The whole place is surrounded by trees. Nobody knows we’re in here. I pick up my rod and cast.
Angling Versus Acts of God
THIS WAS ONE of the ways a fishing trip could begin. The airline smashed my tackle, and less than twenty-four hours after starting I lay in bed at our hotel in Victoria, food-poisoned and no longer able to imagine the wild rainbow trout I had set out for.
Frank, my companion, was speaking to the house physician. “It came on him very suddenly,” he said. “He didn’t even finish his drink.”
At that moment our itinerary seemed to lie heavy upon the land. We were going up into the Skeena drainage, and I realized that if I could stop vomiting (and ruing the prawn dinner that had precipitated this eventuality), I would see matchless country and have angling to justify all the trouble. It would be the perfect antidote to food poisoning and all the other dark things.
As it was, the trip seemed a trifle askew. Coming in from Seattle, I had inadvertently been thrust among the members of an Ohio travel group; a mixed bag, coming from all parts of the country. “We’re with Hiram Tours,” one man said to our stewardess as we flew north from Seattle. “Is that Alaska down there? Or Oregon?”
The stewardess began a spontaneous rundown of the glories of Our Neighbor to the North. “There is a mountain in Banff,” she explained momentously, “that they’ve named Mount Eisenhower.” She paused to look first at the blank faces, then at the sullen Pacific beneath us. She exhaled audibly. “After your former president, that would be.”
We flew on for some time in silence.
One of the tour group looked up beaming from the map on his lap. “Strait of Juan de Fuca!” he cried.
I could take it. I was ready for this kind of thing. I was going to virgin country and I still hadn’t got food poisoning and my companion hadn’t yet had to call the house physician to say, “He didn’t even finish his drink.”
They had been to San Francisco and were now doing the résumé. “Filthah hippahs!” said a lady from Little Rock. Then a young man bound for Vietnam announced, “Well, I’m off to defend my country!” in tones that seemed less than totally sincere. So the tour group, for this and other reasons, grew restive and was ready to pile off the plane by the time we arrived at Victoria.
I registered at the Empress Hotel, a stupendous Victorian edifice where the bellhops scurry and the waiters in the dining room murmur the most caring hopes about your meal, exactly the place to sport an RAF mustache. Frank arrived and we talked about our trip north. Then early to bed, with glimpses of the curious Victoria skyline, a pastiche of the high-rise and the venerable.
Every traveler here soon discovers the considerable reverence for the British connection. If the queen ever gets run out of England, this is where you’ll find her holed up; the Victoria Chamber of Commerce will have drawn its wagons in a circle around her.
In addition to such good transpositions as the unmatched gardens of the city or its numerous bookstores, you get double-decker buses imported from London, coats of arms in woolen-store windows and tea and crumpets available everywhere from the Empress itself to the Rexall drugstore.
But to emphasize the town’s studied dowdiness is unfair. It is obvious that Victoria is a town of what used to be called graciousness, and any ride around its perimeter will put the traveler’s back to those unparalleled gardens and his face to the headlands of the San Juan Islands.
There had been heavy weather immediately prior to our arrival, and long, golden log booms, the shape and color of egg yolks, had been towed inside the bays for protection. Beyond, handsome trawlers were moored under clouds of gulls. If you squinted, it looked like Anchorage or Seattle or San Francisco or Monterey or — squinting tighter — Mazatlán: the Pacific community seemed continuous.
That first morning I picked up the menu downstairs in the hotel. A number of breakfasts were described: “the Charlotte,” “the Windsor,” “the Albert,” “the Edward,” “the Victoria,” and “the Mountbatten.”
“I’ll have the Mountbatten,” I said, “over lightly.”
Frank made a number of order changes to his Edward.
“If you’re going to substitute oatmeal and add an extra egg on your Edward,” said the waitress, “you might just as well order á la carte.”
I was hungry and abruptly ate my Mountbatten.
We spent the day driving as far up the coast as Saltspring Island. At one of the ferry crossings, watching the wind-striped water and high, beautiful fjords, I innocently poisoned myself with a prawn.
A local prawn? I don’t know.
Within hours I had failed to finish my drink. My companion was on the phone to the house doctor. My vision was contracting. My gorge was rising for the tenth time. The Canadian Pacific, so recently thrilling, was now the scene of hopelessness and abandonment.
WE WERE GOING NORTH to Smithers by way of Williams Lake. The fellow passengers were more promising than the tour group — a few swells like ourselves, some surveyors, timber cruisers, a geologist. The minute the aircraft had elevation, a country revealed itself that was so tortuous, folded, and empty that some trick of time seemed to have been performed.
The sky came down to a jagged horizon of snow, and for 360 degrees a coastal forest, baleful and empty, rose to the mountains. Past the bright riveted wing, the ranges succeeded each other to the north in a blue eternity.
We landed at Williams Lake on the Fraser River, dropped off passengers, taxied, flew a few yards, landed again, taxied again, took off again, and landed. The pilot came out of the cockpit with his shirt unbuttoned and remarked with appalling candor that the plane felt like a Model A.
They sent us into Williams Lake to eat while they fixed the plane. In the cab we learned the airline we were using was bankrupt, and so it had come to seem. But at the restaurant they told us to return to the plane immediately.
When we boarded, the pilot said, “I hope it goes this time. Occasionally you’re not lucky.”
So we flew over the increasingly remote wilderness, hoping that we would be lucky and that the plane would work and be better in all ways than a Model A.
At Smithers, the seaplanes rested very high on their pontoons beside floating docks. A mechanic tapped away at a workbench nearby as we boarded a De Havilland Beaver.
Within a short time we hung precariously over a long, gravelly mountain ridge. The pilot craned around looking for mountain goats, while Frank and I exchanged nervous glances and judged the drop.
On either side of us stood implacable-looking peaks and ridges while underneath, blue-and-green lakes hung in saddles and rockwalled cirques. Occasionally the entire groundscape shone amid delicate water meadows, and in a short time we had landed and were taxiing toward our fishing camp. I thought of the trout under our gliding pontoons.
“How is the fishing?” Frank inquired routinely of Ejnar Madsen, the camp’s co-owner.
“Extremely poor,” said Ejnar.
“Really!”
We put our luggage down on the dock as it began to rain. There had been an Act of God and we could not be philosophical about it. I asked what had happened. The biggest summer rain in many years had raised the lake and turned the river almost black with runoff.
Next day we floated disconsolately down the slow, ineffably northern river in a twenty-five-foot, Indian-built, spruce riverboat. The rain poured off our foul-weather gear and made puddles in our laps.
Between long spells of silence we burst into absurd conversations:
“Neighbor’s cat crawls under the hood of the car. Next morning the neighbor starts the car. The fan does a job on the cat.”