The Little Ferry That Could -- Fascinating Characters, Scenery Highlight A New B.C. Ferry Trip

The stubby bow of the Queen of Chilliwack plunged into swells rolling in from the North Pacific as we steamed through the summer night. Dishes clanked in the galley.

We were heading north, crossing the open waters of Queen Charlotte Sound on Canada's west coast an hour after departing from Port Hardy on the northern tip of British Columbia's Vancouver Island.

The new Discovery Coast ferry would soon wind through the cloud-piercing mountains that ring the towering fiords of the central B.C. coast.

I'd had this trip in mind since it was announced five months earlier. Now I was on my way to see that rugged landscape up close.

I found instead a floating theater. The characters dwarfed the scenery.

Scattered among the immensity of that rainycoastline are remote villages that in June, got an overdue public ferry connection with the outside world. The Queen of Chilliwack now links Finn Bay, Namu, McLoughlin Bay (and nearby Bellla Bella), Shearwater, Ocean Falls and Klemtu with an interior highway at Bella Coola, and with the Vancouver Island highway at Port Hardy, which is the ferry route's terminus.

The 200-mile trip between Port Hardy and Bella Coola (via the Bella Bella area) typically takes 22 hours. The ferry has several routings over the course of a week to connect all the stops.

Another B.C. ferry, the Queen of Prince Rupert, still travels every other day from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert but no longer stops in Bella Bella as it has in previous summers.

Seagulls were screeching at dawn in the harbor of Namu. The 9,000-year-old village that once boomed with commercial fishing was empty and silent. Its fish processing business is now defunct.

Passengers watched as the ferry disgorged a lone kayaker, Jennifer Hahn of Bellingham, into the bay. She was on a hazardous 75-mile, solo trip to Port Hardy after having paddled down the coast from Alaska to Namu in a trip of several segments.

Guy Thorn, of Powell River B.C., ignored her. His eyes were looking at the empty village, seeing ghosts of his former fishing life.

"I fished this coast all my life," he said. "I was a fish buyer here in the '40s and '50s, from Namu down to Rivers Inlet. Sockeye were 45 cents apiece . . ."

The commanding man with piercing eyes was born on northern B.C.'s remote Nass River in 1922, the son of the Anglican minister. "It was wall-to-wall boats on every dock you can see," he said. "We all knew each other. The place was jumping."

Jennifer paddled through Thorn's memories, around the abandoned cannery, and disappeared into mist.

The morning mist was still skittering around Fog Rocks in Fisher Channel when we saw 30 dolphins surface. We were well into the landscape of Heiltsuk Nation, 100 miles from Port Hardy, nearing Bella Bella.

Into McLoughlin Bay

In 1793, just after becoming the first white to cross Canada, Alexander Mackenzie was confronted with the fierce territoriality of the Bella Bella - or Heiltsuk - people. In sea canoes they kept his Indian paddlers from the Bella Coola tribe from transporting him across Heiltsuk waters to view the open Pacific.

Mackenzie subsequently painted his name on a rock in the channel, turned around and returned overland to Montreal. Today, Bella Bella still wants no visitors, and McLoughlin Bay, two miles south, is where the ferry stops. Bella Bella's business is fishing.

Rather than apologies for its closed-door stance, Frank Brown and other sons and daughters of this tough village are offering an alternative. From McLoughlin Bay they give passengers a two-hour glimpse of Heiltsuk Indian life, and an exhilarating canoe ride into the past.

The glimpse we had was authentic. We walked past sites of ancient occupation - before European settlement, the Bella Bella village was situated here - and turned upstream to place where salmon eggs are harvested. Then, by a pond, Brown stepped onto steaming bear droppings. He wiped his shoes, looked farther upstream, then around into shadows.

Our walking group went on alert. Questions quickly shifted to bear habits. "Unlike grizzlies, local black bear usually spook from people," Brown said. "Trouble comes when they are taking salmon or escorting cubs."

During the next hour's walk to the salmon hatchery and fish plant we took turns being cub scouts, but we saw no bears.

Paddlers depart

The interpretive center was in a traditional bighouse (or longhouse) replica that Brown had built on the bay's urchin-shell beach. It was emblazoned with a Heiltsuk design done for Vancouver's 1986 Expo by his uncle, Robert Hall. A 30--foot-long sea canoe rocked below us at the float.

We discussed Heiltsuk sea voyages and exploits, then a half-dozen or so paddlers who'd signed up for the four-mile canoe excursion were told they'd be shoving off soon.

The husky Bella Bella crew chief, Duane Walkus, began pulling out carved paddles. The canoe would catch up with the ferry at Shearwater, its next stop. Some paddlers headed down; others eyed the huge, tippy dugout and appeared reluctant.

Then came a report of fresh signs of a bear's presence at the high-tide mark. The beach emptied. The paddlers leaped to their mission, and with a few war whoops, rocketed off in the canoe.

Ocean Falls

Third mate Clive Quigley sang sea shanties as the ferry left the Bella Bella area. People played cards and went on tours of the engine room or the bridge. It was an unusual, cloud-free day. There was a halibut barbecue on deck. A pod of 15 orcas vented silvery mist as they encircled a school of salmon in Lama Passage.

After the Shearwater stop, snowy peaks began to appear on the skyline as we neared Ocean Falls, 30 miles northeast of Bella Bella. A group of ravens began chasing a bald eagle around a cedar.

