In 1867, the first white people arrived in Bella Coola to set up a Hudson Bay Company Outpost. The first permanent building wasn’t erected until 1891.
119 years later, at 11:00pm at night, I showed up. And the magic started even before I disembarked from the ferry.
Onboard I’d met solo traveler Sherri, a Bella Coola native who’d been industriously hand-numbering a mountain of $2 tickets for Bella Coola’s upcoming fund raising raffle. We discussed all things Bella Coola. She seems to know everything and everybody. As we talked, Sherri quickly uncovered my awkward traveler’s dilemma – that I had no transportation from the ferry terminal to my night’s lodgings. “Jump in my truck!” she said.
As the cars and RVs drove off the ferry, Sherri and I walked to her pick-up, whereupon she noticed other obviously abandoned souls. A nervous English couple that couldn’t find the rental car they’d been promised. A pair of Spandex-clad senior cyclists (in their 70s) who couldn’t find the big black Suburban that was supposed to transport them to Bella Coola.
Sherri adopted the lot of us. Helped the Brits find their car and the hidden keys in a dark corner of the remote gravel lot uphill from the terminal. Assured the cyclists that she could shoehorn all of us AND the bikes into her pick-up. But the Suburban showed up before we had a chance to test her rescue plan. So she rescued only me, dropping me at the door of Bella Coola’s funky Homestead Accommodations. We grinned, hugged and parted… as I slipped her money enough for 5 raffle tickets which she agreed to donate to a worthy citizen.
Margaret and Henry Bryson are the unbelievably authentic 70-something proprietors of the funky but spotlessly clean 6-room Homestead Accommodation. See Photo Gallery.
Like Sherri, Henry was quick to leap to my protection when he learned I’d not gotten a confirmation for the next day’s up-valley travel on the Bella Coola Community Bus. It’s unscheduled and runs only by request/confirmation. (And at $2.50, it seemed a better bargain than the $70 that Tweedsmuir Lodge would have charged... each way!) Henry took me into his kitchen where he placed a string of telephone messages and assured me that all would be well in the morning.
Morning came, and all was not well. There was still no confirmation from the Community Bus.
And once again I heard the war cry of the Heroic Bella Coola Traveler’s Friend: “Jump in my truck!”
We drove the 2 blocks to the Bella Coola Valley Restaurant, the early-morning Happening Place in town. Apparently everybody there knows everybody else’s business. And someone was sure to know the whereabouts – and maybe even the day’s schedule – of the Community Bus driver. And sure enough, somebody did. It was Frank (?), the bus driver. He acknowledged having received my multiple voice message requests for a ride to Burnt Bridge Creek. Then he gave a good laugh and explained, “The Community Bus doesn’t go to Burnt Bridge Creek. I know the Tourist Board information booklet says otherwise. But we’ve NEVER gone out to Burnt Bridge.”
Henry growls about the deception. Then he quickly gets over it, and commands, “Jump in the truck! I’ll take you.” But that’s an 80-kilometer round trip?! “Jump in the truck, Michael.”
It was the trip of a lifetime. Henry’s lifetime. I learned about his health (not good). I learned about his early working years (a forester, a ship’s hand, a dock-side crane operator) and his later career with Margaret as lodge-proprietors in odd provincial outposts. They’d been in Bella Coola for 5 years. I learned about black bear hunting (he's allowed to kill 2 per year.) I learned about his near-death after being ejected from a snowmobile that went unexpectedly airborne while racing across a frozen lake at full speed in sub-zero temperatures on a weeklong caribou-hunting trip in Nova Scotia. Broke three ribs. But when no helicopter would rescue him… he did what any sensible soul would do in that situation: he kept on hunting caribou.
As we eventually neared the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge at the far end of the Bella Coola Valley, Henry turned down a dirt road toward the river. “I’ve got a fish-counting station you might be interested in.” I expected to find the pride of the upper valley, a Ministry of Fisheries field station bristling with instruments and high technology. What Henry showed me was a tiny wooden shed that had been hammered onto a big cedar tree leaning over the river. Inside, there were two well-worn car seats balanced atop a viewing bench. A wooden flap opened for a stellar view of the river. “Two guys with hand-clickers do all the counting,” Henry explained.
O.K. And hello hello, Bella Coola.
Henry wished me well as he dropped me at the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge. And I bid him farewell until my return to Homestead Accommodation, scheduled for 3 nights later.
