Book review: Fishing lodge memoir celebrates life at Rivers InletBack to video
By Pat Ardley | Harbour Publishing
$24.95, 349 pages
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Ever wistfully wonder what it would be like to live at an isolated lighthouse perched over the Pacific, or to create a salmon fishing lodge in the rain forest? Pat Ardley’s new memoir, Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon is an account from someone who did more than just daydream.
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It all began, like so many B.C. adventures, over beer at a Vancouver pub. At 20, Ardley was a recent arrival in town, fresh from Winnipeg and excited about starting a new life on the coast. She met her soon-to-be husband George Ardley in 1972 over draft beer at the Ritz Hotel.
Soon Pat and George were a couple, bonding over a shared decision to take a job as the junior lighthouse keepers up the coast at Addenbroke Island. They next took work at a fishing lodge on Finn Bay in Rivers Inlet, found other odd jobs on the coast and saved their meager earnings until they were able, in 1976, to open their own fishing lodge on the Inlet.
Decades later, after raising two children at the lodge and losing her beloved George to cancer, Pat Ardley sold the Rivers Lodge in 2012.
Ardley’s book is an odd mix of The Swiss Family Robinson and the “Survivor” reality TV show. It is rich with detailed descriptions of the endless building fixing and make-do improvisation that was necessary to keep the lodge afloat. These practical matters are described in loving and surprisingly interesting detail, as are frequent encounters with whales, grizzlies, and sea lions as well as the inevitable human dramas of life at an isolated lodge, ranging from a commercial fisherman who sexually harasses Pat to occasional tensions and battles within her family and among the lodge’s growing staff.
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In addition to the “boy’s own adventure” dramas with weather, the sea, wildlife, and occasionally problematic employees, Ardley has a love story to tell. Despite some sardonic references to how much life on the coast is “a man’s dream,” (and often enough a bit of a nightmare for the women who accompany them) the living core of this story is the life –long and tender love affair between the Ardleys. The book’s final passages are framed as letters to George after his death, and offer a poignant tribute to the abiding love they shared. While not artful, the memoir’s prose is clean and uncluttered and the story is compelling.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
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