The Spit was offshore opposite Comox and near Courtenay, home of the Sons of Freedom Hall where a bit of dancing took place, so I’m told, when my dad was all of 24 years old.
If the experience was considered a break from action (the year before he had been aboard the SS Silver Walnut and in convoy from England to Sicily, via the southern tip of Africa), my father doesn’t say so in the article.
["I could make this bigger but then what would I write about?"]
What he does say, however, spurs my imagination and gives me a better understanding of the man during formative years.
For example, he writes, “Fishing for salmon was great there. I myself never fished; I ended up on the business end of a pair of oars in the captain’s dinghy while someone else sat in the stern and trawled, using filleted herring as bait which acted as a shiny spinner. Some Fridays we were able to supply the noon meal with freshly caught salmon. We didn’t have meat because of the R.C.s.”
I know my dad liked to fish. He and pal Gord Bucholtz (from Norwich) often fished for green bass at Long Point, Ontario, and he told stories about catching smelt by wading into Lake Erie with nothing more than a basket.
Too bad he didn’t get to fish for salmon, but he sure wasn’t afraid of hard work, so if somebody had to man the oars for hours at a time, dad would have been up to the task.
He mentions salmon a second time in another context:
“A few miles west of Comox was the small town of Courtenay, and I have stood amazed on the bridge over the river in spawning season and watched the salmon. Bank to bank salmon - it didn’t seem possible.”
His appreciation for nature and raw, natural scenes lasted into his later years.
On one of our longer car rides together (from his residence at Parkwood Hospital to Long Point and back) I stopped at the side of a gravel road as a flock of birds flew toward us. The flock turned out to be about two dozen crows chasing a bald eagle SE toward Lake Erie, and the eagle, keeping low to the ground for protection, flew directly toward us and then over the car.
“Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen that!” he said as we pulled away to head home.
One of us joked that the eagle looked big enough to pick up my Civic.
We also spotted bluebirds - his absolute favourite birds - along that same road (before or after the eagle, I’m not sure), so, all in all, that was a pretty fine day in his book.
Already my wife and I are talking about a trip to B.C. within the next year or two, and we’ll have to look for that bridge near Courtenay. It would be nice to look upon a few of the same scenes as my father did, appreciative raw scenes as he did, and maybe eat a plate or two of fresh oysters while we’re at it.
More about those oysters tomorrow.
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Please click here to read Memory Lane PT 1.
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