Negotiating Nootka
Kayaking British Columbia's Vancouver Island

Late that night, puttering around the kitchen, Kevin and Adam heard a woman's voice coming from Mark's tent. They looked at each other conspiratorially. There were four women in our group, but Mark's wife wasn't one of them. Then they realized it was the weather radio, a looped forecast read by a woman.

The next morning they joked with him about "the weather lady," and Mark, still a little bleary, had sighed, "Ooh, she's sexy."

We all laughed, and Mark admitted he'd spent far too much time in the wilderness alone listening to the forecast. "Well, have you seen a photo of her?" I asked. More laughter. "She's a computer," Mark said. I hadn't known.

Apparently, however, her accuracy was less acute than her sex appeal, because the predicted gale never materialized. So we headed off across the sound toward the village of Yuquot in the normal cold drizzle. Our first stop was a narrow inlet called Boca del Infierno, roughly translated, "mouth of Hell," probably named for it's devilish narrowness that accelerates currents passing through the 100-yard-long gorge. We'd ridden the current down into the large lagoon inside and stopped for a lunch of salami, salmon, and crackers on a small peninsula beside a feeder creek.

John Jewitt, one of the two Boston survivors, had probably been to the same spot. One of his duties as a captive had been to procure firewood for the settlement, which at that time was a bustling community of 1500. He'd been spared by Maquinna, the Nu-cha-nulth chief, because, as the ship's armorer, he was useful in making metal tools like daggers and whaling harpoons. When, the day after the attack, it was discovered that the Boston's sailmaker, a relatively old man of 40, had survived the attack by hiding himself somewhere on board, Jewitt claimed the man was his father and begged for his life to be spared.

The Boston incident was the only such attack. A small argument when Maquinna visited the Boston was apparently the proverbial last straw—Maquinna's son had been killed in a dispute on board a Spanish ship some years earlier, and Maquinna himself nearly died in a prank when a sailor ignited gunpowder beneath the chair he was sitting in on board an English ship.

The two Boston survivors lived among the Nu-cha-nulth for three years, Jewitt forming a close bond with the chief and eventually taking a wife and fathering a child. But when an American ship finally did arrive at Yuquot, drawn there by a note Jewitt had written that was passed along by a sympathetic chief from another tribe, he didn't hesitate to escape and leave his wife and child behind. Eventually, Jewitt settled on the East Coast of the U.S. and made a patchy living peddling written accounts of his captivity. The primary account, White Slaves of Maquinna, is considered a valuable ethnographic account of original Pacific Northwest native culture.

Today, the village of Yuquot is occupied by only a handful of people—a single Nu-cha-nulth family and the keepers stationed there to run the lighthouse. We paddled into Friendly Cove, Yuquot's harbor, but because the wind was getting up, we decided to head back to camp without landing. That night we huddled in the kitchen, clustered around the Dutch ovens, which, arrayed with charcoal briquettes, were a decent stand-in for a campfire. We passed around mugs of bag wine and hot chocolate spiked with whiskey, laughed and told stories. Mark swore for the 10th time that September is normally roofing season, when locals put on new shingles because they know it never rains that month. He also told us about the last trip he'd led—the worst of his guiding career.

They'd had perfect, cloudless weather, but the group had consisted of two different parties—a tight knit family with adult children and two wealthy women who had apparently expected something a bit less primitive than sleeping in tents and paddling their own kayaks, and had taken their disappointment out on the group. One of the kids proposed to his girlfriend on the trip, and even as they sat around at dinner that night admiring her ring and basking in the good feelings, the sourest of the women had said to the bride-to-be, "You know, it's still not too late to find yourself a rich husband." Things deteriorated from there.

By contrast, our camp was filled with joking. I'd head off to my tent to do some reading, only to be drawn back to the kitchen by peals of laughter. As we were passing around plates of Mark's chicken curry, with the Dutch oven chocolate cake rounding into form at our feet, Kevin suddenly blurted out, "This is awesome!" And it was, strange to say. There was a real sense of accomplishment within the group, that we were enjoying ourselves despite the weather. We'd each had to make a conscious decision to keep a good attitude. I felt as proud of our group as if we'd pulled off a 10-mile crossing in big seas. Nonethless, we decided we'd had enough of the rain still lashing our kitchen tarps and decided to head in a day early.

The next morning, of course, the weather improved to partly cloudy. But when the clouds pulled back from the peaks surrounding the sound, we spotted freshly fallen snow. We piled on layers and clapped wool caps on our heads as we paddled the long way around Bligh Island, piling on the miles I had been craving to paddle all week. At the most seaward point we rose and fell on the big swell and steered clear of the rocks where they broke in huge plumes of foam. It was there on the point that I finally spotted my first sea otter. Due to the fur trade, the animals were wiped out on Vancouver Island by 1911. But since their re-introduction in 1969, they'd been flourishing. It seemed a fitting symbol for all of Nootka as the region makes its unsteady way into a more balanced economy. The otter poked his rough-furred head up from between strands of kelp near the crest of a swell and stared at me a long second. Then, perhaps knowing better, when the swell passed, the otter was nowhere to be seen.