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repairs and we still had to get to the BC Packers fish camp in Bull Harbour on Hope Island a few more hours north. We would leave exploring Hardy’s handful of streets and infamous hotel bars, the wharf-side Seagate and the uptown Thunderbird, for another trip. I had a feeling they would out-weird and out-rough even the crazy bars in the outposts of Ucluelet and Tofino on Vancouver Island’s west coast. We needed to start fishing and making some money very, very soon, and if the weather calmed down the next day, we would head up to Bull Harbour and do just that. That night in my bunk I felt like an arrow vibrating with energy and ready to spring from the bow.

Bull Harbour
    I thought Italians were intense! My mother had nothing on Mother Nature, who had cleaned house overnight in a fury of wind and rain until even this tawdry little town shone and fluttered in the soft morning light. All the sullen grey had been swept and scoured away to reveal a world transformed. She had trotted out her best greens and blues and sparkling whites to show off her lovely home as if in preparation for company.
    We sped over the rippling bay and out into the stunningly calm Goletas Channel that would lead us another three hours north to Bull Harbour. I mused on what Mother Nature might be celebrating today and leaned against Paul in companionable silence as he sat and steered the boat. My eyes drifted from the hypnotic sparkling seas over to the Royal Bank calendar, a few feet to my right, thumbtacked to the varnished wall of the wheelhouse under the depth sounder. May’s picture was a Saskatchewan wheat farmer seeding his endlessly rolling furrowed land, and here I was in another world, yet the same country. Amazing. Not so different, really: he was making his living from the land too. We were both working to feed the world. Working from the sweat of our brows with nature’s rhythms and bounties in a simple, honest way—it doesn’t get much nobler than that. I was just about to remark on this when I suddenly snapped to attention.
    â€œHoly shit, Paul, it’s Mother’s Day! I can’t believe we’ve only been gone five days. It feels like five months. Look, it’s May 18th. I’ve got to get hold of Mum and Dad to let them know I’m okay. She will be freaking. Is there a phone at the camp I could use and reverse charges?”
    â€œWe’ll have to see when we get there. The camp is barged in every year by tugs and things can change. Depends on who’s managing and if they have a decent connection after that storm. Maybe you can ask the manager if you can use his phone real quick. He might be sympathetic to a cute girl who wants to call her mum on Mother’s Day,” he said with a grin.
    We did have some capacity for long-distance calls on our radio telephone, but it was incredibly expensive, especially to Clinton, in the Cariboo region of BC’s interior where my parents had retired. It was only for extreme emergencies because the call would have to go through the Coast Guard and be patched into BC Tel. I had told my mum that if they ever received a patched call it would be very serious, which had reduced her to heartbreaking tears. There were other phones that could be patched straight into the telephone system, but they were a fortune and, needless to say, we couldn’t afford one—or the calls.
    My mother, who had suffered through countless sleepless nights over my adventures, had been completely beside herself when I told her and Dad that I was going commercial fishing with Paul up north. Whitewater canoeing for a weekend was one thing, but a boat in the middle of nowhere, where every imaginable (and she had a great imagination) thing could maim or kill you in an instant? That was more than she could bear. She had already seen and experienced unimaginable suffering and destruction growing up in northern Italy during the Second World War and knew all too well what could