Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon Read online

  Addenbroke Island is about two miles square, with the houses on a cleared area on the Fitz Hugh Channel side with enough area in front of the houses for two lovely, though time-consuming lawns. Other than the gardens and walkway areas, the rest of the island was covered with a thick forest of huge cedars, yew, a few small shore pines, spruce and alder as well as dense salal undergrowth—but mostly cedar. The bay was only safe to anchor in if there was good weather, which was rare in winter, and there was no safe place to build a dock because of the constant crashing waves. Instead, a wharf was built far above the high-tide line. The wharf was about 150 yards from the houses. There was a small rowboat that belonged to the station and an even smaller skiff, with an ancient motor on it, that belonged to Ray. A hydraulic derrick on the wharf lifted the small boats in and out of the water when they were needed. Halfway between the house and the wharf was a fenced garden on one side of the walkway and a short path that led through the salal bushes to the helicopter pad on the other. When it was convenient for the Coast Guard, they sometimes arrived in a helicopter between the regular monthly boat deliveries and brought our mail. And if we were notified in advance of their delivery, which was seldom, they could bring a little extra fresh produce.

  Ray and George split the twenty-four-hour workday between the two of them with Ruth covering a few hours in the morning while I took a turn late in the evening to give George a chance to have a nap. During my late-night shift months later I heard a song dedicated to me on a Seattle radio station, the one channel that our radio could pick up. It made me feel like I was still connected to the outside world. The fact that I was the one who had submitted the song request to the station (by mail) meant little. Even if it was a dedication to myself, I heard my name on the radio!

  George worked from midnight until 4 AM and then 10 AM to 6 PM. Ray and George worked together in the afternoon on a variety of projects to keep the lighthouse looking good and functioning well. They made repairs wherever they were needed; they painted the white buildings and the red trim, cut the grass and maintained the machinery. They worked inside if it was raining and outside if it was dry. During the day I could always hear Ray talking while they worked. Ray had a wealth of knowledge about life on the coast. He was patient and helpful and always explained how something worked or how he wanted the job done. George soaked up the information like a sponge. Ray was like a little old elf, small but agile as he moved quickly and clamoured over rocks and up and down ladders with ease.

  Me with the Addenbroke Island light tower in the background. Having moved from the flat, open spaces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to the rugged wilderness of the West Coast, I was ready for adventure. I think I got more than I bargained for.

  Part of George’s job was to, once a day, radio the weather to the Coast Guard in Prince Rupert, including wind speed and wave and swell height. And at 6 PM he would take the Canadian flag down. The main duty for the middle-of-the-night shift was to keep an eye out for fog because the keepers had to go out to the generator room to manually start the foghorn if visibility went down to about two miles. The horn had a lovely deep-throated bellow that was easy to get used to. I could drift off to sleep feeling safely wrapped in the fog on solid ground while the sound of the horn washed over me.

  George and I spent a lot of time talking. There is nothing quite like being stuck on an almost-deserted island on the Pacific for couples to learn how to communicate with each other. Who needs couples therapy when you have endless hours in front of you with no one else to talk to but your partner? We talked about anything and everything. We talked through our arguments, we talked over our finances, we talked about the past and we talked about the future, always with me curled up in the cozy armchair and George sprawled on the couch so we could both watch the changing scenery through our awesome front window. There was nowhere to go, so we learned a lot about each other. I thought of the saying my mom would quote to us kids when we were having a tough time: “What doesn’t kill you outright, will only make you stronger.” We decided that rather than killing each other outright, we would make the most of our life together on the lighthouse. We only got stronger.

  Gardening, Chickens and Can You Really Eat This?

  I was bent over weeding when I heard a noise. I turned to see a doe leap straight up and over the seven-foot-high fence and land three feet from my bent back. I leaped out the open gate in startled panic. The high fence all around the planted area was ostensibly there to keep the deer out.

