There, almost meeting in mid-air, they exchanged greetings and chitchat that rivalled the excitement and decibels of a teen-age Vancouver audience dissolving at the feet of the current crooner sensation. They shrieked with laughter, groaned with despair. They slapped palms to forehead, swooned, stood rigid, mouths and eyes wide open. They stamped their feet, lifted arms to heaven, whirled round in circles. Their native idiom was no more difficult to understand than which reaction indicated delight, which shock or horror. With literary memories of the impassive, taciturn Indian fixed in my mind, the impression they generated that life in these remote waters was an unbroken series of emotional crises seemed amusing.
At first. As it became plain that they were repeating themselves over and over, I wondered if—subconsciously, of course—these young things could be staging a modern version of the powwow from which their ancestors drew pride and strength and unity of purpose.
Join the Conversation
If, using theiE curled bobs, modern dress, extravagant speech and gestures as weapons, they were not fighting for a secure place in the very way of life their ancestors had fought to reject. As the ship pulled away and the laughter and screaming died, I was sure of it. Both the girls and the boys who had stood wordless but shining-eyed in the background visibly exuded satisfaction and pride in that synthetic demonstration.
Hardly had Cormorant Island fallen behind than the sun burned partially through the overhead haze to silver the sound's low, slow swells and unveil on the west a wall of midnight-blue mountains whose crests and upper slopes were planed with snow. The Insular Mountains of Vancouver Island!
And on the east, the Coast Mountains, now on their northwest diagonal drawing closer to the sea, finally to form the coastline itself, displayed several ermined peaks. Within that handsome frame, a changing scene appeared. Alert Bay, Bella Bella Lower, rounded hills replaced the coned or peaked coastal foothills. Hemlock and spruce replaced Douglas fir.
The forests in general were of visibly poorer quality. Islands became lower and broke up into groups of smaller islands, some almost denuded of trees, their shores a mass of black and grey rocks, softened by golden lichen. One could watch the sea at work, undermining trees, rank by rank, even in the act of carrying them away.
Watch white- fanged breakers gnawing large islands into smaller ones, small ones down to their basic rocks. If Inside Passage's changing scene was varied, often dramatic, equally so were the insights provided by the passengers into the calibre of the men who have built and are building British Columbia. There was Commander, a snowy-haired gentleman of impressive dignity and charm. Seated at a window table in the lounge, he daily poured over scientific tomes written in such technical language that few people could read them.
Yet, born in Lancashire, England, seventy-two years before, he had started to work "in the mill" when he was only ten and so small he had to stand on a box to operate the machines. After three years of working mornings, going to school in the afternoon, he ended his formal education to settle down as a full- time millworker for the rest of his life. Fourteen years later a daring fellow worker proposed that they try their luck in western Canada, then at the last moment backed out. Though Commander never had been outside Lancashire, knew only the name of one town in Canada's west, Saskatoon, he set out alone.
Working on a Saskatoon farm, he heard about Victoria, on the very rim of the Pacific. There, the flash and dash of fire apparatus filled him with desire to join the city's Fire Department. He did, to rise steadily through the years to the title of Chief. When he retired at sixty-five, he knew so much about fire fighting and fire prevention that the Canadian Navy made him a reserve officer and consultant to the Admiral who heads Canada's fire-prevention program in time of war.
In , as a teen-ager, he had fled from Communist Russia to China. During the thirty years before he fled from Communist China to Canada he became a man of standing and property. Both were lost, of course, when the Communists confiscated all privately owned wealth, Chinese and foreign. Even so, as the Communists replaced every foreigner with a Chinese, the nationals of European and American countries could claim protection from their home governments, eventually be assisted to leave. Refugees from Russia's Communism, though good citizens of China for thirty years, had no country. Unless Chinese friends risked their lives to help them secretly, they starved.
BC Historical Books
And many did. Aided by Chinese friends and his knowledge of Chinese custom and languages, Salamander managed to remain alive though twice the Secret Police threw him into prison for long periods. By the second time he knew all the answers, especially the answer to a key question embedded in an endless questionnaire. Salamander's father had been a successful fur merchant in Czarist Russia, but he wrote, "Labourer. Very poor man. Oh, no! Farmer, he is very bad capitalist. He owns land. He pays two-three other mans to work for him.
Before time I smoke because I am so afraid something must go wrong. Now I walk close by soldier or policemans and fear nothing. No man can touch me. I am Canadian. Never by glance, word or gesture did they voluntarily indicate their awareness that any non-Indian was aboard.
My fear that, with forty-three grade and high school youngsters at large, the ship would be a shambles, died early on the vine. Except that the boys' sleek hair became more dishevelled daily as they wrestled over checkerboards and other games, and in "C" deck corridors girlish giggles flowed like running water, they all might have missed the boat. Not until the evening before we reached Prince Rupert did they express their collective presence.
