We stayed a second day in Tahsis. I liked the place. There was a good walk up the steep hill to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where Charley could relieve himself in an ecclesiastical setting. I also had to do something about the balky starter switch, which lurked in the back of my mind, clicking. Lying in bed that night and listening to the gentle hiss of rain on the water, it came to me: I would install a shunt! Simply bypass the starter button so that if it balked at a critical moment, all I had to do was open the hatch and flip a second switch.
The marina had a decently stocked repair shop. The next morning, I hot-wired the starter motor, tucked the new switch where it couldn’t be activated accidentally, and voilà. Surgery my father would have been proud of. But he stayed away.
We left Tahsis in fog so thick we couldn’t even see Vera’s bow. I knew it was a straight shot out into the main inlet, but we still needed radar, GPS, and binoculars to get there. Ten minutes out, we were in the clear; behind us, Tahsis receded under a thick white cloud. Suddenly, six sport-fishing boats materialized out of it, fanning apart to blast by, like a squadron of fighter planes. No radar, no running lights. As though on cue, the VHF Coast Guard channel broadcast the news that the sport-fishing skiff from Winter Harbour had been found.
The Qualicum Rivers Nine had finally been spotted the day before, five days after disappearing, by another fishing guide from Winter Harbour. It was upside down in the middle of Brooks Bay. Only the tip of the bow was showing; not enough for the search planes’ radar. Divers found one life jacket floating nearby; the other three were still in a locker on board. The ignition key was in the off position, so they had probably been jigging for halibut when the boat flipped.
I thought about that: three middle-aged guys braced against the wicked chop, perhaps joshing with the guide, cradling their rods and intent on any signal from a hundred feet down. Come on, baby, bite! But the monster — the rogue wave — came from above.
The search for the men was soon called off. High winds, freezing water, ten miles from shore with no life jackets — by any measure, their time had run out. An EPIRB — a radio beacon that could be triggered by the boat’s rolling over — might have led searchers to them faster, but radio beacons aren’t mandatory on such craft.
There wouldn’t be much sailing today. Long and narrow, Tahsis Inlet runs almost straight north-south, and we had a dozen miles with the wind dead ahead in a channel only a half mile wide. Where the Tsowwin River entered the inlet, the sandbank off the estuary squeezed the channel enough to take three knots off our speed. The river cut deeply into the mountains at right angles to the inlet. Passing the Tsowwin was like gazing briefly into a lone, illuminated window — grass flats, silvered driftwood, the gentle V of the valley and the fog-shrouded mountain beyond. We bulled slowly through while, in the other direction, a conga line of nine sea otters, head to tail, hitched a ride with the current heading back toward Tahsis.
We would spend the night somewhere in Nootka Sound. Of all the place names on this famous coast, Nootka may be the most familiar. Before I even knew exactly where it was, the name brought to mind explorers, swirling mists, angry rocks, Indigenous people in conical cedar hats. Friendly Cove, to give the main anchorage and settlement its English name rather than its real one, Yuquot, was where Captain Cook and his men became the first documented Europeans to land in British Columbia. The Resolution and the Discovery anchored there in 1778. British names, of course, abound; I didn’t have to go to Walbran to recognize HMS Bounty’s master William Bligh, who has a large island named after him.
The sea otters that seemed to be monitoring Vera’s progress since Cape Scott should have been direct descendants of the ones that watched Cook’s vessels arrive but, strictly speaking, they weren’t. Once Cook’s party demonstrated the profits to be had from otter pelts, later traders managed to extirpate the species in B.C. waters. Between 1799 and 1801, around 10,000 otters were being taken from B.C. and Alaskan waters every year. The ones we were enjoying now were transplants, the descendants of eighty-nine Alaskan otters released south of the Brooks Peninsula in 1969. There are around 3,000 otters along the coast now; not enough to restart a hunt, but a few were being shot and skinned, illegally, every year. I was glad we didn’t find any of these grisly remains. For now, the biggest threat to the animals was oil spills.