  I was learning how to garden. Ray and Ruth had a great vegetable and fruit garden that required constant care. Ruth was a kind and caring matronly woman who was generous with her knowledge. I helped with the work and learned a lot from them both. My only previous experience with gardening was with an oversized bag of English pea seeds that my big brother gave me when I was ten years old by way of an apology for dragging me around the house by my hair. I planted them in the semi-shade at the side of our house and enjoyed raiding my very own garden a few weeks later. I also picked lilacs in the back lane and sold bunches of them to unsuspecting people walking past our house. Though that might be considered more entrepreneurship than gardening.

  The underbrush from the surrounding forest on Addenbroke was relentlessly trying to take back the land. I was constantly pulling little salal plants out from where they had popped up after creeping underground five, ten and sometimes fifteen feet into the garden. I felt right at home—weeding, raking in nutrient-rich seaweed and compost or helping to tie up the beans and raspberry bushes. It didn’t matter what the job was, I dug in and enjoyed it all. Except for the slugs—great big banana slugs. So disgusting. They stampeded in from the forest. One night I walked out onto the back deck in bare feet and stepped right onto a huge squishy, slimy one. It popped under my foot and oozed between my toes. I let out a blood-curdling scream that brought George running, terrified that I was being electrocuted. He was relieved to see me hopping on one foot very much animated and alive. Ruth and I sharpened the ends of a few sticks and marched up and down the rows of vegetables poking the sticks through the slugs. We had to de-slug the garden every day. Every once in a while Ruth, Lorna and I walked around the extensive front lawns with our sticks. We each called out the number as we poked into them. “125,” “126,” “127”! When there were six or seven slugs on a stick we would fling the slugs over the cliff at the bottom of the lawn and into the ocean. One morning we poked over four hundred giant slugs onto our sticks.

  Ruth gave me broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and tomato seeds to plant in flats in the basement. There was lots of light downstairs since the generator ran all day 365 days a year and, because it was diesel, we needed to leave all the lights on for a more even load on the engine. (If we weren’t using enough electricity, the exhaust pipe would throw out thick black smoke and all the pipes and anything nearby would get gummed up with oily sludge.) The seeds sprouted quickly, and in a few weeks I planted the seedlings outside. My garden would provide an important part of our diet on the island since we couldn’t be sure that we would receive fresh produce more than once a month. This was serious business. There was not a little green grocer around the corner. I added peas, carrots, lettuce, spinach, radish and kale seeds to my next grocery order. I also sent for several gardening books from the library in Nanaimo. The long-distance library service was my new best friend. I studied the gardening books and several seed catalogues during my late-night shifts and acquired a lifelong love of working with plants.

  We had brought a dear little sheltie dog named Kobe with us. Friends of ours from Vancouver were going to be out of the country for a couple of years, and we said we would look after him. At first he tried to herd the chickens, but they didn’t react the way his dna told him they should. We told him not to chase them. Then he spied the seagulls flying overhead and became obsessed with getting them into an organized flock. He loved to chase after the seagulls right through a bunch of chickens, scattering them in all directions as the
y squawked and complained. What? I didn’t see them! There were a few deer that came down to eat the grass but he learned very quickly that he wasn’t allowed to chase them either. He often ran right past the deer as he was looking up at the seagulls, and the deer would then chase him for a few steps reaching to hit his back with their deadly front hooves. He did a great job of chasing the seagulls away from pooping on our roof and therefore our freshwater supply, but we had to keep him in the house part of the day because he couldn’t stop chasing after them, and they were everywhere and completely impossible to herd. He would crawl exhausted onto the porch, foaming at the mouth, but if a seagull flew overhead he would take off at full speed and once again try to take control.

  We built a makeshift chicken coop after Ray and Ruth gave us a dozen bantam chickens. They had been running free but they settled down quickly and were producing eggs within days of their move into a huge unfenced area behind the house that we covered with fishnet. The net draped over salal bushes and around cedar trees and over stumps and fallen logs. The chickens were comfortable and I’m sure they soon learned that they were much safer under the net. There were eagles and hawks in the area that often helped themselves to the chickens that were loose. Also, the free-range chickens tended to hide their eggs, and when you found them you had to put them in a bowl of water to see if they sank or not to check if they were fresh. You don’t eat the ones that float. But sometimes they kind of stood on end and I am here to tell you not to try opening an iffy egg.

