Some Coastal Characters

These are pictures of Theresa with her bottle collection and Rene and Peter, the caretakers of Namu. They were a great people more than willing to show me around the once thriving coastal cannery town of Namu. Rene an Theresa decided to take me out to a place called Tuna town. Tuna town was at one time a little village  of houses at the north end of Namu. It is now 4 houses are barely standing. 

This is a photo I took inside one of the houses of Tuna town. As you can see there is a beautiful skylight to let in all the natural light and of course brand new moss rugs to give that indoor outdoor feel. Rene and Theresa obviously spent quite a bit of time exploring about Namu. They knew all the little secrets. Like for instance: how to get inside this house.

This house at one time certainly had a front porch. Now all that remains is wood framing and a large pit in front of the door. So Rene and Theresa showed me just how I could swing my body (and camera gear) over the gaping pit and into the front door. Rene and Theresa had greyed hair and weathered complexions with the  spirit and curiosity of children. 

On our way back from Tuna town we walked along the beach beside the Cannery. Cannery beaches are covered in debris. Although I like to think of it as treasure and obviously so do Theresa and Rene. They have a collection of maybe one or two hundred glass bottles and jars they have found of the beach. They have vinyl records covered in barnacles, piggy banks, dollies, flower vases, salt and pepper shakers and the list goes on. Most people would probably dismiss the object on the beach as just garbage. But if you walk slowly, nose down, with a keen eye for long lost treasure, you will find endless amounts. And they do.

Character and charm

My trip with my father was slow, patient, calm and quiet. These words are not the words that would have used to describe this industry 60, 70 years ago. Today however, it’s just how it is. The fishing grounds are quiet and sleepy. The old canneries are decrepit characters, slowly dying and the people of the industry and few and far between.

The people of fishing are really what stand out to me. I grew up on the water. It’s beautiful and I love it. But what stands out are my father’s (and grandfather’s) eclectic community. I had a chance to revisit with a few of those characters since commencing this project.

North Pacific Cannery is now a National historic site and museum. When I showed up there I was fully willing to jump through the hoops that one would expect to find at a government run operation. I talked to this person, so they could connect with me with that person, so they could inform someone else to expect me at the cannery. Hoops. So that’s what I got. However, once I got the cannery it was a whole other scene. Although the museum is governed by bureaucrats, the day-to-day operations (in the winter) are run by Spider. Spider You ask? His actual name is Doug Round but I have never known a person to call him anything but Spider.

Spider is my dad’s age and has also spent his life fishing. The fishing industry has petered away into next to nothing and so Spider has had to find a way to get by. Many people have retrained but for some that is not an option. Spider is an intelligent well read man but he functions best with a little help from Jack Daniels. And so Spider is now the winter watchman and summer maintenance staff at North Pacific Cannery museum. It’s the perfect job for Spider. He spends his days mostly alone, trying to keep up with the aggressively aging buildings of the cannery.

Spider was ready to bend over backwards to help me with anything I needed. He handed me the keys and gave me the run of the place. He spent some time telling me stories of how my father had helped him. My father taught Spider to fish the Skeena river. He taught him every thing he knew about the river. Spider told me how he once wrote a letter on his behalf that changed his life. Spider only had warm things to say of my dad and was more than willing to extend to me anything he could.

            If you were to pass Spider your first thoughts might not be the best. Spider isn’t dressed sharp and there isn’t anything fancy about him. He’s a middle-aged guy, with a bit of a stoop from many years of hard labour. He carries a micky in his back pocket and although he’s a fully functioning, employed guy he is usually drunk. He wears an old leather cap, has a crooked smile and has a smoker’s dry laugh. He does however, have one old fashioned custom that is common trait among coastal folk. You can show up on his cannery door-step wet and tired, and before he even finds out that he knows you after all, he has invited you in for warm cup of tea.

           

To my Grandfather

Yesterday I spent the day wandering the buildings of North Pacific Cannery. North Pacific is a museum and National Historic site just outside of Prince Rupert BC. The cannery has been kept up and opened for the public (in the summer) to come and take in the exhibits and the cannery grounds as they used to be. I've been coming to NP since I was a little girl and I've always loved it. I used to come here with grandparents mostly so it was a little different to be wandering the grounds on my own. My grandparents used to be a constant narration in the background of cannery stories. My mother took her first steps at North Pacific Cannery and my grandfather although he did not work at this particular cannery im sure had to work in and around the site. The old office at the museum is set up with old typewriters, radios, operator knobs and buttons just how it would have been in 30's or 40's. North Pacific has a road from Prince Rupert now but this road wasn't put in until 1959. Before that it was radio and telegraph and post to communicate. However, the office has a different sentiment for me. The office reminds me of grandfather through and through. He's still alive but just a little stooped old man with a poor memory and a very different disposition remains.

