We found out that Gold River was built in 1965 to house the workers for a pulp mill being built 13km away at the dock. Joan had mentioned that the town seemed to "lack a soul" and that explained it. The town hasn't earned any character yet.
July 26-30
We found out that Gold River was built in 1965 to house the workers for a pulp mill being built 13km away at the dock. Joan had mentioned that the town seemed to "lack a soul" and that explained it. The town hasn't earned any character yet.
Gold River was definitely a low point. The trailer park we camped in was a little weird, though the owner, a Scottish fellow, took to Eric and gave us a discount. (He had been an electrician in the pulp mill and recently retired. He had a fancy synthesizer, a computer, and he told me all about the great electronics on his boat.)
We spent Monday (Jul. 28) lazing in the tent, reading, and talking on the phone to Eric's parents and brother Bob. Who is finally quitting! Eric reminded his parents that now three of their children are mostly unemployed--Katy, who is quitting Arriba after 11 years; Bob, who quit his civilian Navy job after at least 9 years; and of course, Eric, who is often unemployed anyway.
Tuesday morning we got up early, eager to get the hell out of town. We were especially leery of getting more flats, since we had used up our patch kits, and could only find iffy patch kits in Gold River. Other than that we had two tubes. So we figured we could risk two flats, maybe three if one of those funny looking patch kits worked.
I was taking down the tent when Eric said he got a flat. He hadn't even moved his bike. All he did was try to add some air to his front tire, whereupon our valve-eating pump bent his valve. That was like his ninth flat. Not that we're keeping count. We used one of our spares and prayed that we'd only get one flat before Port Hardy, at the north end of the island. The odds were way against us, because the road between us and Port Hardy included a 42k dirt road out of Zeballos, a tiny old gold mining town. To give you a comparison, Eric got 4 flats on a 17k dirt road into Gold River. So we figured we'd end up walking.
Anyway, Tuesday morning, we were so happy to be leaving that we didn't dwell too much on the long walk ahead. After fixing Eric's flat we rode 13k to the docks where we got on the M.V. Uchuck III, an 1940s era U.S. Navy minesweeper. Now the Uchuck is a cargo boat, picking up and dropping off all sorts of stuff--port-a-potties, washing machines in little logging camps and one- and two-house outpusts in the bush of the Nootka Sound. These are the same waters that Captain Cook and (and his 1st lt. Bligh) sailed 220 years ago. We went by islands named after them and their men. Eric swapped book recommendations with a young mate on the Uchuck, who is also a fan of Hornblower books. The guy has a great job for a Hornblower fan. You get to operate this old freighter in and out of historic places. The boat operates just like it would have in the 40's except now tourist like us pay to go along.
It was a fantastic ride. It cost $51 for both of us and our bikes, which is a total steal for a ride on that Sound. We also got a kick out of watching the boat drop off its cargo. Eric was especially taken with "sidewinders," these little meter-maid motorcycle-sized tugboats that pull and push and nudge logs around on the surface of the water. The guys driving those things can tip over 45 degrees and not fall in. They make jet skis look like clumsy barges.
[Eric: I watched for quite awhile as the sidewinder did his work. I asked an older fellow standing next ot me what he thought the guy was doing. It turned out this fellow had worked for years at a mill in Washington state and he knew exactly what was going on and explained it to me. It turns out that the driver of the sidewinder is called a "boom man" and he puts together "barges", sometimes called "stows" of logs. The barges are just huge rectangles of logs, the sides of which are made of logs chained together at each end. The boom man makes a long skinny rectangle with one narrow end open. The longing trucks come and dump their load into the water and the boom man pushes the loose logs into the rectangle. When its full, he closes the end and tows it away from shore where a tug comes and drags it to a mill. In 20 minutes we watched the boom man do what retired fellow said used to take six men an hour, of course they were only making $7 a day back then. Soon we would meet a boom man who had driven sidewinders.]
We got into Tahsis late, around 3 p.m. Tahsis is like mecca for U.S. fishermen. We saw a whole bunch of folks from the U.S. up there at the marina, pulling in with 30 to 42-pound salmon. Those fish made the Quetico crew catches look like appetizers. Eric weighed himself on a fish scale and noted that after more than 400 miles, he'd lost five pounds. (In comparison, he lost 10 during Pepe le Hugh's weight loss clinic, the Quetico trip).
