After sleeping in a swimming pool for the night, I’ve never seen such a welcome sight as my uncle and cousin driving the skiff to shore with a pot of coffee in hand. Add a splash of Bailey’s and life was good again.
Tuesday was supposed to be spent exploring the areas that the siblings remembered best. It was going to be a long day on the boat to see everything on the list, so we all packed up and headed to the boat for breakfast. Only to find out that while the tide had gone out, the boat had become stuck on the bottom. Sigh. So after breakfast I crawled into the fo’c’sle for a mid-morning nap. A couple hours later I found myself peering over the back of the boat with my aunt, trying to estimate how many more inches of water we needed to get unstuck. Meanwhile people went fishing or kayaking, napped or found a spot to bask in the sun when it came out intermittently.
Finally, around noon, we were able to get on our way. I was a little worried about getting seasick again, although the water in the inlet was considerably smoother, the memory of hanging off the side of the boat was fresh in my memory. As it turns out, nature took pity on me and provided a distraction. Whales! And lots of them. We had so much fun chugging down the inlet watching the whales. Not only did we see the mist from the blowholes, we saw their noses and backs and their tales. No breeching, but this was still pretty amazing. Since it was raining again at this point, the majority of us were crowded inside. One cousin woke up her sleeping baby when she hopped up out of her seat to yell “Whale!” At one point I shouted, “Whale, one o’clock!” And my youngest cousin, who is 8, says in response, “but I don’t know what that means,” with dramatic despair. This turned out to be one of the best quotes of the trip.
After the whales, we motored to the old Tukush settlement. After having been on the boat for hours, while stuck to the bottom and traveling, we were anxious to get off and look for artifacts. In my mind I was picturing us finding ancient pottery and arrowheads. What we found was crap. Old soles of shoes, metal and glass was everywhere. It was so overgrown it was hard to explore too far. It’s amazing how the government can decide that a tribe will be better off somewhere else and just move an entire settlement of people. And leave behind nothing but junk.
Since the old Tukush settlement didn’t hold much excitement, and it had started pouring again, we motored further up the inlet towards Boswell, which was the last place the logging camp was stationed and where it was for the longest period of time. Boswell is completely abandoned now, but you can still see the pilings from and old cannery and fuel station. As we turned a corner, almost in unison, the siblings said “there’s the island!” Clearly we were almost there. Camp had been settled in a naturally protected inlet. There was a long peninsula jutting out from the land that acted as a natural breakwater. With log booms on the back side of the camp to keep it from bashing into the shore, this looked like a pretty good place to homestead.
Since we were back at camp we had retro dinner night, which was something familiar to the siblings from their childhood and has since turned into many of the kids’ and grandkids’ favorite meals. We had gluten with mashed potatoes and gravy with home made lemon meringue pie for dessert. Best meal ever. Serious props to my cousin the baker who made not one, but six, lemon pies from scratch in the boat oven.
That night we all had to sleep on the boat since there was no beach to camp on. I’m not sure how big the KJ is, but it gets considerably smaller when you have people laying down on every available inch of floor space. And I mean every inch – one little cousin slept under a table. We ended up being two spaces short, so being the tough guys that they are, my dad and brother slept outside on the boat. Where it was cold. And raining, again. Serious kudos to them. Ironically, not one person was fighting over getting to sleep in the fo’c’sle. It had five bunks in there . . . . but the catch was it was housing the snorers. I opted for floor space and had the best sleep in my cozy little corner.
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