"When my father came to Ocean Falls in 1925 he had 24 hours to get a job or move on. That's where I was born, so you know he got the job," said Ted Maskell of Kamloops, B.C., a former RAF pilot in the Second World War who still flys his own plane. He'd visit Ocean Falls on his way to Bella Coola.

Once a booming pulp mill town of 5,000, Ocean Falls became a ghost town after the mill shut in 1980. Most buildings are still intact. The area population is now 65. Four people live in the old town itself.

Feisty, dark-haired Diana Mac- Lean is one of the handful of present-day locals trying to keep the town from giving up the ghost. She was sailing home after a month outside.

Nearing town, she gathered a crowd on the forward deck with her raucous voice. She dispensed facts, poignant history and local color (too much partying; houses are dirt cheap), and pointed out landmarks.

The ship's loudspeaker was broadcasting some of the same information, but MacLean became increasingly irritated by how it was being cleaned up and watered down. Finally she'd had it. As the loudspeaker droned the proper chart name for a point we were passing, her resonant voice boomed: "That's called Pecker Point, you . . . peckerheads!"

Bella Coola

Bella Coola is tucked into the Coast Range 65 miles east of Bella Bella. Approaching it, the ferry zigzags through fiords where mountains soar and waterfalls stream out of the clouds. Great interior rivers, such as the Bella Coola, have created valleys and deltas where moose, grizzlies and huge salmon runs flourish. Here, salmon come to the people, rather than the other way 'round.

This valley, population 2,500, is the ancient home of the Bella Coola - or Nuxalk - people. They're as different in language and personality from the Bella Bellas as Italians are from the Spanish.

When Mackenzie came to this lush place one summer evening in 1793, completing his epic journey across North America, the Nuxalks accepted him, feasted him on roast salmon and provided him lodging. He wrote that he was among people of abundance and good will.

The valley was the route to the Cariboo gold fields in 1858, and the site of a Hudson's Bay Post in 1867. Through it runs the 300-mile-long Highway 20 to Williams Lake and the interior. In 1894, Norwegians founded a colony at Hagensborg, 10 miles up the valley from Bella Coola.

Good-will ambassador

Darren Edgar is a Nuxalk guide. A slight, congenial man, he popped out from behind a totem pole just as I arrived in town. He welcomed me to his valley, told me I could camp on the delta, but it was full of bears; that there were inns and cafes in town; that salmon were running, and that orcas, seals, eagles were feasting on them.

We walked around the area where the town fronts on the Bella Coola River. Nuxalk were cutting salmon for their smoke houses. With a twinkle in his eye, Edgar got me some smoked spring salmon, told me of some unusual petroglyphs he guided to, and gave me his card. It said: "Good Will Ambassador."

Later, out of the rain at the Cedar Inn, proprietor Ken Smith told me "the old village site that Mackenzie visited 200 years ago was abandoned when the river moved."

Through the inn window I saw Edgar step out from behind another totem pole, surprising two backpackers and giving them his card.

Pat Wylie of Nanaimo, B.C., was on a stopover between ferries with her teenage grandaughter Christy when Darren had found them.

"He gave us a wonderful tour of a Nuxalk petroglyph site," she told me later. "We hitchhiked about three miles - my first time ever - then hiked in to the site. Darren doesn't drive. We couldn't have found it alone. The rock carvings were beautiful."

The anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl thought so too. He was so intrigued by their likeness to South Seas island carvings that he worked ancient Bella Coolas into a remarkable theory about the origins of Pacific island peoples. (Language and DNA studies later proved him wrong.)

People started arriving for the 10 p.m. ferry. Five kayakers drove in from Seattle. They were off to Finn Bay and the outer coast Hakai Recreation Area. Bob Dewald of Red Deer, Alberta, drove in on his BMW motorcycle. He was bound for Port Hardy and Vancouver. Trucks rolled in from the Chilcotin.

The ferry docked. As a group of disembarking Japanese tourists began retreiving their gear from the luggage cart, a slight man popped out of the shadows, talked a bit, then gave them his business card.

Darren Edgar, the good-will ambassador, also slipped me one more card as he walked by.

At Klemtu

A summer storm was buffeting Klemtu, the northernmost village on the ferry's run and the southernmost in the range of the native Tsimshian peoples. But the children surrounding the dock hardly noticed the weather. They watched eagerly as the ferry made its way up the channel, through sheets of rain, toward its landing. From their excitement, I guessed they all had relatives or packages or something important coming in.

A shrimp-fishing boat was getting fuel at the oil dock. It rocked in the wake of guide Patrick Brown's herring boat as it came in from neighboring Princess Royal Island.

Five Alaska salmon seiners steamed by the village, heading north. Down the beach under a tarp, Robert Stewart carved a 42-foot canoe that villagers of the Kitasoo tribe were planning to paddle to Bella Bella in celebration of their traditions. Below him, old men staked out beach logs for firewood. Up the silvery boardwalk, people loitered in the Band Store and Cafe, the only eatery in town.

The ferry docked. The kids swarmed on.

On the car deck they piled onto the fork lift, tow van and luggage carts, tooting horns, flicking lights. They found the elevator. They massed upstairs at the steward's service office for an official tour, then broke off, one by one, toward what they'd really come for: the video games arcade and snack-machine room.

That was it, end of tour. The coin machine sang, and the kids were in heaven. To them, the ferry was the great white floating mall that came in every eight days.

After about two hours, mothers and aunties came and led them home by the ears.

------------------------------------------------------------------ Jack Nilles is a Seattle freelance writer. ------------------------------------------------------------------