Posted with permission
(This short article appeared, with maps and reproductions of a few of Bill’s
paintings, in Sea Kayaker Magazine, October 2005.)
Looking for Kayak Bill
by Neil Frazer
The letter from Stewart in
Sointula said: “Kayak” Bill Davidson’s body was found awash with his
gear somewhere on the Goose Islands early in March. They are doing a forensic
exam on him, and we’ll soon have a clearer idea of what happened. Reading
Stewart’s words, I felt a door close and tried to wish it back open. Stewart
and Bill were friends and artists who both kayaked freely on British Columbia’s
outer coast (as freely as you or I might take a breath), living out of the
ocean for seasons on end. How could Bill be dead?
Bill had wintered at Goose
Island, I guess. Located just off British Columbia’s coast about 14 miles
southwest of Bella Bella, it’s an easy place to stay fed (lots of deer and
seals, and no bears to interrupt at mealtimes), and it was a place he knew
well. I was pretty sure of that because I’d thought a lot about Bill over the
years. I’d hoped to actually meet him one day, but there were unstated rules
about it (the kind of rules that somehow get promulgated while you aren’t
looking, and later you realize you’ve been living by them). We had to meet in a
place like Goose. The problem was that, in the summer, Bill avoided places like
Goose because of the people. The dozen or so adventurers who visit Goose in an
average summer regard it as only slightly less remote than the moon, but Bill’s
notion of remote was not the usual one. Goose could only have been a winter
place for Bill.
I first crossed Kayak Bill’s
track around 1992, on one of those voyages when the rain hardly ever bothers to
stop—or at least it seems that way. My wife Pauline and I had left Comox in
early July and had camped our way north as far as Bella Bella. We’d stayed at
the north end of McNaughton Island the previous night, and on this morning we
were headed south down the west side of Hunter Island. It was raining, although
as I said, it had been raining for so long we hardly noticed anymore. More
important, the wind was gusting out of the south, against us, and the mist kept
visibility down to a few hundred yards.
Pauline was hunkered down
inside her poncho. She had that polite silence spouses get when they’re
wondering what possessed them to marry you, so I guessed she was thinking about
the sunny trip I had painted in her mind last winter. My glasses, which I’d
forgotten to Rainex, kept fogging so badly I couldn’t read the chart. I decided
to admit defeat and camp before things went from bad to ugly.
In Swordfish Bay, the rain
was louder than the sound of our keel on the beach. Pauline was very still,
apart from the rain splashing on her sou’ester. “You go ahead, dear,” she said.
I looked at the woods. Trees don’t always talk to you when you’re searching for
a camp, but when they’re big and straight and dark, they say People
have camped beneath us time out of mind. At Swordfish Bay they just
said Look here. I kept listening to them until they led me to
Bill’s camp.
Of course, at the time I
didn’t know it was Bill’s. I’d never heard of Kayak Bill. But his camp was
astonishing. It was very small. There was no place for a tent, just an empty
tarp frame made of driftwood. Beneath the tarp frame was a single bunk—also
beautifully made of driftwood—and at one end of it a stove (that really was the
only word for it) made of large stones. The fire pit had a grate, two of those
huge rusty bolts you find at the top of the beach sticking out of the weathered
timbers of wooden barges wrecked long ago, and the back of the stove had a
stone reflector that would have heated everything in sight.
At the time I thought whoever
had made this camp had no money, but he was at home on this coast in a way I
could never hope to be. There was nothing fussy or effete about the camp—there
was, in truth, not a single flourish, but everything there was perfectly
executed with an easy, almost careless, art—and without a saw. There wasn’t a
scrap of trash either. A well-concealed trail led me back to the beach. “We
can’t stay here,” I told Pauline, “but you have to see this.”
We did find a camp that day,
on top of a fortress island flattened by the indigenous Heiltsuk tribe long
ago. The path up was steep and slippery—that’s why it was a fortress—but the
view was fine, or would have been without the rain. I hauled our gear to the
top and left to secure the boat. When I returned, Pauline had the tarp up with
our gear piled beneath it. I added my carcass to the pile and fell asleep in
about 10 seconds. I dreamed of the Heiltsuk manning the long-gone palisades of
our island to repel Haida raiders: Chief Koyah’s men, probably, or Chief
Cumshewa’s, I couldn’t tell. When I awoke it was evening. Pauline had made a
fire—a considerable achievement, as fortress islands don’t come with driftwood
or big old stumps—and some soup, which she brought to me beneath the tarp. The
storm took two more days to blow itself out. At low tide, I foraged in the rain
(this place had good urchins) and hauled whatever wood I hoped might burn.