Gathering somewhere below decks, they set the whole ship athrob with the unique beat their clear young voices gave to school songs, hymns, chants, popular favourites old and new.
escort combined propulsion: Topics by www.kitchenbathandhome.com
Then it was passengers and crew who were silent. The teacher in charge of the girls and the young sports instructor in charge of the boys laughed when I spoke of the students' model behaviour and becoming uniforms. The chil- ml dren did want to do the right thing, they agreed, and by June, after nine months of school life far from home, their goodness did reach a peak.
September ships which carry them back to school after a long, undisciplined summer sometimes reach Vancouver slightly the worse for wear. As for the "uniforms" —they were the students' own idea, a fad of the moment. All follow the curriculum and standards of Canadian schools everywhere and the children work hard to meet them, are very proud when they can. In , this Alberni school added a High School Residential Plan, to enable girls and boys to live at the school and attend the city high school in Port Alberni.
- ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS.
- ADJOURNMENT DEBATE.
- List of dramatic television series with LGBT characters: 2010s.
- Canada's music history resource since 1998.
- Movies on TV this week: Sunday, April 26, 2020.
- BC Historical Books.
- Journal Menu ☰.
After hours when only Queen Charlotte Sound's rollers, accompanied by grey skies and a cold breeze from the open Pacific, had filled our view, we entered a wild and lonely world. And to the east, snow-heavy peaks rose six to eight thousand feet from the succession of fjordlike passes that add up to Dean Channel. Even when the ship moved between a leaden sea and a tumbled sky of small white clouds and long grey windrows that threatened to engulf us all in gloom, the scene was impressive.
With sunset it became spectacular. On the dot of nine, the sun, a blazing ball, burned through the clouds above the mountaintops. The windrows fled south. Then as we unwound mile after mile of silver-blue waters, the reflected mountain crests, advancing, withdrawing, engaged in a stately minuet. And the sun, in an ecstasy of light, flung itself among them. Soon it was gone and the snow-capped peaks, flushing gold and crimson, stood out in three-dimensioned beauty. Gradually they faded to orange, burnt sienna and rose, pale lemon and shell pink, while their headlands and slopes melded every shade of blue against a sky that now curved from tourmaline to turquoise.
In that "celestial light," as coastal residents describe it, we rounded the last island to see Bella Bella ahead. Some sixty years ago a colony of Norwegian immigrants crossed Canada to find here the site that most nearly resembled the forested mountains and fjords from which they came. Here they planted orchards and gardens, fished and logged a little. Now they are gone and the orchards are going. Sons and grandsons prefer to fish and log full time. Round them has grown a village, largely peopled by Indian fishermen and their families.
A substantial fish cannery and several small ones logically are the leading industry. But dominating village and inlet is the big white Mission Hospital of the United Church. Again no passengers could go ashore, but there was no need. Bella Bella came to us. Before we arrived, while we remained, even as we drew away, Indians of every type, age, size, dress, wealth or lack of it had come or were coming down the long Alert Bay, Bella Bella pier across the tidal flats. Among them were a dozen white men and women. Unable to see any reason for such a gathering, a passenger waylaid a local resident wandering happily about with an assortment of magazines from the ship's newsstand under his arm, to ask for one.
If you lived in Bella Bella, where would you be tonight? We were ascending Douglas Channel, the mile fjord at whose head stands Kitimat. Kitimat People of the Snow and Kemano Men of the Rock are old Indian names for the youngest of the three great industrial communities now taking advantage of the hydroelectric power this coastal watershed affords. With Powell River and Ocean Falls, they are, in fact, three of Canada's largest industrial enterprises. Because industry is not, to my garden variety of mind at least, an absorbing or even a comprehensible subject, I had thought that to see one of these communities would be to see them all.
But now, remembering the hundreds of miles of green, varied so rarely by small villages, I had reviewed the day before, I was sorry Powell River and Ocean Falls lay behind us. One must see at first hand the distances and wilderness involved to appreciate the dynamic imagination and grand-scale planning, the skills and effort that have gone into making this trio celebrated realities.
House Publications
Powell River and Ocean Falls are the sites of giant paper and pulp mills. Both are beautifully situated. Ocean Falls, almost miles north, overlooks Cousins Inlet. Freight boats from all the world arrive at their long piers. Bag booms filled with millions of feet of logs pattern their harbours.
For different reasons, their company towns are especially interesting. Powell River's, because in the forty-four years of its 24 Powell River, Ocean Falls, Kitimat existence so many employees have bought their homes that it now has lost its title of company town.