, we both were excited to try something new.
It was 1974 and we listened to ABBA and the Beach Boys as we packed our few belongings into boxes and loaded them into the tractor wagon for the ride down to the wharf. John Salo and his tugboat, the Robert G II, were anchored in the bay, and George and Ray used the hoist and a net to lower our things down to him. The most important piece of furniture that we had to take was our bed that George had so patiently and lovingly carved. There were also the two very heavy coffee tables, wooden planters and various jars of jellies, jams, pickles and canned clams and salmon. Also important was our record player, with quite a few records, that had been a godsend for me on crushingly quiet winter evenings.
We pulled the netting off our makeshift chicken coop and let the banty chickens run free. They were very adaptable and would be hiding their eggs in the woods again shortly. We left the chicken house for future junior keepers. I had scrubbed our temporary home from top to bottom and now walked through the rooms feeling just a little sad to be leaving. We had had such a wonderful time here and I didn’t quite know what we were heading into. But I was sure it would be more exciting exploits. I stood looking out the big picture window in the living room and memorized the vista: the always interesting and changing ocean as it rolled and roiled up the channel. The mountains rising three thousand feet on Calvert Island to the highest point on Mount Buxton, the lush shades of green of its tree-covered flanks and the contrasting starkness of the treeless craggy rocks at the very top. I had no premonition that one very sad day I would land in a helicopter on the very peak of that mountain to fulfill an important wish for George.
I finally turned to go, and bumped into Lorna, who was also unhappy to see us leave. She loved to have someone to play tricks on and would miss listening in on our story time. We walked over to the senior keeper’s house to say goodbye to Ruth, who was just sending the 11 AM weather report. She came into the kitchen and wrapped a bundle of cake for us to enjoy on the trip to Finn Bay. In the Robert G II, the trip would be a little over an hour. We had hugs all around on the porch and headed down to the wharf. John was waiting on his boat, which was gently swaying on the swell. They had everything already tucked safely on the boat, so we headed down to the shore where John could pick us up in his skiff. We climbed aboard the tugboat and with a forlorn wave headed out of the bay and on to our next excellent adventure.
The resort in Finn Bay was called North West Safaris and was built on log floats like the Dawsons Landing store, only on a much smaller scale, and was safely tied to shore in a corner of the bay just off Darby Channel in Rivers Inlet. The entrance to Finn Bay was about 150 feet wide, and the bay itself was a half-mile long by about five hundred feet wide in places and was surrounded by low tree-covered hills. The resort was there for the winter because the spot they tie to in the summer was too rough on the floats in the winter winds. John dropped us and our belongings off on the floats and headed out of the bay, leaving us in the stillness of the beautiful late-spring day. The lodge owner had a little cabin that we would stay in for the summer, so we carried our things in and piled them in the corner. The cabin was one room with a clothes rod along one wall, and a saltwater marine toilet and sink in a cubby hole in the corner. You pumped sea water in to flush the toilet but the sink wasn’t hooked up to fresh water yet. Very simple accommodations compared to our comfortable house back at Addenbroke—and it definitely didn’t have anything comparable to that incredible picture window. But I was excited and anxious to get started.
We had arranged to leave for a holiday in Vancouver before the fishing season started, and our flight was arriving shortly to pick us up. All commercial flights into the inlet landed on the water, so they either had long metal floats underneath the body like on a Cessna or Beaver, or they landed on their belly
