THE LEGEND OF KAYAK BILL
“What happened to Kayak Bill?”
WE HEARD ABOUT BILL’S TRAGIC suicide in a surprise phone call from his ex-partner Lori Anderson in Sointula on Malcolm Island. She told me she was organizing a memorial service in their community and asked me to spread the word to as many of Bill’s old climbing friends in the Canadian mountaineering community as possible and invite them to the wake.
When the wake was in full swing there were more than a hundred people present, which was not altogether surprising, because in spite of his hermit lifestyle, Bill had lots of friends. What was surprising and very mysterious, however, was the fact that very few of these people knew each other. Bill’s ex-wife, Lori, had loosely facilitated a formal process in which she invited various people that she knew had known Bill well and asked them to tell their stories of their friendship with him in a somewhat chronological order.
A definite pattern soon emerged showing that even though Bill, being such a lovable guy, always made friends wherever he went, he also kept moving on and leaving old friends behind, just like he did with me. Furthermore, he never told his new friends very much about his previous life, so none of approximately half the people present who were from the coast had any idea who all these other folks from Calgary were, or that they represented the cream of Canadian mountaineering. “Billy the Bolt,” as he was known to them, was a living legend on the other side of the Rockies. Of course, these Calgarians knew very little of the details of the west coast legend of “Kayak Bill.” Even his more recent friends on the upper coast knew few of us old lower coast friends from earlier times.
This dramatic saga was heroic and tragic right from the start. Bill’s childhood friend Perry Davis told how he became close buddies with Billy Davidson in an orphanage in Calgary where Bill’s mother had dropped him, aged 9, and his younger brother and sister off on the steps and walked away from them. They never saw her again. They kept in touch with their father but he was unable to cope as a single parent. Something similar had happened with Perry and his sisters. Apparently, the orphanage encouraged the kids to follow their own interests. This explained why Bill could barely read or write but was a genius with electronics. In his early teens he built a robot that won a national award. It required him to go to Ottawa and have some VIP put his medal into the hands of the robot. The robot then walked across the room and delivered it to Bill.
Perry and Bill soon started hiking in the mountains together, and Perry described how Bill took to mountaineering right away and soon left him behind as he quickly became a very good climber and made all kinds of new friends, including members of the elite hard-climbing and hard-drinking Calgary Mountain Club. Prominent among these was the next speaker, who described how Bill soon developed a high degree of proficiency in the specialized skills required for climbing extremely steep and scary rock faces. His forte was solo climbing, which is particularly serious and scary. Another younger Calgary Mountain Club member told how, at a still very young age, the two of them went down to the rock climbing Mecca, California’s Yosemite Valley, where Bill became the first Canadian-born climber to reach international fame by doing a very early ascent of the hardest and most scary big wall rock climb in the world. Soon after that, I met them there in those hazy, crazy, lazy days of warm California Indian summer.
When it was my turn to speak, I told the story of our pact, how we spent increasing amounts of time living out in the mountains and how after spending a large part of a day up a tree at Dick Pearson’s tipi, talking to the birds, Bill sold all his climbing gear, his motorbike and all his filming equipment and bought himself a bow and arrow and a leather outfit and took off into the Rockies to live off the land. Soon after I moved to the coast, Bill came out for a visit and we did our big trip up Toba Inlet together. On that trip I introduced him to painting and drawing. When I bought into the land co-op, Bill bought himself a kayak and paddled off into the wilds of the BC coast.
Others then picked up the saga of how Bill committed himself to the coast and managed, with admirable ingenuity and discipline, to support himself for the rest of his life living off the land and sea. He shunned the use of money and motor cars and trained himself in the use of wild edible plants, learning a lot from the Native people. His unique and total absorption in the coastal landscape was reflected in his paintings, which he used as trading items for the few trappings of civilization he needed such as tobacco and peanut butter. He moved farther out up coast each summer and set up primitive temporary driftwood base camps as he went. He was extremely strong and fit and could paddle phenomenal distances in a day if he cared or needed to. In winter he would retreat to remote communities and build a beechwood shack in someone’s yard and work and play on his home synthesizer made from used radio parts. Otherwise he carried all his possessions in his kayak.
One person told us about Bill’s enthusiasm for eulachon grease, a foul-smelling concoction made by the First Nations from rancid fish. He claimed it was especially helpful in combatting the cold coastal damp. One time he paddled his kayak up to the top of Knight Inlet to score some grease from the Natives. He was hoping to make a trade for some berry leather he had made and was giving his sales pitch to an elder, explaining how the berries would provide all the vitamins they needed for the winter. The old Native looked at him and smiled.
“Why don’t you just make wine?” he asked. “Then you get your vitamins and you get pished as well.”
Some of the later speakers at the wake, who had spent time with him more recently, mentioned that Bill had been having some health problems, especially with his teeth. Friends had offered to help pay for treatment and yet Bill stubbornly refused to accept help or go anywhere near a doctor or dentist. This perspective inevitably led to the dramatic conclusion of the saga, the unanswered mystery which was now at the forefront of everybody’s mind.
“How or why could anyone who loved life so much and was so well loved, possibly have taken his own life?”
Although Lori and their son Westerly did not speak publicly at the wake, I later had a chance to chat at great length with them in private. From our conversation and our comparing of notes we pretty well agreed on a possible answer to that mystery. To do so we had to indulge in some amateur common sense psychology. Against what must have been tremendous emotional trauma from the rejection of his mother, Bill’s seemingly casual and laid-back manner disguised a steel-hard emotional defence mechanism that explained both his extreme self-reliance and his extreme reluctance, amounting to incapability, for long-term, deep emotional attachments. Lori confided that this trait was compounded in mid-life when they had agreed to go their separate ways. This amounted to another emotional rejection, which served to compound Bill’s self-reliance.
Then Westerly told me that in his teenage years Bill tried persuade him to join him on his trips. Though Westerly enjoyed the lifestyle for a while, he decided it was not his path. Once again, apparently, Bill took this very hard, effectively seeing it as another rejection. Bill’s response, as was his habit, was to move on even farther out.
If this hypothesis is true, then it’s just a short stretch of the imagination to see that Bill, having experienced the effects of his body failing and facing the prospect of old age dotage, complete with dependence on other people or, even worse, society’s institutions, chose instead what for him would be the logical, consistent, courageous and honourable way out, the way of the Samurai warrior.
So, now being the only one of the four original pact members who has survived to tell the tale, I have come to agree with John Donne: “No man is an island entire of itself. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”