Mostly I stared into the fire and wondered about the person who’d made the camp
at Swordfish Bay.
Years later, when I told
Stewart all this, he said, “That’s Kayak Bill,” and related how Bill had once
sold one of his watercolors for a hundred dollars and immediately spent every
dollar on Bic lighters. This seemed perfectly reasonable to both of us. “When
Bill splits kindling,” Stewart added, “He splits the round exactly in two, then
he takes one half and splits that exactly in two, and so on.” A perfect binary
progression. I hadn’t noticed any kindling at Swordfish Bay, but there had been
a cache of firewood beneath a scrap of three-ply. Each stick had been cut
perfectly to length with a hatchet or a large, heavy knife.
I learned more about Bill
over the years. He’d been caretaker at the lodge at Echo Bay for a few months.
Some years he wintered in Sointula. Another time he was in Shearwater. Stewart
always knew where Bill was, but he didn’t offer to introduce me. Bill’s
a very private person. What Stewart really meant was, You
smell like the city. Stewart was right. I reeked of deadlines and
mortgages. But I didn’t mind Stewart not introducing me to Bill. To meet Bill anyplace
but where he belonged would have been a violation of the rules. Stewart knew
what he was doing. Also, I’d been finding more of Bill’s camps.
My friend Audrey Sutherland,
the inflatable kayak aficionado, had met Bill on one of her many kayak voyages,
and he’d shown her several of his camps on her charts of the Broughton
Archipelago, the maze of islands at the eastern end of Queen Charlotte Strait.
I inspected those camps when I passed them, but they had been used hard by the
kind of campers who imagine that soda cans and broken lawn chairs are
biodegradable. Not many people voyage alone, and most voyagers use tents, so
they tended to recycle Bill’s artistry into firewood. Still, a couple of those
places had things that reminded me of Swordfish Bay.
In 1998, near the end of a
day on Milbanke Sound, Pauline and I were looking for a place to sleep. The
island we found was so tiny and intricate, it hardly showed on the chart, but
there was a narrow passage behind it with a bit of white shell beach. Hidden in
the woods on the point was a camp that was unmistakably Bill’s: a tarp frame
with a single bunk; a stove built of fitted stones; a cache of firewood, each
stick cut perfectly to length with a hatchet. The details differed from
Swordfish Bay, but the artistry was the same. I recalled asking Stewart about
the lack of space for a tent. What about black flies? “He lives in the smoke,”
Stewart had replied. The camp was invisible from the water, but the nearby
shore gave a view to forever across the sound.
“Bill’s thinking of wintering
in the Storm Islands,” Stewart told me one year. I knew the Storm Islands a
little. I’d often camp at Lamont Cove on the west side of Balaclava Island and
wait for weather to cross Queen Charlotte Sound. Wait for a southeaster of the
kind that once took Stewart in his kayak from Sointula nearly to Haida Gwaii
before it turned and tried to kill him. When the southeaster came, as it nearly
always did, I’d leave early in the morning, out of Browning Passage on the
compass. Everything is grey in that kind of weather. Pine Island lurked like a
ghost. The Storm Islands were the last bit of land to disappear. Their steep
sides, scoured of trees by winter storms, were a warning: Here ends the
south. Nobody could winter in the Storm Islands, I thought. But
Stewart never lied.
Years later, on a rainy
afternoon—there must have been sun that year, somewhere, but I never saw it—at
the south end of Aristazabal Island, in Weeteam Bay, we found a camp that had
to be Bill’s. Oddly, it had a wall of dimensional driftwood that made it
visible above the sandy bay. In any other place, this would have disqualified
it, but the rest of the construction was unmistakable. Bill’s bay was well
hidden among the islands on a shallow passage few boats would take, and as the
woods there are unusually open, the camp would have been visible anyway. That
driftwood wall was for the westerly. We took some pictures in the rain, but
they don’t begin to do it justice.
