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The fireplace was
like the others but more substantial, a double layer of thin,
flat pieces of granite were closely fitted around the base
with an empty pop can and coarse sand insulation in-between.
Bill could have hot fires in here without burning the place
down. There was an ingeniously arranged rack of moveable heavy
bolts to hold pots. The bolts were from the boiler of a nearby
shipwreck.
There were five cups, a dozen oddly shaped bottles along a shelf, a few eagle feathers, some plastic drums, three chests for storing food and a large perfectly intact sea-urchin shell. The only food was a small bag of chocolate pudding mix and three chocolate Santa Clauses—Bill had a sweet tooth. But there was no chimney. How could he live in the smoke? I made a small fire from his meticulously stacked firewood. The wall of driftwood just outside of the cabin faced the prevailing wind, creating a wind eddy, so the smoke was drawn up and then out under the roof line. Standing up I choked, but sitting on Bill's bed, the smoke flowed out two feet above me. With a hot fire it would be warm in here even in winter. Outside the door, an open box three meters by three meters contained the remains from his staple diet, clam and muscle shells as big as my hands, heaped to chest height. This was no Hollywood castaway Tom Hanks; this was Robinson Crusoe for real and by choice. Clearly, nobody had visited in the two and half years since Bill left. His Shearwater friends, Andrea and Bryan, had informed me that Bill's health had lately deteriorated. A lifetime without dental care had left him with excruciating toothaches. His aching teeth and age (mid-fifties) had slowed him down, so he had not made it out here for a couple of seasons before his death. No fresh water here, but I spotted another fishing float across the now dry channel. At low tide Bill's islet connected with the two larger islands and to many small rocky islets. I found his well in the forest; he had punched the bottom out of a large plastic bucket and dug it into a damp spot in the forest floor. It must have taken him a couple of hours a day to gently dip out and haul water. He would have been busy what with, getting water, cooking, gathering food and fuel taking up most of his daylight hours. This place did have two advantages: Nobody would find this camp to wreck it. And, no flowing or standing water meant no mosquitoes or black flies. Bill hated bugs. The next morning, I left under ideal sea conditions. Except for briefly paddling across the path of the coastal ferry, the six days back to Shearwater were pleasantly uneventful. In the Shearwater bar, I may have chewed the ears of four kayakers from Seattle, as I had not spoken for eighteen days. Bill revealed something to me. Being alone out there—is not lonely. My loneliness disappeared as soon as I left people behind. Loneliness, it seems, appears in the presence of, rather than the absence of, people. Maybe Bill wasn't seeking solitude as much as he was evading the loneliness he felt in civilized places. My loneliness arose in the last two hours paddling toward Shearwater to catch the ferry home. As I bobbed in the wakes from a procession of luxury yachts, I began to envy them. Besides being designed for water, yachts are also designed to inform those of us who cannot afford them, how deficient we are for not also having on-board microwave, satellite television, stocked bars, and hot showers. The course of Bill's life was opposite those too fast, too big, too white, and too expensive yachts. His path was to live with less, rather than impressing with more and more. Bill found an answer to his quest: What is the minimum that one man needs? He had no social insurance number, no health care, no credit card. His journals show that in the few months a year that he was in a village his budget was around two hundred dollars a month. I don't know what kind of grubstake he needed to fill his boat with flour, sugar and a few Bic lighters, but it couldn't have been more than several hundred dollars a couple of times a year. He became an artist, self-taught of course, partly to earn the little bit of money he needed. Bill occupies a place in my imagination because he reversed the course of civilization. Except for Bill, civilization is a one-way trip. Once hunter-gatherers, be they in the Amazon or in the Arctic, enter a money economy and find out what life is like when they have pots, an axe, or a gun, a motor for their canoe, a snowmobile, or a permanent roof—they cannot go back. Once entered, civilization inexorably seduces us into the whole catastrophe: a job, a bank account, a mortgage, and then the yacht payments. Bill lived up to Henry David Thoreau's phrase: “That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.” In a material sense, Bill's wake was as ephemeral as the wake from his kayak. However, I doubt that he realized the emotional wake he had left behind. Those who met him remarked on his smile and charisma, the opposite of the hermit image. He liked people even if he could not handle crowds and his idea of a crowd was three or more. I can understand going out into the wilderness for weeks, for months maybe, but for nine to ten months every year for twenty-eight years. What could possibly motivate anyone to that extreme? From Bill's friends, Perry Davis, Stewart Marshall and Andrea and Bryan Clerx, I gleaned a bit about Bill's early life. When Bill was six, his mother disappeared. Bill’s father deposited his four children at a Calgary orphanage. From the age of six, onwards he had to be self-reliant. Bill’s younger sister was quickly adopted. Bill, his other sister, and his older brother lived in the orphanage until they finished high school. Bill's father visited his children but they never had a family life. The separation and the orphanage must have branded into Bill an emotional pain and an equally deep resolve to become so self-disciplined and so perfectly self-sufficient that he inured himself to physical hardship and risk; to living on the vertical edge in his teens and twenties; to living at the edge of the ocean and beyond the edge of civilization for the rest of his life. Bill began living off the land by running away from the orphanage. At its western edge, Calgary then had some forests where he could hide with food stolen from the orphanage, until hunger forced him back. As he got older he got better, staying away longer, learning to live from the land. Then, on a summer school outing he found a place that fit. On an easy scramble up the backside of the same rock face where he would later spend months on the vertical front side struggling against gravity, Bill later wrote in a published article, “When we got to the top, I was transfixed. The great height seemed to have me spellbound. Right from then, I knew I would be doing more climbing.” Through his iron discipline, he quickly developed mountain skills, which brought him into the frontier of rock climbing. In a few years he was doing the then hardest aid climbing routes on the planet. Through painstaking preparation Bill took on immense risks. He brought the same patient approach to his kayaking. Most of what happened to Kayak Bill out there will remain unknown. His terse journals recorded only what he needed to track, the weather, how much flour consumed, and how many lighters left. Bill made his last journal entries in December 2002. On the sixth he wrote, “Light rain showers. Lots of stew, plus sweet rice dish. Lower back and stomach pains.” For the morning of the seventh, he wrote, “Overcast with light rain showers and very light west wind. Fog and drizzle with winds light from the north and northwest by noon.” After that—blank pages.
A man can be himself alone
so long as he is alone…if he does not love solitude,
he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that
he is really free. Keith Webb is trying
not to be a ski-mountaineering guide any longer. He’s
currently working in a business management school as ‘ecologist-in-residence’,
whatever that is. He has four well-used kayaks, and he will
be figuring how to row his newest inflatable kayak as soon
as the mountain lakes thaw.
Keith Webb - kmwebb@shaw.ca |
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