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| SHOAL BAY JANUARY 2006 NEWSLETTER
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January 5, 2006. This is a posting you won’t want to miss.
SHOAL BAY NEWSLETTER
shoal bay, e. thurlow island, british columbia, canada, v0p 1b0
January 3, 2006. Late on the last day of 2005 was the highest tide of the entire year. It can be somewhat intimidating with decreasing light on a gray windy winter evening, to find yourself being squeezed between a darkening sky and a rising angry dark sea.
Late this summer over a cold beer I was told a story by a visiting elderly but spry gentleman. He was visiting Shoal Bay with friends on a lovely ketch rigged sailboat. He told me that his first visit to the bay, seventy years ago at the age of 14, was under somewhat different circumstances.
In 1936 Jerome McAllister lived with his parents and eight brothers and sisters in Courtenay, a town on Vancouver Island about 40 to 50 miles south of here. He was told by his mother one morning that he was being taken out of school and sent off to work at a logging camp. Three days later he stepped off a rickety ship with his sack of belongings onto the Government dock in Shoal Bay. Jerome claimed that Shoal Bay at that time was as big as Courtenay and twice as busy. He was given a bunk in a house that held 50 men and slept above another boy who had come in on the same boat as himself. His new friend Jim was the only thing that kept Jerome from immediately packing up and heading home to his mother. Jim was tough, funny and streetwise. According to Jerome, Jim couldn’t read or write but could speak three languages and fart Amazing Grace without missing a note. He had no family and no home, stating that he had been kind of bought and paid for out of a Duncan orphanage by the timber company.
The boys worked side by side greasing up the log “skid” roads that carried the big timber down from the hills by the chugging diesel or steam donkeys. They became inseparable, smoking cigarettes bought from the Chinese miners and flirting with the old whores. On a hot and sunny August day that summer the boys were hard at work on the bottom section of what Jerome seemed sure was the skid road that now makes up the lower part of our gold mine trail. Jerome was confident that it was August, as he claimed that he could still remember the two of them working without their shirts and fighting off the bugs late into the warm workday.
My new friend was relaying his experiences at Shoal Bay with a boyish smile as he explained that on that afternoon as he and Jim planned their evening if all of this hard work would ever come to an end. It had already been a long, hard day. He spoke of how he will never forget the sudden ear-splitting tearing sound screeching over what was the constant din of the machinery. When he looked up in the blink before everything went black he recalled old-timers screaming and lunging in all directions. From what he had been able to piece together since, the main cable that dragged the timber down the trail had snapped sending four monstrous limbed trees thundering down onto the boys. Literally tens of tons of timber, a huge diesel powered skidder and the boys were swept up and crashed into the water where the road met Shoal Bay.
There was no emotion as Jerome went on with his story. The boys were both trapped beneath the rubble but unbelievably they were still alive. Jerome was in a sitting position on the beach with most of the debris above him; his legs were pinned under a massive log and his arm between a log and a piece of machinery somewhat behind him. “I was alive,” Jerome said, “but as I think back upon it, I was in massive pain and shock. My legs were badly crushed and I was subsequently found to have a broken jaw and several broken ribs. Whether it was the jaw, the shock, or a combination of the two, I was totally unable to speak. Jim was on the other side of the log that pinned me; I could hear him but could not see him. Jim was mumbling for help claiming to be unable to move his arm, he was pinned as well.”
Jerome remembers that the sun was starting to go down as fallers, riggers, and all kinds of men from town started clambering around the rubble trying to free the trapped boys. Over the next period of time that Jerome claimed could have been five minutes or could have been an hour he listened to crosscut saws working the timber, men shouting directions and Jim constantly assuring him that they would be out in a jiff. Jerome was in a sitting position. The water was about waist level and perhaps luckily, he could not readily see where his legs were trapped under the water, his left arm bent and jammed between some metal and a log. He was in agony. Jim claimed to be just stuck and not in very much pain at all. His voice seemed very low and strained but he laughed as he continued to talk to Jerome and even chuckled about their situation while working hard to keep his friend’s spirits up. Jerome wondered how Jim could be so very sure that he was even alive, he was incapable of making a sound, and yet Jim hadn’t shut up.