In 2002, on the way north, we
camped on the beach at Bonilla Island, across from the light. The head keeper,
Mr. Bergen, said Bill was living on Harvey Island. A month later, on the way
south, we looked at the Byers Islets, Conroy Island and Harvey, but found no
trace of Bill. I won’t say we looked carefully—Harvey is too intricate for
that. Bill might have been there and just didn’t feel like showing himself.
It’s also possible we weren’t really looking for Bill, but
looking with him. On sunny evenings, the outer coast gets a low angle light
that turns the trees above the shore to gold. We admired it until night caught
us. Then it was too late to camp, so we anchored in the kelp and slept aboard,
scrunched and soaked with dew beneath the stars. Later I learned from Stewart
that I had walked within a few feet of Bill’s camp.
Bill’s widow Lori said there
was no point in trying to talk on the phone because she would just cry. Bill
was born in Alberta on October 12, 1947, she wrote. When Bill was six, his mother
left him with his brother and two sisters on the steps of an orphanage. The two
girls were adopted right away, but Bill and his brother remained through high
school. Later Bill gained renown as a mountain climber for ascents of El
Capitan and many difficult peaks in Alberta, and for film clips of other
climbers that he planned to make into movies. (The Calgary Mountain Club
gathered on two successive Saturday nights last November to pay tribute to Bill
and watch his films.) Once he made a suit of elk hides, and a bow and arrows, and
disappeared into the Rockies for a year and a half.
Sometime around 1975, after a
near-fatal fall, Bill went to visit a friend on the B.C. coast. He pared down
his belongings until everything he owned could be packed into a double
Frontiersman kayak. Ayak, he called it. Ayak was
green on the top and white on the bottom, like a coho when you first see it in
the water at the end of your line. Bill rigged a mast and sail, but seldom used
them. Mostly he liked to paddle his kayak.
After Bill met Lori near Echo
Bay in 1980, Ayak carried her too, snug in the front cockpit,
while they courted. Camped in the sunny Burdwood Islands where the afternoon
westerly blows warm, not knowing she was pregnant, Lori said, “Wouldn’t
Westerly be a nice name for a boy?” The following February, Wes was born.
Bill was 5' 8" with
curly, sandy-brown hair and clear blue eyes and a mouth that nearly always held
a grin or a smile. He never raised his voice. Everyone who knew him
loved him. His watercolors of coastal scenes were whimsical or comical
(especially those of animals), and even strange—what Salvador Dali might have
painted had he traveled with artist Emily Carr in her travels on this coast a
century ago. When he built a camp or a trail, it was as carefully planned as a
painting. While he and Lori lived on a float house, he built a music
synthesizer out of electronic junk.
He was uncomfortable in
groups. No matter how close he became to people, when he left to
continue his journey, he never looked back. His voyages followed the
growing seasons of goose tongue, wild onions, berries and herbs that could be
dried. Clams were a staple. In the centuries-old pattern of coastal trade, the
halibut he caught were often swapped for flour, sugar, drum tobacco, coffee and
tea. Bill learned to make grease from the oolichan fish on the
Klinaklini River, with people whose ancestors had made it time out of mind, and
afterward he always carried a supply of it.
We don’t know much about
Bill’s kayaking because, apart from his years with Lori, he always voyaged
alone. My guess is that, like most habitual voyagers, he didn’t think much
about technique. The kayak wasn’t a recreational item; it was a way to be where
he wanted to be, and live as he wanted to live. When you spend a lot of time on
the water, you acquire good habits: tying the same knot in the same line
because that particular knot has always held (and you can tie and untie it in
the dark) or maybe because the one time you used a different knot, it came undone.
Often you can’t remember why you do a certain thing a certain way—you just
know in your bones that any other way is risky. After years of
this, your mind is free; your consciousness expands away from you into the
ocean and the forest. This is nature’s way of letting you focus on more
important things, such as finding dinner.
In his last years, Bill
summered in a tiny cabin at Shearwater, painting from memory. He never carried
a camera, even to photograph the wolf that shared his camp on Harvey Island,
obliging Bill by eating all the mice. When October came, he put his paints away
and bought a few supplies. When he was ready, when all his gear was in order,
he departed, regardless of the hour. Ayak would be sunk to her
topsides with staples carefully stowed in containers scavenged from winter tide
lines.
