Kayak Bill: A Requiem - Oct.2005 Sea Kayaker Magazine

Back home, I occasionally thought about Kayak Bill alone on an island somewhere out there. When I mentioned him to a long-time mountain guide, he told me, “Oh, that's Billy Davidson; you must remember him from the Calgary Mountain Club.” He told me that Bill was raised in an orphanage and that he was a mechanical and electronic whiz kid; out of scrap metal and scrounged parts, for a provincial high school science fair he built a three-meter high robot that could pick up and crush a pop can. Bill took top prize but the orphanage could not afford to send him to the national competition. Years later, Bill soldered together a bunch of scavenged electronic parts into an early music synthesizer.
Over the years, Bill’s camps migrated northward as the more southerly kayaking spots got popular. Some of his camps were repeatedly trashed. He departed the Echo Bay area after the Forest Service tore down his Eden Island camp. One of his Goose Island camps was kicked apart more than once by native kids from Bella Bella. While chatting on a beach a fellow kayaker told me that he had met Bill at the south end of Aristizabel Island. Bill had told him that his main camp was somewhere in the vicinity.
On other kayak trips, I heard stories of Kayak Bill shooting deer and drying the meat. I was told he would rub himself with layers of rendered seal grease for sun and bug protection. He must have smelled ripe after cooking over open fires for months. There was a mention of a base camp out in Queen Charlotte Sound, near Goose Island, but in our two trips there Heather and I found only a couple of his temporary camps on some nearby islands.
In 1999, as we were returning from a two-week trip that had taken us near Aristizabel, we had camped on a pocket beach of clean sand facing the Pacific Ocean. After supper a kayaker paddled into view in a huge green and white kayak. He was using a homemade paddle double the length of our own longish paddles.
His complexion was so dark he no longer looked Caucasian. We squinted at his halo of frizzy hair backlit from the setting sun. Shielding her eyes, Heather asked, “You Kayak Bill?” “Yup,” he replied. He told us he was exhausted, as he had just paddled in one day what had taken us three days to cover. He gave us a warm invitation to visit his camp next morning—“It's just around the corner, you'll see my kayak on the beach”—and he was gone. When Heather and I woke the next day, impenetrable fog blanketed everything; we could not find his camp. That was the last time I saw him.
On a subsequent trip, I met Bill's kayaking and artist friend Stewart Marshall camped on the shore of a rocky lagoon. He told me Bill had occasionally stayed on Malcolm Island off the northeast corner of Vancouver Island. For a period Bill had lived with a woman, they had a son they named Westerly after a fair wind, but Bill could not handle four walls permanently surrounding him. Bill came and went, but mostly he went.
I had long contemplated a kayak trip out toward Bill's haunts in the hope of blundering across his path again. For me Bill embodied an ideal of self-sufficient competence. There was my curiosity about him, and there was something curious in how his path had repeatedly crossed mine in ways that were of consequence to me and inconsequential to him. But, there was no possibility of phoning or writing somebody who regularly spent ten months of the year alone on uninhabited islands. Even if I could have found where his camps were hidden, I doubt he would have revealed himself.
I needed to cross his path out on the ocean and to see his expression when I asked him about the robot. I wanted to know how he gathered clams and mussels and how he smoked his deer meat. I wanted to know how he could gauge the weather, waves, and currents so well that he never had an accident.
If he had ever misjudged the weather and flipped his loaded kayak, I doubt Bill could have righted it. It seems he never carried a lifejacket. In the places he paddled, there was nobody to rescue him, anyway. Even minor injuries, a slip on seaweed on a rocky beach dislocating his shoulder, or a single slip with an axe, or paralytic shellfish poisoning, could easily prove fatal. His safety lay in his solitary discipline. I knew from some of his friends on the coast that he often rehearsed his steps before carrying his kayak ashore and he always practiced packing and repacking his kayak before trips. All his trips were big, I never heard of him doing a moderate climb or less than a few months paddle. He needed an edge of danger to keep his skills and judgment honed.
The next I heard about Bill was a terse article in an American hiking magazine. I read that in March of 2003, near Goose Island, a deer hunter from Bella Bella had discovered Bill’s body at the edge of the sea, the cause of death undetermined.
One of Kayak Bill's camp kitchens...

Then in 2004, a poster appeared in Banff, where I live, featuring a smiling young Bill, climbing rope draped over one shoulder. There was to be a memorial service for Bill. I couldn't attend. Some time later Heather discovered that her workmate, Perry, had been a buddy of Bill's in high school. Perry told me more about Bill. They had done a ski-touring trip as teenagers. Bill did not have money for ski boots or for climbing skins for his wooden skis, so he adapted his homemade mukluks for boots and, he glued leather strips to his ski bases for skins. He glued the leather strips so they spelled out “far out, far out”— in the snow for 60 kilometers.
Perry showed me copies of Bill's last journals and some of his charts. An idea came to me with a rush of goose bumps: I could not cross Bill’s path again, but I could parallel it by following his recorded camps out to the tiny group of islets out in Hecate Strait where he spent much of his last decade.
The route required five open-water crossings, each over 20 kilometers. I told myself that it shouldn't be too risky, even though it looked exposed on the charts. After all, Bill paddled this route in much rougher winter weather. Bill recorded how he packed his kayak solid with 180 kilos of food and gear, sufficient for five months. He noted that he had just one centimeter of freeboard on his last trip to the islets; his kayak must have been closer to a submarine than a boat. I had a fancy, fast kayak with less than 35 kilos of food and gear. By moving faster than Bill I figured that I would be less exposed to the risks of changing weather.
I disembarked from the coastal ferry at the Kitasoo/Xai’xais village of Klemtu. The unusually strong flood current pushed me north. I had accidentally timed the turn of the tide perfectly so the ebb current then drew me west through narrow, rock-studded Meyers Passage. Elated at my fast progress, I went farther than I had intended, well past the few good camping spots.
I camped at the highest spot in a damp meadow squeezing my tent into the dense old cedar forest. Suddenly, I woke in the night, floating on my sleeping pad; I jumped naked out into darkness and ankle-deep water, telling myself the tide could not get any higher. For an hour, the water crept up almost to my knees, not until 3:30 AM did the tide fall enough to drain the tent. I was shivering as I groped my way into a sopping sleeping bag. In my rush to catch the ferry I had neglected to buy the tide tables that would have told me that that evening had the highest tide of the year.
I cursed myself until dawn for getting cocky. As I retrieved the wet gear that I had tossed into tree branches the night before, I found that the dry bag containing my extra charts, and my photocopies of Bill's journals had drifted off. The supposedly waterproof case for my VHF radio had water inside—now I had no weather info and no Coast Guard rescue if I made a mistake. If I continued, I would be doing this trip too close to Bill's style of travel, relying only upon myself. What I needed was to take more time, to sit until I had thought things through, like Kayak Bill.