Im very found of my grandfather. He's not your typical grandfather I suppose. He's not warm and affectionate. He did tend to my scrapes and bruises but it was with Iodine not hugs and kisses. He was still working until quite recently in his business doing income tax work for fisherman. Most of my memories of my grandfather are of him as a business man. He was a big fish in a little pond in Prince Rupert. People knew who he was (and I think some people were quite afraid of dealing with him). Every once and a while i get stories filtered in of what a snappy, harsh business man he was. Nothing slipped on his watch. (except of course the time Oceanside cannery burned down when he was managing). I used to sit on the other side of his great wooden desk next to his file cabinets playing on his underwood. He was my grandfather and I loved him. He was always there for me whatever I needed. Things fixed or built or my taxes done, anything I could ever need he could provide. In some respects he helped in place of my father who was always away.

But that man I knew and loved and relied on is gone now. Not physically gone. My grandfather is still alive. But mentally gone. He is a shell of what he once was. A frail little man who asks me the same questions over and over. He can't do much on his own anymore. His once commanding presence gone. 

We all get old however, to see some people degrade so much is hard. People who have known my grandfather their whole lives shake their heads in disbelief when they see him. They can't even believe its the same man. 

He is similar to the old canneries he used to manage. Just a shell of what was once there. 

He is my grandfather and I love him.

The Wonderful Character and Characters of the Coast

This is Port Neville, B.C. Population 3. I got the chance to meet one of those three inhabitants of this once upon a time town. Lorna has lived on this property her entire life. Her grandfather founded Port Neville with the Post office seen in this picture. The post office was the center of the fishing and logging in this area. People lived along the inlet and at one time there were a few hundred permanent residents, a school house, a store and this post office. The original homestead of Lorna's grandparents still stands. In fact it was the nicest house on the property but for some reason she doesn't live in it. Lorna lives in a mobile home which is the new post office. Population 3 but the mail still comes in and out. 

Lorna was a very interesting character. She has a very thick bush accent. She was born and raised on the same coast as myself and yet she has a pretty thick accent. Most of the coastal isolationist speak a little different. This is something I have always loved. 

 Lorna was of course delighted to see us. My father napped while she showed me around the Old post office which is now a museum gone art gallery. The woman who lives across the inlet is an artist. Her work decorates the walls. I'm not so sure i would trust the walls of that old building to house my art. The Post office building shuttered in light breezes, one strong sigh and it would gladly fall back to the earth.

Lorna obviously spends a lot of time alone and was happy to have me to her little mobile to have tea.. She told me all about her daughter who she raised at Port Neville, just the two of them.

Lorna's house was decorated with doilies and crosses and plaques with little prayers. She gave me tea and homemade cookies and we chatted. We chatted about everything and anything she was really quite a lovely lady. She fit little "bless your soul"s into our conversation everywhere. 

Once upon a time people like Lorna dotted the coastline all the way up. And my father informs me that you could be guaranteed that everyone of those people would welcome you into there home and share a cup of tea with you. Now those isolated people are few and far between but we managed to stop for a cup of tea with quite a few and Lorna was one.

Fishing Family

My father and I. Well my strongest connection to the fishing industry would have to be through my dad.  My dad and I have a very strong, very complex relationship...

Most people see only the romantic side of fishing. The old wooden boats, the cozy nights at sea with the rain coming down, the camaraderie between fisherman, a pretty Stan Rogers picture. Of course the average person realises that with all that wonderful stuff comes a lot of hard work. Long, hard, dirty fish stinky smelly days.

Being the daughter of a fisherman can sometimes be difficult. My father spent most of my life leaving. He had fishing openings all summer long so he might have been home a day or two here and there but I was not likely to see him because he would be getting ready for the next opening. 

Fisherman don't just fish their boats. They maintain the structure of their boats and they are the mechanics. A fisherman has to know exactly how his boat works because if he is out fishing and something happens then he has to  able to fix it. He also has to maintain his gear. I have many memories of my father sitting out in the yard mending his nets for hours. So marine mechanic, ship builder, electrician, hydraulics specialist oh and yes he had to know how to fish and everything that entails. Fishing is no 9 to 5 job. It's all year all the time which is very hard to integrate your family into. Even the summers that I spent out with my father, I felt like more of a burden than a help. 

I was a lucky in some respects. My dad came home. Every year trip after trip he actually came home. My dad's count of friends who have not come home is now at 41. So as much as my dad was away, their dads will never be around ever again. 

My family has a long line in the fishing industry. My grand father the cannery manager, great grandfather fishery officer and many more stories of long waits for their return. Long hours, long nights and a lot of very self sufficient women back home.