Our biggest goal in Tahsis was getting out. We had to get to Zeballos because there is a road out of there back to the east side of the island. The Uchuck doesn't stop there anymore because the dock burned down -- in 1985! Even though Zeballos is only 10 miles as the crow flies from Tahsis, there is no road because of the mountains.
We had been told we could get a water taxi to Zeballos for $90. Ouch. It was either that or swim. So we decided to call a taxi. Only you can't call a water taxi. First of all, if you try from a payphone, it costs C$2.05 a minute. Luckily, we got the nice lady who runs the Tahsis marina to call for us. She called and left lots of messages and they didn't call her back. We waited around at the marina for hours, until the lady arranged for a log salvaging boat, which sometimes ferries loggers to their camps, to pick us up.
Our taxi driver, Bill Coates, arrived in a tiny aluminum boat. The back of it was just big enough to fit the bikes. We climbed over them into the console and learned about his sweet deal. He was a logger (he had been a sidewinder driver) for 22 years, but his mill was being sold, and it was laying off workers because of computers had reduced the need for them, he said. So, they were going to pay him up to C$20k, or $1600 a month, to go to school and get a degree. They were also going to give him severance of 21 weeks salary (he said he made around $22.50 an hour), and buy his house from him so he could move to Campbell River, where he'd go to college. Bill is head of some group that watches for poachers on Vancouver Island, and he was pretty happy to get retrained. He's going to take forestry management, and become a planner of some sort. He was a real nice guy and we were glad he got a great deal. Oddly, he said he liked Tahsis so much that he never got out, and hadn't been to Zeballos for 10 years--even though it's just a 45 minute boat ride away.
He dropped us off in Zeballos. Zeballos is sort of like Sonora, Calif., without the attractions for tourists. It's an old goldmining town. When the California Gold Rush slowed down in the 1850s, miners flocked to the Zeballos area. The place totally boomed. At one point there were 1500 people. Then the gold ran out and within three years, the population dwindled to 35. Now it has about 250 people, mostly affiliated with the logging industry.
Dinner and breakfast the following day were a total adventure. We went to this place called the Iris Lodge, run by a Bulgarian guy and his sister, who just moved from Toronto to help him out by cooking and waiting tables. We asked her how she liked Zeballos. She gave us this priceless east-European look of despair. "It's terrible" she said with her thick accent. Then she quickly added, "oh it's great to vacation and fish and things like that." But it's not like Toronto.
They tried to decorate the place like a Canadian hunting/fishing lodge but it it just didn't work. There were a few cheesy pictures of wildlife scenes but they were small and kind of high up on the wall. There were some stuffed animals, not like moose heads but like childs toys. There was a bear skin hanging on one wall and some unmatched living room furniture. All this in a freshly dry-walled white interior. It looked like a Bulgarian with no money had tried to make it look like a lodge.
After we got back to our tent we realized we forgot to leave a tip for this poor women who we felt bad for. So we decided to go again for breakfast so we could make it up to her.
Apparently the Bulgarian guy is in trouble. While we were trying to eat breakfast on Wed. (7-30), the guy started hammering and sawing away, trying to fix a sink. We felt like we were eating at a construction site. Then the phone rang. For the next 30 minutes, we heard the Bulgarian guy yelling at one of his contractors, saying things like "stop bullshitting me" and complaining about inspectors from Victoria who might shut him down. It was so bad it was comical.
The only road out of Zeballos is the dreaded 42k gravel road that meets up with Vancouver's main highway about 45k south of Port McNeil. We got on the road with dread, seeing as we had only one spare tube. Eric said he'd be happy if he made it to the first bridge (about 2k) without a flat. He did. Neither of us remarked on his luck because we didn't want to jinx anything. We kept riding and riding, up hills and down them, and marvelling at how nice the road was compared to the gravel road near Gold River. At times it seemed like it was actually paved with a layer of gravel over it. We saw beautiful lakes and not-so-beautiful clear cuts. We rang our bells as we rode to avoid surprizing any bears. By around 1:30 p.m. we made it to the island highway with NO flats. That was so amazing. We stopped for a quick lunch and then rode another 45k to Port McNeill, where we hopped a late ferry to Alert Bay.
Next: Our adventures in Alert Bay with a half-Cree, half-Slovakian ex-taxi driver who's now a fisherman.
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