We ended up in Friendly Cove, although it wasn’t our first choice. Protection from wind and swell looked much better in Santa Gertrudis Cove, a notch just north. The Spanish name, like so many here, reflected the stalemate between British and Spanish traders in the area. Ten years after Cook landed, the Spanish built a permanent settlement in Yuquot (they called it Santa Cruz de Nutka), but they lost interest and dismantled their fort as the otter pelts ran out. They were gone by 1795.
But the entrance to Santa Gertrudis defeated us. It was high tide, so the many rocks we needed to avoid were underwater. Even the vaunted GPS threw up its hands, offering seriously conflicting locations on two different electronic charting systems. Suddenly, Vera felt like a sumo wrestler in an airplane aisle. I lost my nerve, yelled at my wife, went into reverse, and backed out exactly the way we had come in.
In Friendly Cove, we were the only boat anchored, although the public dock was humming. The Uchuck III had just arrived, disgorging seventy families of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation for their annual summer residence on the grassy isthmus that separated Friendly Cove from Yuquot Point, on the outside coast. This place is the site of historic Yuquot, the summer home of Chief Maquinna and his Nootka people (their winter village was in Tahsis). It’s now a National Historic Site (although, when I looked a little deeper into that one, it turned out that the original designation in 1923 was to recognize Cook’s historic landing. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Mowachaht/Muchalaht persuaded the Canadian government to “re-designate” the site to reflect First Nations history).
A cultural and interpretive centre was in the planning stages, and tourism was being developed, beginning with a half-dozen rental cabins. The whole effort was poked and prodded into being by a couple of Gold River entrepreneurs, both of whom we managed to meet. The first of these people we were obliged to find if we wanted to stay overnight; the second one found us when we tried to stay in the wrong place.
Margarita James was in charge of the band office and collected the twelve-dollar overnight fee. If we had tried to come at a more chaotic time for her, we couldn’t have managed it, because seventy tents were being erected on the freshly mowed meadow. A small fleet of off-road buggies was hauling supplies and equipment over the long roadway from the Uchuck’s drop-off, and already the area was strewn with ice boxes, lawn chairs, piles of firewood, backpacks, garbage bags, blankets, and wheelbarrows. Racing through it all were the kids, giddy in the brilliant afternoon sun. The sound of more firewood being chainsawed blew in from the long crescent of beach that looked south.
A few of the kids sidled up to check us out. One little girl wore white sneakers with flashing red lights. She sat on the edge of a picnic table, swinging her feet.
“Cool shoes,” I said. She tucked them up. “Do you know who Margarita is?”
The girl pointed solemnly at a group of women beside a lime-green tent.
“It’s my mom,” she said.
Margarita was sturdy and energetic. She launched into a spirited argument for the cultural centre she was trying to raise money for, and how it would house the many artifacts they were doggedly working to repatriate from museums across North America. I knew the fisheries biologist for the band; did she know Roger too? Of course she did; he was out fishing with the rest of the men. Margarita pointed out the church on the shore, and the network of trails her people were tending and expanding, and sent us on our way. We forgot about Estevan Point looming somewhere out there waiting for us and set off, skirting the happy scene in the meadow and entering a green corridor of salal that ran along behind the beach that finally, after a month and a half of fear, frustration, and fog, felt exactly the way I wanted a west coast beach to feel.
“This is why we came,” I said to Hatsumi as Charley raced ahead. “And about time.”
Never mind that we could have found something similar by just driving to Tofino; we’d gotten here the hard way, and that made it sweeter. We cut through to the beach and stumbled, half-running, down the pebble shelf to the hard-packed sand where we could walk easily. Pinnacled black rocks were sprinkled throughout the bay. Squinting at them into the sun, I decided they looked like a fleet of ships. Hatsumi looked at the rocks and shook her head.
“Everything is pointed here,” she marvelled. “It’s just like Japan.”
We walked. Charley harassed seagulls. To call them a flock seems inadequate; this was a sky-darkening mass, an airborne seagull division, yet a single schnauzer stage-managed them down the beach, running them aloft, waiting while they regrouped and settled a hundred metres farther down, then charging them again. If we’d been further south, someone would have taken us to task for allowing it. But there were no other people here. A sport-fishing boat buzzed the beach, cutting close to the toothy headland where the Spanish cannon had sat. Men in the back whooped and waved. They disappeared around the point in a cloud of exhaust.