Panoramic shot of the of Butedale Cannery

A view from the dock of the main walkway. On the left is Lou's house, Main bunkhouse on the right and in the center is the "manager's  house"

Myself and the Past

I think i knew myself better when i was six. Life was all about the experience. I had no concept of mine or anyone else body. I had few true possessions and what I did have had no actual monetary value. Life was purely what it was moment to moment and it was great. I was still quite young when my father left the fishing industry. He stopped fishing full time when I was ten and sold the boat when i was fourteen of so. And yet even though I spent so little time fishing and actually living that life it is forever engrained in me. It has created a passion that i can barely put to words. It is through this project that i hope to be able to express this passion and capture something that is a part of my soul. My soul is 20 km wide and 1000 km long.

I was flipping through one of my grandmothers photo albums the other day and i came across a photo of Butedale. The photo really wasn't that old. I would peg is around late 1980's. I mean that's old in my lifetime but not in hers. My grandmother is chief shutter bug in our family and she is an absolute story teller through and through. So its really no wonder that she has spawned four story telling/picture taking grandchildren. Anyways it was really heartwarming to come across this photo she had taken a few years back, a place where I just was taking the very same photo. Only in my grandmothers photo, which was at the most 20 years old, Butedale still looked like a quaint coastal village. The roofs were all still intact and there were more buildings still standing and the sun was shinning over this quaint little town. It absolutely amazing how fast things change. Butedale is such a symbol of life. How easily such things are forgotten, left in the past to literally rot. Things that helped build our lives as we know them today.

 

I guess I've just never really been a person to want to bound forward into the future without pausing to remember and pay homage to the past. My grandmother included. I am a product of her incessant (and yes i do mean incessant story telling and snapshot taking) she instilled in me the importance of recording and remembering and passing on stories that matter to her and inevitably now matter to me. I can finish most of her story telling sentences because i have heard those stories time and time again. But for me that's what this is all about.

 

Butedale was a scary looking place when we went there this summer. The roofs are all collapsed and the walls are crashing down. If i could put a soundtrack to way it looked, it would be a loud one. And yet for one man this is home. The caretakers name is Lou. He is originally from Quebec but has obviously been West a long time. He is not what most people would consider a friendly guy but he had a warm heart which given the opportunity would shine through brightly. He has an orange cat, named Tiger, and a big old dog and a twelve year old boy who he had taken on for the summer. Lou seemed the type to scare people off more than welcome them in but it was all for show. He was crusty on the outside and squishy on the inside. He had been living at Butedale for 4 or 5 years. Other than the cat, dog and the boy who was there for the summer, Lou lives in this cannery village alone. It was originally built to house a couple hundred people maybe more since half the buildings were gone.

Butedale oozes a strange energy. The buildings would scream if they could. Strange noises, cracks and creeks are almost constant. The Rumble of the water from the nearby falls. In fact the whole mountain side the village is built on is constantly dripping. Little streams and rivers ran in, out and under all the buildings and boardwalks. It feels as thought the water is pushing the whole place down and it is. Trickling, drips, creaks and splashes.

  I could still close my eyes and imagine my great grandfather here so many years before. He was the manager i believe and so he would have been a very powerful man at Butedale. Seems kind of strange to have any kind of power over a place like that. A place that seems completely under the control of the water that surrounds and flows beneath it. At one time this was bustling center of the fishing industry.  The energy of that center is still very much there.

stories

Get on 36 foot commercial fish boat, with a 12 foot x 6 foot cabin, with your father and stay there for two weeks in the middle of no where. It took a lot of courage for me to get on that boat in June, but i certainly think i have a lot to show for it. I can't really say it wasn't a hard thing for me to do, it was. It was an amazing trip and ill never forget it and so I have to share my stories and the stories I was told along my journey. My life has been spent in and around the fishing industry. My father was a fisherman and marine surveyor, my Grandfather was a ships broker and managed several canneries and my great grandfather was a fishery patrol officer. I have experienced much of the coast myself but more than that I've been surrounded by stories my whole life. My dad laughing with his friends for hours talking about the good old days, how many fish they caught on the fluke run back in 1975, stopping for a few minutes to remember someone who didn't come home from that trip. My grandfather surrounded by piles and piles of paperwork, drinking coffee till wee hours of the morning with his fisherman clients trying to make the income tax deadline. Shared moments between many people over a very strong common life, the coastal fishing life. Over the years i guess I've grown to realize that although my own experiences are very important, it's the stories I've been told that are irreplaceable. Those times where i usually just rolled my eyes because "I've heard that story so many times dad" those stories are so important and I will help to keep them going.