Stage Seven - to Telegraph Cove

Our ferry stopped at Sointula again on its traingular way back to Port McNeil.  But it was a glorious day and we sat up top on deck and let the breeze whip through our hair and the view of sea and island and distant mountains fill our senses.  

We were informed the navigation system needed to be recalibrated, so at one point the boat did a balletic 360 right in the middle of the strait.   The view took me back a few years, on a ferry in the southern part of Chile.  It was a bit more populated but the landscape was virtually identical until I arrived in Puerto Montt and saw distant volcanoes smoking instead of British Columbia's snow-capped mountains. 

Getting off I felt like Mole in Wind in the Willows when he passes by his old home after a long time away and becomes both ecstatic and nostagic when he catches his first whiff of it.  For me, the smell of salt water, freshly milled timber and creosote can only mean one thing, that I am back at Telegraph Cove, the place I spend my youthful summers, the home of my grandparents.  That first view of the forest opening out and that smell hitting my nose like a dog smelling a returning master, would presage a bump up onto the boardwarlk and slow rumble over loose boards all the way round to my grandparents' house.

There is no more freshly hewn wood alas, as the mill has been dismantled and built over with shops and an ugly rectangular motel, but if I face to the left I still get the salt and creosote and the view I remember so well, of tiny wooden houses painted brown and green and rust with white around the windows strung along the boardwalk.  No more driving on the boardwalk itself: we parked in the old mill yard, and walked to the house. 

I immediately saw Clara Ogawa (as was) with her brother George and nephew David. Clara and George represent one of the sad stories of the Cove, and of the entire country actually.  They were children at the time of the Second World War, born of Japanese heritage, many even in their third generation.  It is a shameful part of Canada's history that its fear of a potential Japanese invasion, due to Pearl Harbour,  precipitated a mass evacuation of anyone remotely Japanese away from the coast and their homes.  They were given as little as 48 hours to pack a bag and be ready for transport.  Homes and furniture were to be left behind, as were friends, colleagues, and businesses.   Many of these people had been instrumental in developing B.C.'s coast and its salmon industry, and now they were just wrenched away without a thought, treated like criminals.  Huge intern camps were set up in the interior, in the Okanagan and the Kootenays and the Caribou.  After the War most stayed inland, as they had learned agriculture and become farmers.  One generation later, my generation, Japanese orcharists and hot house farmers were ubiquitous. 

It actually took about 45 minutes for us to get from the car park to the house, as we were greeted at every turn by someone who wanted a chat. Clara and George of course, then proprietors Marilyn and Gordie Graham, then Marvin and Evie Farrant, who are part of this place almost as much as the Wastells, my family. And Lorraine, Jimmy and Thelma's daughter (Thelma ran the post office and Jimmy was first mate to my grandfather) who had her own grown up daughter with her. Then Jim Borrowman who arrived with his son by boat.


The original lineman's shack jacked up to add a new storey underneath

Almost at the end of that curving stretch of planks we climbed a very long staircase to the house my grandfather moved his young wife and baby girl  (my aunt Pat) into so many years ago.  Of course it was only a two room shack back then, and over the years had an extension added, then a second storey, and then a sunroom.



As I remember it in the 70s







It is now a bed and breakfast,  and we have been assigned room #2,  the room that used to be the kitchen. Very appropriate given the amount of time I spent in there, making Grandpa's morning porridge, which I never got quite right. Then endless batches of cookies every day. Lunch, dinner, Granny's tea time, etc. etc.  On the left of the room now, by the bed, there used to be a large and ancient wood stove, a tricky oven below and a smooth iron suface which was always warm and contained a full kettle at the back ready for tea.  It also had a cupboard-like space above to keep plates or dishes of food warm.  That stove was the only source of heat in the house, it heated the water, and dried the laundry.  Above the old table and window seat that faced the stove there had been a wooden rack that could be pulleyed down to drape wet clothes that needed to dry.  Of course in the summer we hung the clothes on a line outside, but I preferred to think about those cold winter days, with the smell of freshly washed clothes steaming in the kitchen.

Room #2 as it is now

The old living room and dining room and sun room are now common roms for guests. No one else had checked in yet so I peeped into all the rooms and spaces. 




The dining room used to have
a door into the kitchen where the sideboard is

the living room is pretty much unchanged

the only thing different here is the view

The deck, off our room, is as it was in my memory, dirty and horrible rippled plastic roof and all. Well, there is one thing missing, a wall of ivy that used to wind its way inside.  One of me long ago summer jobs was to pull it out of the window frames in Granny's bedroom every summer. I'm surprised it didn't pull the house down!  But wait a mintue, there it is!  In a small corner I can see a tiny tendril of ivy starting to emerge up from the space between the floor and wall. I felt too charitable and nostalgic to remove it.

the deck, minus the ivy wall

We unpacked and changed and then went down to the pub, built in the old wood shed, already packed with people.  We found the only unoccupied place, a table for two pressed against the side wall, perfect for a Guinness  and a chat with whoever passed by on the way to the bathroom.  This old woodshed is the perfect place to build a pub, next to the general store and post office (now a coffee shop) and build on pilings looking out over the Cove.  The walls contained photos of the early days, and a few items scavenged from the mill before it was dismantled.  That was the only thing I was a bit sad about, that they didn't save the mill.  It would have been a great place to have a museum, or some other gathering place, instead of the eyesore motel.  Neither my grandmother nor my great grandmother would have approved a pub serving alcohol in the Cove though, and it's probably a good thing there are no photos of either of them here.

Before turning in I wanted to do one more circuit of the boardwalk for old times' sake, the boardwalk we used to cruise along, all us kids, until it was dark. That was the order for returning to the house for bed. The sun did what it could to prolong our time outside, especially those long early nights of summer, when the dusk hung like a curtain that slowly closed, denying the impending dark until finally even we had to admit surrender and regretfully return home. 

It was raining this night, and I remember many, many rainy nights in the past when we walked to the dock to watch the rain on the sea, and then walked to the mill's open burner to get warm. Just  hanging out and talking. Except there is no burner any more either.  But from its site I look across to the part of the place that is here and freely admit it looks better than it ever did in my grandarents' day.  Warm yellow lights flickered out from cabin windows and after awhile I walked slowly back to add to them.



Telegraph Cove in summer dusk