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happen to a human being. And I was her baby, the first-born, her only link to my father when they were separated for long periods and distances in their early years together. She had already endured the loneliness and isolation as a beautiful young woman coming to Canada and living alone with a child in Edmonton, then fledgling Vancouver, while my father toiled in constant danger in remote lumber camps in northern Alberta, then northern Vancouver Island, before forming a successful construction company.
    As a tow-headed farm boy, my father had been flung into the horrors of fighting for his beloved Latvia and then into camps as a Displaced Person. He later followed his heart as a gifted musician and arranger in northern England, where he met and married my mother and I was born. And now they were two middle-aged mismatched folks living quietly in the middle of 160 acres of high pine forest in the middle of the Big Bar ranching district where my father had finally found home.
    He was not frightened or worried about me, believing in his deep Nordic heart that Mother Nature would always keep me safe and bring me home to him again. He hung on every word of my colourful stories, sky-blue eyes shining with chip-off-the-old-block pride. Before the fishing season, the last thing he’d said when he crushed me in his hug was “Remember to call your mother—this is going to be tough for her. Write me a letter now and again. You write as good as you talk.”
    If I’d known how early he would be taken from us, I’m not sure I would have let that hug go. But what he held closest to his heart was knowing that I carried his spirit of survival and a hunger for life.
    â€œHey, how about rustling up some grub, there, deckie,” Paul said, smiling, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the galley. “That porridge ain’t gonna cook itself and we have another couple of hours before we get to Bull Harbour.”
    â€œAye-aye, Captain Honey.” I saluted smartly.
    â€œI’ll have ye keelhauled for insubordination.”
    â€œYou’ll have to catch me first,” I said, relieved that his brooding had lifted. He and Mother Nature had a lot in common.
    Keeping the cranky old oil stove on an even keel was an art and a science in itself, similar to turning lead into gold. It was either blasting hot or barely warm and went out completely when it got rough. My experience drawing machine-engineering spec sheets for a living was definitely coming in handy now, if for nothing else than to save me from being completely mystified.
    While he ate at the wheel, I took my bowl out to the deck and sat on the hatch cover in my jeans, gumboots and three sweaters, and watched my Brave New World open up and slide by. Land gave way to sea and horizon, at times completely—a very odd thing for a girl brought up in a city of mountains and rivers and the high sierras of the BC Interior. I was no stranger to the waters by canoe and sailboat, but the next five months were as unknowable as the ocean horizon that revealed the curvature of the earth.

    Entering Bull Harbour off Goletas Channel was like one of those old King Kong movies where people stumbled upon a secret world tucked away from time and the familiar. Just when I thought we’d be flung out into the wild open seas beyond the channel, we slipped into a subtle little opening that wound a bit left, then right, and suddenly stunned us with a spacious bay carved into the port side of Hope Island—the last stop on the way to the Queen Charlotte Islands, two treacherous days north.
    Glassy water reflected the low-slung land furred with trees dwarfed by powerful winds. Today it was a bustling place of fishboats loading and unloading, coming and going, from the two enormous barges that held an entire fish camp of ice houses, storage, general store, office, fuel tanks, water systems and floats. The portable factory town was owned and operated by BC Packers,