Ahousaht is a strange place, a few hours around the top of Flores Island from Hot Springs Cove and down the long neck of Matilda Inlet. Actually, Ahousaht is two places. I’d briefly experienced the First Nations village, properly called Marktosis, which sits on a thread of land so narrow it looks both ways: inward, toward the inlet, and outward, to the Catface Range on Vancouver Island. I’d spent a strange night there, a few years ago, wearing my biologist hat, and had written about the experience. This time, I wanted to see the other side. I wondered, was Ahousaht-Marktosis the same arrangement as Walters Cove and Houpsitas? Whites on one side, Indigenous people on the other?
We passed a native longliner on the way, probably going after dogfish. Just before the entrance to Matilda Inlet, several salmon farms were tethered in the shallow channel. There was another concentration of farms here, extending from Estevan Point to Barkley Sound. Not as many as in the heavily peppered stretch around Johnstone Strait and the Broughton Archipelago, but enough for visitors like us to notice.
Ahousaht — the white version — was a string of sagging concrete docks beneath a blue general store with a carved sign featuring an extravagantly endowed mermaid. Next to the store were a restaurant and a shed that served the fuel dock. I knew we were on the fuel dock because a long snake of diesel hose extended in lazy waves down a gangplank and along the dock, as though waiting for someone to come along and squeeze the trigger. This, I learned, was more or less how you got fuel in Ahousaht; I watched a string of locals, in everything from runabouts to trollers, pick up the hose, gaze expectantly landward, and be rewarded with the appearance of a stern woman who shaded her eyes and yelled, “Diesel or gas?”
This person was the sister of the store owner, a toadlike man in his seventies out of whom, for a while, I made it my business to try and coax a smile. I wasn’t successful, unless you counted his mirth at my expense, which he shared with a crony whose troller was hauled up on the ramshackle marine ways behind the store for bottom-painting.
“What’s that up on your mast?” said the fisherman.
“Yeh, looks like a fender. We been thinking, why’s that sailboat got a fender up its mast?” Har, har.
“Radar reflector,” I said. Charley was making friends with the man’s dog, leading it on a chase up and down the gangplank. “The kind that works.”
A cheap radar reflector, which is supposed to make you visible to everybody else’s radar, looks like two metal Frisbees welded at right angles inside a shoebox. A better one, like the one Vera had, has all the metal elements encapsulated inside a smooth white plastic lozenge. It does look a lot like a fender, or a really big suppository.
“Yeh, well,” said the store owner. I noticed the “For Sale” sign in the window behind him. No wonder. Inside, the place was dim and untended. He had some eggs, some plastic-wrapped bread, candy bars. The store served as the local post office, and I’ll give it this, there was a fine selection —although it was beginning to look more like a collection — of the practical stuff needed to keep a working boat working: chain, pipe elbows, electrical wire, many boxes of screws. No sissy stuff like jiffy salmon smokers or solar showers. I didn’t buy anything.
I led Charley on a stroll around the grounds and took my own inventory of a place in collapse. Or maybe it was just transition, like so many outposts along this coast, because, on closer inspection, there were things happening here, they just weren’t what the present owners had signed on for. In behind the docks where the salmon boats used to come to off-load their catch, where the fat cocked elbow of the fish chute still swung in the wind like an amputated limb, there was evidence of life.
A bunkhouse housed miners contracted for the exploration of the Catface Range — unpopular in Tofino, but business. And next to the old torpedoes and dried-out flower boxes in front of the restaurant was a shiny blue undersea rover the size of a toddler’s wading pool, fitted with tiny propellers and bearing the logos of suppliers and sponsors. A nice young man with an English accent told me it was for his research; he was from the University of Bath. Most of the funding was from the U.K., but the rover also bore an Earthwatch sticker, which explained the fleet of kayaks at the hostel.
Earthwatch provides a “field science experience” by inserting paying “volunteers” into research projects around the world. The project in Ahousaht, I found out, was about tracking grey whales, although the dockside briefing I watched a young man give a group of middle-aged kayakers seemed more to do with his research on sea otters. It was all very confusing: English and American researchers, using funding from their own countries and from a global grant-maker with offices in London, Boston, Melbourne, and Tokyo, teaming up with the science tourists who flew in to “help” them.
The fuel-selling sister was renting out her “rustic but comfortable” hostel to the visitors. She had them figured out.
“It’s all bullshit,” she told me.
The restaurant, also glowingly described on the Earthwatch website, wore a sign in magic marker on a scrap of cardboard: “The Restaurant Is Not Open.” When I looked more closely at the shot I had snapped, a native troller was reflected in the window with the testy sign, and I remembered the man who had tied up, come into the store to collect his mail, and left. I also remembered asking the store owner about the marine ways in the First Nations village, which had been an impressive facility for boat repair when I’d first visited.
“Huh,” he said. “They only used it once. They left it in the water. It’s ruined.”
I wondered who had ruined all the equipment littering his own property — the abandoned cement mixer and forklift rusting in the bushes, the boat trailer overgrown by blackberries, the collapsing large-vessel dock nearby, its walkway furred with lichen like an old man’s patchy beard. The loading area was littered with batteries and propellers and a couple of huge Mercury outboard motors, on their sides like dead hippos.
One night in white Ahousaht was enough. We rowed across to the village of Marktosis in the evening, and my visit a few years before came slowly back: the desperate look of the houses, the graveyard of wooden fishing boats lining the shallows. On a rock at the entrance, a carved cedar representation of a man in a traditional conical hat raised one arm to the outside world; the low sun made the weathered cedar gleam. The salute seemed ambiguous to me because the arm was lifted only to waist level, like a person measuring off a child’s height. Surely it was a gesture of welcome, but, given the indignities being suffered in that unfortunate place, it might as easily have been farewell.
The next morning, as we were preparing to untie and head for Tofino, an Indigenous family in a small runabout dropped by for fuel. An older man, who I guess was the patriarch, ambled along to where I was untying lines. He looked Vera up and down.
“Nice boat,” he finally said. Was there a twinkle in those brown eyes? I’ve worked with enough Indigenous people to recognize their sense of irony, which, given their history, is highly developed.
“Should put some trolling lines on it. Might catch some fish.”
He was giving me a gentle dig. I didn’t mind.
“It’s a good year?” I asked.
“This year? Unbelievable. I don’t know what it is, I know we overfished in the past, but this year . . .”
“What are you catching?”
“Sockeye. Tons of ’em.”
“But there aren’t that many strong stocks out here.” I’d worked with a neighbouring First Nation on the sockeye stocks near Tofino; they’d been depressed for years.
“These ones aren’t local,” the man said.
“Where are they from?”
“Fraser River.”
I thought back to the prediction of the woman in Sointula two weeks ago. “The sockeye are coming,” she’d said. “I can feel it.” I didn’t ask the man, “So why are we mounting a royal commission on the disappearance of Fraser sockeye if you’re getting a bumper crop?” But it certainly looked like the decision to bail out of my part in it was turning out to be the right one.
“Have a good one,” he said. “I’m going fishing.”