Among people who live in the
wild (anthropology tells us), toothache is the only thing that makes men take
their own lives. Stewart had offered Bill money to have his teeth fixed, but
the dentist refused to extract them all, and Bill was not one to compromise
with civilization. Probably during that last winter on Goose, the pain from a
bad tooth became unbearable. I want to believe this because Bill was my hero,
and after that near-fatal fall in the Rockies, I don’t believe he ever made a
mistake.
One thing I can tell you:
Goose is a fine place to die. Storms sift the sands of Goose anchorage until
they’re as white as the sky and whisper beneath your feet like dry mountain
snow. With sea otters as daily companions, it’s not possible to feel alone or
unfulfilled or anything other than grateful for the privilege of having lived.
At Bill’s memorial in Calgary, a friend said “Bill lived the first half of his
life vertically and the second half horizontally.” I think that on most days,
he lived more than most of us live in a month, or maybe a year.
When you look for certain
people for a long time, they often capture your thoughts even in places you
know they wouldn’t like. Passing one of those ugly, bankrupt salmon farms in
the Broughton Archipelago. Or south of Port McNeill, where a new mansion brags
on a hill from which every tree has been shaved. Bill, you see, knew things the
men who killed the trees and stole the waters never knew. He knew the coast was
impossibly beautiful. He knew you had to stay in one place long enough to know
it, but that staying too long made you blind, which is the real reason First
Nations moved with the seasons.
Bill could have painted more,
but I think he deliberately chose not to compete with Stewart. He knew his own
genius lay in crossing over to a coast the rest of us glimpse only rarely, for
a second, from the corner of our eye. I don’t know how to stop looking for
Bill, so I’m not even going to try. It’s a comfort to know that in Sointula,
there’s a woman who once loved him, and a son, named Westerly, for the wind
that blows us home.
---------------
Neil Frazer was born in
Comox, British Columbia, and is drawn to the B.C. coast every summer by a force
as powerful as the one that pulls salmon into rivers. He lives in Kailua,
Hawaii, and is the author of Boat Camping Haida Gwaii: a small-vessel
guide to the Queen Charlotte Islands (2001, Harbour Publishing).
9 comments:
There’s a B&B in Fanny Bay who’s owner let Bill stay in her five acre property for around five years before she moved from Sonitula, Malcom Island. Her home in Fanny Bay has numerous paintings by Kayak Bill. And. The real low-down on some of Bill’s life and times.
Up until last Fall Bill's kayak "Ayak" had been on Malcolm Island in the care of Stewart Marshall. It is now in Echo Bay. Bill's ashes were spread off the south end of Malcolm Island.
saw the kayak at echo bay. Ive met neil frazier at rose harbour before. just for fun I have been reading up on kayak bill.
I met Bill sometime in the 70's early 80's when he was in Powell River visiting my friend Diane who was at times romantically linked to Bill. I have some small paintings that Diane gave me of Bill's. My memories of Bill were of a gentle, quiet man who could face just about anything life threw at him. I thought of him today and wondered if anyone knew. Thanks so much for posting this. Rest easy Bill.
Thank you for this beautiful article about my uncle Bill ❤️
I came across this after a chance google search - a dear friend of mine here in New Brunswick has a huge stunning Kayak Bill nightscape in her home and when I asked her about it she said she knew him while she lived in Bella Bella in the 90s. She had a good few stories about him which sparked a curiosity in me about him and his story. Fantastic writing here, I will send it to her too.
Ann - I would love to see a photo of your friend's painting.
My name is Melissa I am the granddaughter of Elizabeth malloff whom lived on sointula for a while. She passed when I was in my 20’s. She bought a watercolor from kayak bill. She told me the story about how he lived and I thought what an amazing way to live! When she passed she gave me the water color that she bought from him. I wanted to share it with the people here to bring a smile but I don’t believe it will let me. I am honored to have one of his watercolors ❤️
Melissa,
I would love to se the painting. If you are on social media perhaps we could share it there and I would be happy to post it here.
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