Our lighthouse living room with George’s handiwork with two-by-fours. There were amazing views from the front window. We spent many hours lounging here with one of us reading aloud through The Complete Sherlock Holmes and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
During my late-night shift one night when I was the only one in charge of the safety of boats and ships travelling in front of our lighthouse along BC’s Inside Passage, I heard a thump on the side of our house. Then another, and another. At first, I thought it might be Ray and Ruth’s son, John, who lived in Rivers Inlet and worked as a logger and log salvager and sometimes came to visit his parents. John had a bushy beard and wild hair, and his everyday uniform consisted of heavy wool pants, a grey Stanfield’s shirt and suspenders—and he seemed to be joined at the hip to his tugboat. He was often visiting his family here, and now I thought he might be playing another trick on me. Something he and Lorna loved to do. The thumps continued while I crept from room to room trying to see out the windows. It got spookier and more disturbing as I went. Were there a whole bunch of people attacking our house from all sides? But why? I knew I would already have been seen by what sounded like a huge mob because anyone could easily see in the windows at night since the rooms of our house were always lit up like a used-car lot. I couldn’t see out, but while standing at the kitchen window, there was another thwack! right into the window, inches from my face. It looked like a bird. It was a bird—and birds! Hundreds! Thousands! I was in the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The thudding on the walls woke George and, curious to find out what was going on, he joined me at the kitchen window.
He was intrigued and wanted to get a closer look. I put on a big sou’wester and, holding my hands in front of my face, followed very closely behind George out the door onto the deck where we could see swarms of birds kamikaze-flying into the house and lighthouse tower. Short of turning off the navigation light, there was nothing we could do to stop the deadly deluge.
In the morning, Ray told us that they were rhinoceros auklets. They nest in burrows along the coast and often feed at night to stay safe from predators. They were being blinded by the lights, especially the huge spotlight that could be seen for miles. Ray said that this strange behaviour happened every few years. Such a sad waste. Some managed to escape with only a bump, but we collected hundreds of little bird bodies in the morning and gave them a burial at sea.
One day, the helicopter arrived with our mail a week before the supply ship was scheduled to be there, which was such a nice surprise. But then when the supply ship did arrive, it was so anticlimactic, since it brought no mail. So disappointing—we lived for the mail service. I began to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this kind of wilderness of the spirit. Then John arrived with a load of mail for us that had been sitting for two weeks in the post office at Dawsons Landing, our alternate mailing address. The general store at Dawsons Landing has the closest post office and is about six miles south of Addenbroke and eight miles up a side channel of Rivers Inlet called Darby Channel. We didn’t realize that it would be so hard for us to get to the store, quite impossible really, since we didn’t own a boat. We would have to see if we could borrow Ray’s boat once we knew the area a little better.
There were cards and letters and a parcel from George’s sister Gery. She had mailed us a bottle of wine! Unfortunately, she didn’t want to get into trouble with the feds at the post office if the bottle gurgled en route, giving away its true identity, so she opened the bottle, topped it up with water and re-corked it, then covered the top with wax to seal it! It was not the best glass of wine, but even watered down it was better than no wine, which is the usual sad state of affairs when one is so far from civilization!
We had been there for almost three months and, in spite of the warm weather, we had yet to receive a fridge.
Exploring the Wilderness
George liked to get away from “it all.” One day we headed out hiking and I found that it was more like slogging once you were about six feet into the bush. There was a lot of heavy coastal underbrush, mostly salal, amongst the towering spruce and cedar trees. Huge trees had fallen over the years and were hard to climb over or under. Occasionally we had to scramble straight down ravines and then straight up on the other side, clutching at little clumps of roots, young bushes or sometimes prickly young spruce trees to steady ourselves. We then came to an area that was impassable. We couldn’t go up or down or over or under and had to turn and claw our way back to the water. We were sort of swimming across the top of the thick salal, our bodies far above the actual ground. I had been so hoping for an easier route back to our house and its lovely expanse of wide-open green front lawn. We finally “swam” our way out toward the edge of the island, which at this point was a rock face, straight down to the water with a thin ledge about sixteen feet above the rocky beach. Waves were crashing and swirling on the rocks far below.
George could see how nervous I was, and said, “Trust your boots. They have a good solid sole and will keep you safe.”
I stared down at the thin strip of rock cliff that was little more than half an inch in width. I was supposed to walk back, along this? I would have preferred a skyhook to lift me out of there. I put my foot on the ledge and without letting go of the branch in my hand, I tested my boot by bouncing slightly and could feel that it wouldn’t slip off the narrow ledge. I reached over and found another handhold and brought my other foot onto the ledge. This was going to take a while. I carefully reached again and pulled myself over, one boot and one hand at a time. After I had taken six steps across the sheer face, I came to a vertical crack, a fissure in the rock. It was about three feet deep and narrowed as it went in. Peering into the darkness, I could see a little brown bottle stuck near the back of the opening.
I called George to come back and see what I had found. He worked his way back along the ledge to where he could peer in and see the little bottle. It was in as far as he could reach and he tried to pull it out but it was stuck fast. He carefully inched his fingers into his pocket and slowly pulled out a small knife, then he chipped away at the rock around the bottle. After a few minutes he was able to free the bottle from the crack and gently slid it into his jacket. My mind jumped to the stormy wave that must have carried the little bottle and inserted it into the gap without shattering it on the rocks. Ooops! I had forgotten for a moment that I was still perched sixteen feet above the waves crashing over the rocks below.
Just past the ledge we came to a wider shelf where we stopped and lit a fire with our usual allotment of one match. George had a competitive streak—that I had witnessed before on the badminton court, baseball field and at the bridge table—which meant we always had to light the fire with only one match. We each wore a small backpack on our treks, with a small jar to keep matches dry, water bottles and a snack. On this trip, George carried the hot dogs and I carried a small pouch of flour. George cut branches to spear the hot dogs on and I mixed flour and water to make bannock wrapped around a fat stick. After cooking the bannock, you pulled it off and stuffed the cooked hot dog in. I crushed a few thimbleberries that I picked from the bushes surrounding our ledge and spread the delicious jam on the extra bannock.
I would have loved a refreshing nap but we persevered, tramping through the woods for another two hours before we eventually saw the red roof of one of the houses. Strangely we had gotten lost on this little island. My sense of direction was born of the Prairies, where, in the wide-open spaces, I always knew which direction I was headed because I could always see, or at least feel, where the sun was. Down in the darkness of the forest surrounded by two-hundred-foot cedar trees, I barely had a feeling of where the sun was supposed to be. And George hadn’t brought his trusty compass with him. I was worn to a frazzle. I felt like the cat on the Pepé Le Pew cartoons to George’s Pepé Le Pew.
Ray let us use his speedboat to explore around the island. Addenbroke Island is at the entrance to Fish Egg Inlet. This inlet had not yet been surveyed so it was exciting to poke into all the little bays and channels, feeling like we were the first ones there since Captain Vancouver’s