“Assholes,” I muttered. This time, when the seagulls rose, they didn’t come back. But we were back at the church, an unremarkable wooden building built, in 1956, by the Mowachaht/Muchalaht community and decommissioned as a Catholic church in the 1990s. Unremarkable outside, that is. Inside, the Church of St. Pius X was unlike any “house of God” I had ever seen. House of Gods was more like it because St. Pius X was no longer a place for monotheists. The Virgin had left the building.
A carved killer whale on two stumps now blocked the path to the altar, whose alcove was taken over by two exuberant totems, too long to fit in the previous tenant’s space. The dais was still there, with a small, engraved cross and facing angels, but they kept to themselves, as though fearing to look up at the bears and ravens and wolves towering above them. As though to emphasize the point, the pews were all turned sideways now. No longer did people face a single symbol of devotion; now, they faced each other, along the axis of the building. The door we had tiptoed through, once we were inside and turned around to look, was itself flanked by more totems, in brilliant greens, reds, and blacks. A magnificent thunderbird spread its wings over them, and us.
Every Christian church I have ever visited has had the same point to make: this is God’s house, here are his symbols and representatives, take your place and worship him. From the impossibly ornate Catholic cathedrals of South America to the stern stone of English High Anglican and the blandest of suburban Unitarian boxes, my reaction has always been the same: this is where you come for instruction, for guidance, for forgiveness, for solace. A kind of one-stop spiritual shopping, from one God.
It was difficult, standing in the warm gloom of this place while children raced around outside staking out their territories in the sun, to miss the point that was being made by St. Pius X in Friendly Cove. I felt no less welcome than in a Christian place of worship, but the enormous feat of accommodation that native people had made in this country, here so plainly symbolized by building their own meeting place inside the walls of what had for so long been a Catholic church, was more humbling than the thunderings of a robed minister. Maybe it was as simple as realigning the pews — what better way to “love thy neighbour” than to have to look at him in church? There was a sense of calm here, surrounded by an entire crowd of animistic representations, and you felt part of them all, not just answerable to one or two. In its serenity and inclusiveness, the church was a little like being in a Japanese temple.
It was all too much for Charley, who vomited in the vestibule beneath an incongruous stained glass titled “Reunion de los Capitanes Bodega-Quadra y Vancouver.” Donated by the Government of Spain in 1957, the panel depicted the resplendent explorer-entrepreneurs inking their deal with their ships at anchor in the cove behind them. A few worried-looking natives watched from the sidelines.
“Jesus, Charley, not in a church!” But was this still a church? Maybe the spirits of killer whale and bear wouldn’t be fussy about a little dog puke. I cleaned the mess up with handfuls of the grass that was trying to engulf St. Pius’s steps.
***
I wish I could say that the church had a calming effect, but by this point in our trip, that was too much to expect. Friendly Cove, for all its revelations, was where you waited to go around Estevan Point, the last of the major obstacles on our circumnavigation. And as each of these obstacles had been fussed over and surmounted, something had been happening to us. The more spectacular the scenery got — and after a day in Friendly Cove, it was hard to imagine anything more beautiful — the more anxious and irritable we were becoming. As the wind rose and Vera began to twist uneasily on her chain, we realized that we needed to go. Get out, get around Estevan, hightail it south to Clayoquot Sound. We were familiar with Tofino and Ucluelet, the two main communities there; I’d been in Ahousaht before, and finally there was the “big reason” for boaters to visit.
“Hot Springs Cove,” I reminded Hatsumi, who was glumly doctoring packaged ramen to look like a proper evening meal. “We’ll be there tomorrow, row in and soak in the pools. You’ll think you’re in Japan.”
She frowned, stirred, winced at the moaning in the rigging. Seven o’clock, and the perverse wind was rising again. Just across the bay, with the Uchuck gone, the dock was empty. Hatsumi looked longingly at it through the porthole above the stove. I sighed, started the engine, got the anchor up, and moved the boat.
But it wasn’t a good idea. As darkness fell, the dock came softly alive again. Now it was a place for teenage trysting, and for younger boys to try out rod and reel. For the first time, I felt like an interloper, even when the murmuring stopped and the fishing lines came in for the last time. Finally, it was quiet again, but I knew it couldn’t last. Margarita had mentioned that the men had all gone fishing. I hadn’t seen any of them yet.