  We composted everything until we got the chickens. Then we fed everything to the chickens and used their manure in the garden. Straight chicken manure is too strong to use right away. I had a lesson in manure-tea brewing from Ray and could safely use the brew to water and fertilize the plants, skimming the “tea” off the top and leaving the manure on the bottom of the five-gallon bucket.

  We took turns picking raspberries. Ray and Ruth let us pick the berries from their well-established and amazingly prolific bushes every second day. They were like manna from heaven. I made raspberry jam for the first time ever and can wax poetic about how wonderful it was with butter on fresh bread right out of the oven. More about the bread later.

  During the summer, two of the young chickens turned out to be roosters and started fighting. They were vicious when they fought and gouged great tears into each other before one would back down. Ray said the only way to stop the fighting would be to chop their heads off. Ray was not a romantic. He and George went out one day with an axe and caught both roosters. They walked with them over to a stump by the garden. I didn’t watch but was there when George came back to the house looking rather pale, with two dead roosters in his hands. Ray had instructed George on what to do with them. We couldn’t waste them. He set up a plank outside between two chairs to use as our worktable, and I boiled a big pot of water in the kitchen. We dipped each headless body in the hot water then ran outside, laid the birds on the planks then began plucking out the feathers. This was not something I had ever pictured myself doing but it was easier than I thought it would be. Then we had to clean the guts out. George made a cut into the first rooster and tentatively put his hand into the cavity. His face quickly turned the colour of the bright green grass we were standing on. When he started to gag I told him to go away, and I finished the job. It was gooey, it was smelly and it was disgusting but I figured that somebody had to do it!

  I put the roosters in plastic and then into the freezer. I wanted to distance myself from them, and from the smell of innards that I couldn’t get out of my nose, before I would be able to think about eating them. It was months before I had the nerve to cook one. I made the mistake of baking it in a pan in the oven. The poor thing was so tough that we couldn’t get the meat off the bones or even the skin away from the meat. It was like trying to eat an India rubber ball. Another few weeks had to go by before I cooked the other bird in a pressure cooker and we had a wonderful chicken dinner that was tender and oh so delicious.

  One morning there were suddenly thousands and thousands of herring in the bay where the wharf was. Ray showed us how to use a small net to scoop quickly through them and drop our catch into a bucket. We stood in knee-deep water with the herring swirling all around us and scooped up several buckets full. I cooked a pan of them for dinner but we decided that we didn’t like eating fried herring—way too many bones. Ray suggested that we could turn them into chicken food by boiling a bunch with oatmeal. I made a huge batch of herring porridge and after it cooled threw glops of it to the chickens. They loved it, and over the next few days they ate every bony lump. But after the second day, we noticed that the eggs were taking on a distinctly fishy taste. Who knew this could happen? It’s one thing to eat fish and eggs, but quite another to eat fishy eggs. The mind boggles at the possibilities here … oatmeal and bacon porridge for bacony eggs, or oatmeal and mushroom porridge for an instant mushroom omelette? I was more careful about what I fed the chickens after that.

  Coast Guard ships and helicopters delivered our supplies at Addenbroke Island. Shown here is the buoy and lighthouse tender Alexander Mackenzie. Freight day at the lighthouse was always exciting. We received mail orders and letters, care packages from our families and groceries that had been ordered a week before, including frozen meat and fresh produce.

  The herring had come to lay their eggs on the kelp in the bay. A few days later Ray took us down to the wharf, waded into the water and reached for a strand of kelp that was covered with eggs. He put the kelp in his mouth and pulled the strand out between his teeth, snagging the eggs as it went. Such a funny texture. Like fresh, salty, fishy Rice Krispies. The eggs popped in your mouth in a not unpleasant way. Not my favourite seafood experience, but there would be others that would be worse.