Jerome took a slow swallow of his beer and calmly said that he remembered getting cold. There was all of this activity going on all over the timber, people shouting, saws grinding, the roar of equipment and now the scream of one of the new fancy chainsaws. Jerome was conscious of the cold. He was injured badly and immersed in frigid water. Jerome recalls trying to look down at his waist; he was getting colder because the water was slowly rising. The tide was coming in and the water that was once around his waist was now at his chest. Jim was still talking. He was telling Jerome stories about the home for boys where he lived for years and how no matter, he was never going to go back there. Never. He told Jerome how they would get time off work while they healed up and they could just lay around and smoke cigarettes and play cards. Jim’s speech was strained and coming in weak gasps. Jerome could hear him trying to shift himself around, splashing in the ice cold water. It had grown completely black and the water continued to rise. The water was black. Jim splashed again.
A huge section of ancient timber shifted and rolled away from behind Jerome’s head and the light from several beams shone into his face. A monster of a grizzly faced man screamed that he could reach one! Jerome stared back up at him in silence. The men worked as if possessed. Now there was a chainsaw and a crosscut saw working within inches of Jerome’s battered and bloody face and he could no longer hear Jims chattering or splashing. The noise was deafening. The water now was around his neck and he was cold and certain that he was to drown. It was obvious that the loggers had the same concern. They were everywhere in the darkness, their voices a mosaic of screaming instruction. Jerome remembers another large man moving behind him as yet another huge section of wood was removed. The man put his arms under Jerome’s and tried to hold his head up clear of the rising water. The effort brought on such intense pain from his crushed legs that he very nearly lost consciousness. There were several men trying to saw the log that pinned him through the sea water. Others were digging on either side of him and at times diving completely under the water to do so. He remembers hearing no mention from the screaming men of Jim. The water was now just below his nose and all he could think of was where were are all of the men trying to free Jim? Jerome said that the last thing that he has ever been able to remember was several men pulling him back away from the log in unison and then immediately passing out from the pain.
Jerome stayed on in Shoal Bay for about another month or so. He was moved into a small room in the brothel where the girls all shared in his recovery. “I’ll never forget them all coming down to the dock when they loaded me like cargo onto the boat back to Courtenay. A lot of the girls were sobbing and I remember it being a grand luxurious ship. Like nothing I had ever been on before!” He told us that it was over a year before he walked again and almost as long before he would speak.
Jerome got up from his tale, put down his beer mug and slowly walked over to the railing of our deck. He looked back up the valley and said quietly that he was still here somewhere. When I asked who?..... he turned around, faced us, and calmly said that they had never taken Jim away, that he had been buried right here at Shoal Bay a few days later. Several of the men had come by to see him as he lay healing and told him that Jim had been laid to rest and had a proper internment right there in Shoal Bay with a preacher and all the fixin’s. Big hairy lumberjacks and tough old whores all crying like babes. Shoal Bay had become Jim’s home. He would have no other. Jerome also said that they had all told him Jim had been killed before he ever hit the water, that his chest was hopelessly crushed by the logs in the original crash. “He was buried well under the water when we found him”. Jerome said that he made no effort at speech to correct them. There was no reason to.
He turned back and gazed over the valley where his friend lay and claimed that a big part of himself and who he had become was right out there somewhere beneath those trees. As the rest of us stood along side him looking over the cedars and beach grass that is today’s Shoal Bay, I think we all felt a bit smaller than we had only minutes before. As Jerome walked around the old town site with us trying to remember and point out where different camp buildings might have been, the brothel, the machine shop, the store, and the bunkhouse, we all were hanging on his every thought. We couldn’t get enough.
When I tried to express to Jerome McAllister, my plans and dreams for the future of Shoal Bay, they came out like so much weightless fluff, insignificant next to the heavy stones of a rich history that were his own, and Shoal Bay’s.v
For those who don’t know, Shoal Bay is located on Cordero Channel, a few miles north of Desolation Sound. This once-thriving town is reduced now to a few homes, a public dock, and a facility – we can’t really call it a resort – owned, run and loved by Mark MacDonald, one of the fascinating people on the coast. There are no roads and no public water. Electricity is from a diesel generator. Boaters who don’t stop in while on their way north or south are missing a real treat. –Bob Hale
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