The Martlet

I was the first one to get to the cabin.

I wasn’t the strongest paddler out of the three of us, but I was the most cold and wet, so that day, I was the fastest.

I thought packing my winter ski jacket and borrowing a pair of rain pants that were too small for me would protect from the insane weather that sweeps through Haida Gwaii.

I was wrong.

As Whitney, our old friend since high school and guide for this trip, told us on the first day, “Only rubber girls. Only rubber out here.”She came to the airport with a pair of gumboots for each of us and insisted we put them on right away.

Whitney had been working as a cook on a floating cabin and as a kayak guide for four summers on Hadia Gwaii.

A few months earlier she had invited me and Jeanine to come on a week kayaking trip with her before she had to start work. We would borrow her company’s kayaks and pay them back with physical labour when we returned. How could we turn it down?

When I rounded the bend into the entrance to Buck Channel — a tiny passage that would take us back to Queen Charlotte City — the rain storm had soaked through all my layers. Jeanine and Whitney had stopped a few hundred meters back to watch a baby seal that was playing between their kayaks.

That’s when I saw the cabin. I steered to shore, snuck up the wooden steps and peered through the Plexiglas on the door. If someone is living here, I thought, they better friggin’ invite me in for some hot cocoa.

There was a sign hanging on the back wall and if I squinted, I could just make out the words.

[i]We built this cozy cabin Through a summer and a fall A place for us to come to Just to get away from it all. And with you, our house guests, We are very pleased to share. But most weekends are for us So please don’t hesitate, If we happen to appear And ask you to please vacate.[/i]

Not only had these people thought up a clever rhyming scheme for their welcome message, they had embroidered the whole with thing with baby blue thread and framed it.

But was it a weekend? I couldn’t remember.

I opened the front door and stepped inside. It smelled mouldy and damp.

There was a woodstove with an old kettle on top, three bare mattresses and a table with a beeswax candle in the middle of it.

The kitchen cupboards were full of canned beans and soups, half-empty jars of peanut-butter and wine corks. There was a dead mouse in a bucket of water under the sink.

I watched out the window as Jeanine and Whitney pulled their kayaks ashore.

It seemed like all three of us were looking for something on this trip. Jeanine was stuck with a hefty student loan and the only way to pay it off was to put on a black blazer, pair of pantyhose and chug away at an office job she didn’t like. Whitney had just gotten out of a seven-year relationship and was slowly figuring out how to live by herself. I had just moved for a job to a little retirement village on the Sunshine Coast and was yearning for any sort of human interaction.

I was lonely, but afraid to admit it.

“So, what do you think?” Whitney said after stripping down to her underwear, hanging her wet clothes above the stove and lighting a joint. “Should we keep on going, or stay here for the night?”

It was only noon, but our vote was unanimous: we would stay.

I went straight to the guestbook and found that both kayakers and locals on their own boats had been coming here for dozens of years.

One woman said she came to Hadia Gwaii from Vancouver to quit smoking, stumbled upon this cabin and had been living in it, by herself, for two weeks nicotine-free. A group of Germans had written out a set of cabin rules. 1. Only eat the nutella when sitting in bed. 2. Put sheets on the bed please if you’re going to fuck....

Jeanine gave us tarot readings. Whitney plucked a pot of wild sea asparagus from the intertidal zone and fried it up with butter, garlic and tomato.

It wasn’t until all the daylight had disappeared that we heard the cough of the motor. We saw a small boat pull up the shore. Two large men got out.

“Shit,” I said. “The owners.”

We slipped out gumboots over our flannel pajamas and stumbled out to the rainy shore.

“We’re so sorry,” Whitney said as we approached the men. “We can leave.”

I wondered where she thought we would go at this time of night.

I looked at the men. One was in his 50s, a bit chubby and wearing a flannel shirt and a baseball cap. The other man was even larger but didn’t look much older than us. He looked like a Gus.

“Geez,” the older one — we’ll call him Chuck - said. “We ‘aint kickin’ ya out.” He had a six-pack of Lucky in his hand and threw a can to each of us.

We learned that they weren’t the owners at all, but a couple of fishermen whose motor had broken and were floating with the current to find somewhere to sleep for the night.

“Naw, the owners are dead,” Chuck said. “Long dead.”

He swayed in the dark cabin and smelt like sweat and warm beer.

“So what are you fine ladies doing out here in the middla nowhere?” he asked. “Who put you up to this?”

I really didn’t want them to stay in the cabin with us for the night, but where would they go? I didn’t feel threatened, exactly, by these fisherman, but they did make me feel...on guard.

Gus had already kicked off his boots and was handing us granola bars and chocolate covered almonds, as if we had been lost in the woods for weeks. “Well,” Whitney started, “we wanted to go on a kayak trip.”

There was a moment of silence. Whitney giggled and looked at Jeanine for help.

“So here we are,” she finished.

Silence, again.

Maybe the fisherman could sense our inhibition or maybe we were just killing their beer buzz, but I was surprised when Gus, who hadn’t said a word up to this point, suggested they get going.

Chuck looked at Jeanine for a moment too long.

“Fine,” he mumbled, struggling to put his boots back on.

We watched out the window and Chuck and Gus floated down the channel and towards the mouth of the Pacific.

“I feel kind of bad,” Jeanine said, “Where are they going to go?”

“Oh, they’ll be just fine,” Whitney replied, as if she had run into these type before.

We stocked the fire until it was roaring hot, brushed our teeth, spat out the front door and climbed into our sleeping bags.

I fell asleep quickly that night, listening to the rain hit the roof and the steady rhythm of the girls’ breath.