Looking for Kayak Bill - by Neil Frazer

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.

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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).