  George and I went back down to the bay the next day to try the herring eggs again. I brought a washtub along in case there was something interesting to put in it. Suddenly George shouted, grabbed the gaff and leaned out over the water. I could see an octopus gliding around in the shallows, probably after the same thing we were there for. George snagged one tentacle and started pulling the rest of it toward him. It was looking at us with one huge unblinking eye. He had it almost within reach but the beast wrapped several tentacles around a rock. I was jumping up and down with excitement banging the washtub on the rocks because it just happened to be in my hands. Every time the octopus seemed to be coming closer, it would reach out another tentacle and suction-cup itself onto the rock. George had a good hold of one tentacle but more and more of its appendages wrapped around the rock. George put up a good fight, but the octopus was in its element. Eventually the gaff slipped through the octopus’s flesh and it swooshed off into a cloud of deep inky black water. We were not going to have fried octopus for dinner that night. I can’t say that I was disappointed.

  Clams, Tools and Protecting the West Coast’s Inside Passage

  Very early one misty morning we went with Ray to a little beach made of broken clamshell. We brought buckets and pitchforks and a shovel. The tide was very low so there was a good mound of beach showing where we could dig. Most of this shore would usually be underwater for at least half of the day. We dug close to the waterline and pulled out big fat butter clams about four inches wide and dropped them in a bucket with salt water. We filled several buckets with clams and sloshed more water on them to wash off any loose shell or sand. When we got back to the bay by the wharf, we poured more salt water on them and put the buckets in the shade. We left them there for a few hours so the clams could clean the sand out of their systems.

  In the meantime, we helped Ruth wash and sterilize cans that they bought by the case for canning clams and salmon. After the clams had soaked for the rest of the morning, we hauled them up to the house so George and I could shuck them one by one in our kitchen sink. George split the shell open and I cut the meat out and dropped it into a big bowl. Then we took the bowl of meat over to Ruth’s kitchen and filled the waiting cans, wh
ich we then fed to a machine that crimped lids onto the cans. We borrowed a very large enamel pot and carried it and our share of the cans back to our house and started the long process of boiling-water bath canning.

  My cookbook said that you were never to can meat or fish in a ­boiling-water bath. The canning authorities felt that there was a very real danger of the bacteria that cause botulism contaminating the cans. But Ruth told us that she and everyone she knew over the years who lived on the coast had always used this method. You were just supposed to do it longer than if you were using a pressure canner. So instead of ninety minutes in a pressure canner, something none of the old-timers owned, the cans had to be covered with rapidly boiling water for four hours. I topped the pot up with more hot water every once in a while as it boiled away. Then at the end of four hours, I carefully lifted the cans one at a time out of the hot water onto a towel on the counter. After a few minutes the cans started to ping, a sound that indicated that the lid was being sucked down as a vacuum was being formed. When the cans had cooled for a few hours, it was easy to see if one hadn’t sealed properly because the lid would not be concave. Also, when you tapped on them, you were supposed to hear a high ping and not a klonk sound.

  One of George’s favourite meals was clam chowder, but after handling the slimy things all day, the last thing I wanted to eat for supper was a clam. We piled the tins in the pantry and after a few weeks I was quite happy to make a big pot of chowder with them. I seem to have a short memory.

  When we weren’t out clamming or catching herring, we liked to get cozy on the couch and read aloud to each other. During our stay at the lighthouse we read through my Complete Sherlock Holmes and then the entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit. It was a favourite part of the day, to sit down with a nice cup of coffee and read a chapter or two, or if it was raining, three or four. Ray and Ruth’s daughter, Lorna, who was a dark-haired, dark-eyed bundle of mischief, would come over and listen whenever she could get away from school work. Of course we had no telephone, TV or vcr or pvr or satellite or cable or computer, and the internet would have been the stuff of science fiction.