BY KERRY MCPHEDRAN

"Scenic thrills, no haute frills" Page 3

 

Orcas don't appear on our voyage, but deer, bears, and Pacific white-sided dolphins do, and we hear the cries of loons and the high giggle of soaring eagles. As we wind toward Kingcome Inlet through the Broughton archipelago, delight after delight unfolds. Mists swirl up through the hillsides like smoke from damp leaf fires. Passing fisherman wave lazy red-checked arms from their wheelhouses. Caught in a strange euphoric time warp here in our ocean capsule, we listen attentively and watch the world go by.

The real show comes when the crew and hydraulic crane load and unload freight at places such as Scott Cove, Lull Bay, Blind Creek, and Sir Edmund Bay. It is curiously mesmerizing to watch these men move cargo, juggling space, weight, and tides with ingenuity and familiar ease. And with no help on this trip. Despite this unseasonably cool week in August, the forest fire hazard is still high and most logging camps are closed. A note on one deserted shore requests: "Leave freight above high water mark."

Matthews speaks positively about the ecological efforts he sees forest companies such as International Forest Products making these days.Efforts that go beyond leaving treed hilltops and buffer zones along the beaches. "We see it in the back haul," he says. "We're now taking out things that were left in the bush before -- oil barrels, used oil, scrap metal, old vehicles, wire, cable, and batteries."

Despite its bulky cargo, the flat-bottomed Explorer is remarkably stable, even in a slight chop. We have opportunity to admire the sturdy little vessel -- built in 1972 in Hay River, NWT, as a seismic survey vessel -- when we take on our biggest load at Sallie Creek. The 30-tonne D8 Caterpillar, bound for another logging camp at Call Inlet, depresses the barge's bow dramatically as it lumbers on, its four-metre blade narrowly clearing the vessel.

Aurora Explorer may not be big, but she carries herself with a certain royal air. Our skipper recalls an incident when the Explorer came up Jervis Inlet into Egmont. A little girl standing on the dock was overwhelmed by the barge's relative size as it prepared to come alongside. As passengers waved cheerily from the upper deck, the little girl inquired earnestly, "Is the Queen on board?"

By Sunday we're powering at six knots down an inland sea the remarkable pale green of melted celadon: glacial-fed Kingcome Inlet. Here, 600-metre cliffs plunge 100 fathoms into the sea. Craven's novel describes it perfectly: "The firs that covered the mountainsides grew so precisely to the high tide line that now, at slack, the upcoast of British Columbia showed its bones in a straight selvage of wet, dark rock." First mate Ted Kirk, on watch, nods toward the trees' salt-stunted branches. "We used to tell Alberta sport fishermen who didn't know an inlet from a lake that Environment Canada came in each year and trimmed them as a beautification project."

We make our way up the inlet, then along the dreamy Kingcome River overhung with willows and alder. It's raining hard by the time we stop at the Interfor camp, 1.5 kilometres shy of the Tsawataineuk village. Two men arrive in an aluminum skiff to pick up books for Little Wolf Preschool.

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