They started to straggle in around 10:30, one runabout after another. Men spilled out, happy, boastful, caustic, the usual result of hours on the water with a fishing rod and beer. I turned on the weather forecast, listening for conditions at Estevan Point.
“Do we have to move?” whispered Hatsumi. She was in pyjamas, and she didn’t look as though she wanted to go anywhere. There was enough swell getting in around the corner to make Vera toss and turn against the metal dock.
“Winds thirty knots northwest of Estevan Point,” said the voice on the radio. That was where we were — wasn’t it?
Outside, the voices got closer. Then, knuckles on Vera’s hull.
“I’ll deal with it.” I crawled outside into the cool night air. A man in sweatpants and a Tilley hat squatted on the dock.
“Got a problem with your boat being here, buddy. I’ve got some guests showing up later for the cabins.”
Guests showing up . . . when? Midnight?
“Oh,” I said. There had to be a way out of this.
“You work with Margarita, right? Managing the place? We had a great talk. And you know what? She said she knew Roger, the fisheries biologist.”
This was sinking pretty low. The guy scratched his head. He had fine, aquiline features. Replace the canvas hat with a conical cedar one and he could have been the legendary Chief Maquinna, who unfortunately presided over the conversion of Friendly Cove to a European trading post. Maquinna probably didn’t sound like this, though.
“Sure, he was out fishing with us. I think he went up to the camp already. You want me to try and find him?”
This was better. I pressed on, disgusted with myself. “It’s okay, I’ll find him in the morning. Look, I’m really sorry about taking your space.” I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. His name was Albert.
“Nah, we’ll make it work.”
“See,” I said, getting off the boat so we could go eye to eye, “it’s the wife. Long story, but she’s, you know, a little freaked out. We’ve been having starter motor problems. I thought if I could get at it first thing in the morning . . .” We exchanged a conspiratorial, testosterone-fuelled look. If Hatsumi overheard any of this, I was dead.
“I got plenty of tools in my cabin,” Albert said. We got to talking; that is, he did. Albert, once he was your friend, couldn’t stop talking. I learned, variously, that he was a concrete contractor, born and raised in Gold River, that his business in Vancouver got skunked by the recession, and that he was now back home, running the Friendly Cove operation with Margarita. And doing it vigorously, I could see.
“I’m relentless,” he said. “No patience at all! Today, out fishing? Got lost in the fucking fog, can you believe it?”
“You don’t have GPS?”
“Fuck, no. But here we are!” Together, we shuttled Vera forward twenty feet, tiptoeing out onto the steel hoop that rode up and down the last piling so that we could tie her up as far along as possible. Albert talked the whole time. It was better than listening to the weather.
Early the next morning, the forecast was the same. I climbed with Charley up the winding steps and over the aluminum catwalk to the lighthouse buildings perched on the hill above us. A cedar helicopter pad shone wetly. Yesterday, the keeper’s house and the light had been brilliant, red-roofed gems in the sun; now they were hidden in fog. I knocked on the back door while Charley nosed around in the geraniums, looking for somewhere to pee. A flustered woman answered.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just filing our weather report.”
“Then maybe you can explain the forecast.”
“Forecast? Haven’t listened to that part yet.”
Hmm. “Well, they’re calling for high winds ‘northwest of Estevan.’ What does that actually mean?”
“Northwest of Estevan? Well, I guess it could mean . . . hmm. Bajo Reefs? Up there?” She waved vaguely. “The thing is, we’re in a tricky spot for forecasting. You know what the word Yuquot means, don’t you?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“It means, ‘place where wind comes from all directions.’”
“We’re thinking of going around Estevan Point today,” I said.
The woman watched Charley rooting around in her potted plants. Behind us, a precipitous trolley-way led all the way down to the dock where the two Coast Guard Zodiacs waited for someone to have a maritime emergency. Except that they were hidden by fog.
“What a cute dog,” she said. “Is he friendly?” Charley barked at her. “Estevan? Ah, you’ll be fine.”