BY KERRY MCPHEDRAN
"Scenic thrills, no haute frills" Page 2
After the crew unloads a mass of boom chains, Kirk borrows a crew cab we've just delivered to shuttle our group to the old Halliday homestead. The old buildings, overgrown with giant rasberry canes and white hydrangea, lie on a grassy delta at the head of the 32-kilometre inlet. The Hallidays rowed up the inlet from Comox in the 1890s and stayed almost 100 years. I can see why. Canada geese vee by, a deer stands motionless, and wild cattle lift their grazing heads from the meadows to watch us. The peace is palpable.
That night, making our way back down Kingcome Inlet, we're strangely quiet. Solitude is a gift the Aurora Explorer offers. In peaceful solitude we discover inspiration, insigh, a restorative calm. Beyond repose, if we're lucky, lies self-discovery.
On Monday we wake to a socked-in Knigh Inlet. But the mist soon lifts, revealing the wet, rich, wild, green-and-black splendour of the inlet's cliffs and waterfalls. We make a dog leg to hunt for five pictographs Matthews has read about in Upcoast Summers, 1930s account of the area by Fraser Barkley. We find and photograph a few of the historic markings before the fog rolls back in.
We move blindly until the first mate picks up a boom on the radar. A sign looms out of the milky whiteness: "Welcome to Paragon Camp." Beyond is Helifor's massive, metallic, self-contained, floating helicopter logging camp, complete with maintenance shops and a heliport. It's a sureal encounter, like floating into a scene from director Kevin Costner's apocalyptic Waterworld.
Tuesday is our last day, and, incidentally, my birthday. In celebration, I scrub my birthday suit in the deliciously hot shower, and Sawatzky bakes a cake. We're on the downhill slide. The weather has been against us all the way -- outflow in all the inlets -- and even now, heading home into Johnstone Strait, we're up against a southeasterly. We can't afford to linger.
Industry beings to intrude. Tugboats with booms, trollers, sailboats, and cabin cruisers steam by. The wind has died, the chop flattens, and we power through the early evening. Venus burns yellow in the east, pulling me home. I feel the tug of Kingcome Inlet still.