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Wrote "Along the Shore and Through the Trees: Two Lives on the Line from Ahousaht to Estevan Point." (Sandhill Distribution $19.95)
Review by John Moore
After a scant couple of decades living with instant messaging, face-time global phone chat and portable laptops, we take wireless communication completely for granted. Consequently, it’s hard to get our heads around the fact that for most of the last century, work in the ‘communications field’ still involved a lot more actual ‘blood, sweat and tears’ than anyone sitting at a computer terminal in an air-conditioned office can begin to imagine.
In 1955, fresh from five years in the Canadian Navy, Des Davidge answered an ad inviting young men to train as radio operators. Ex-servicemen had an edge, especially if they had served in Signals units, because they were familiar with Morse Code — the dots-and-dashes alphabetic code devised by Samuel Morse in the 1830s to be tapped out manually and transmitted over fixed wires between terminals.
While ‘wireless telegraphy’ was invented in 1896 and radio by 1914, fixed-wire telegraph and Morse Code remained in use, especially at sea and between small communities that had limited access to telephone systems. The Morse Code signal for help, SOS, is still recognized world-wide.
Davidge got the job and was posted to the Estevan Point Marine Radio Station, just south of Nootka Sound on the wild West Coast of Vancouver Island and describes his time there in his memoir, Along the Shore and Through the Trees. The area was still notorious as ‘The Graveyard of the Pacific’ because of the number of ships lost in stormy seas kicked up by weather-driven waves crashing into a continent. Facing that wide open ocean, connected to the nearest tiny outpost of ‘civilization’ by a plank road suspended over the spongy floor of primordial rainforest, the manned lighthouse and radio station existed in what could be described as a state of ‘environmental siege.’
Davidge loved it, even the constant danger and hard work of driving and repairing the plank road. He loved the people he worked with, many of them hired from the tiny community of Hesquiat, like George Rae Arthur, who maintained the telegraph line for more than thirty years over some of the most irregular geography on the planet. George was one of the sons of Ada Rae Arthur, known as Cougar Annie, made famous by Margaret Horsfield’s book, Cougar Annie’s Garden (1999). Ada Rae Arthur built and maintained a beautiful five-acre farm/garden in the Hesquiat Peninsula wilderness and got her nickname by shooting seventy cougars who tried to help themselves to her livestock.
Most of all, Des Davidge came to love George’s daughter, Rosina Adeline Ada Rae Arthur, who was inconveniently married to someone else. Des and Rosina resisted the intense attraction they both felt and he returned to eastern Canada, but neither of them forgot. Single again at last, they were permanently re-united after nearly a lifetime of separation. Davidge doesn’t overdo the ‘amor vincit omnia’ theme. Much of the charm of this oddly-structured memoir comes from Rosina’s recollections of her childhood when she often accompanied her father in his boat on long patrols of the telegraph line he maintained so diligently.
What resonates in this memoir is an intimate look into the lives of people living in supposed ‘isolation’ without feeling isolated. About a thousand people lived contentedly in a dozen small cells of a larger community connected by a fragile web of marine radio, telegraph wire, small boats and boot-leather in a wilderness of wild seas and rainforest.
Des Davidge’s memoir reminds us that as we navigate groomed trails through barely suburban forests, satellite-based GPS transponders in hand, constantly checking how many bars our cell-phones register, we should all take a moment, turn off the electronics, sit where we can look at a river or ocean, read the weather in the clouds, measure time by the position of the sun, and re-think our concepts of ‘connectivity’. 9781777392901
Reviewer John Moore’s most recent book is Rain City: Vancouver Essays (Anvil, 2019).
[BCBW 2021]
Review by John Moore
After a scant couple of decades living with instant messaging, face-time global phone chat and portable laptops, we take wireless communication completely for granted. Consequently, it’s hard to get our heads around the fact that for most of the last century, work in the ‘communications field’ still involved a lot more actual ‘blood, sweat and tears’ than anyone sitting at a computer terminal in an air-conditioned office can begin to imagine.
In 1955, fresh from five years in the Canadian Navy, Des Davidge answered an ad inviting young men to train as radio operators. Ex-servicemen had an edge, especially if they had served in Signals units, because they were familiar with Morse Code — the dots-and-dashes alphabetic code devised by Samuel Morse in the 1830s to be tapped out manually and transmitted over fixed wires between terminals.
While ‘wireless telegraphy’ was invented in 1896 and radio by 1914, fixed-wire telegraph and Morse Code remained in use, especially at sea and between small communities that had limited access to telephone systems. The Morse Code signal for help, SOS, is still recognized world-wide.
Davidge got the job and was posted to the Estevan Point Marine Radio Station, just south of Nootka Sound on the wild West Coast of Vancouver Island and describes his time there in his memoir, Along the Shore and Through the Trees. The area was still notorious as ‘The Graveyard of the Pacific’ because of the number of ships lost in stormy seas kicked up by weather-driven waves crashing into a continent. Facing that wide open ocean, connected to the nearest tiny outpost of ‘civilization’ by a plank road suspended over the spongy floor of primordial rainforest, the manned lighthouse and radio station existed in what could be described as a state of ‘environmental siege.’
Davidge loved it, even the constant danger and hard work of driving and repairing the plank road. He loved the people he worked with, many of them hired from the tiny community of Hesquiat, like George Rae Arthur, who maintained the telegraph line for more than thirty years over some of the most irregular geography on the planet. George was one of the sons of Ada Rae Arthur, known as Cougar Annie, made famous by Margaret Horsfield’s book, Cougar Annie’s Garden (1999). Ada Rae Arthur built and maintained a beautiful five-acre farm/garden in the Hesquiat Peninsula wilderness and got her nickname by shooting seventy cougars who tried to help themselves to her livestock.
Most of all, Des Davidge came to love George’s daughter, Rosina Adeline Ada Rae Arthur, who was inconveniently married to someone else. Des and Rosina resisted the intense attraction they both felt and he returned to eastern Canada, but neither of them forgot. Single again at last, they were permanently re-united after nearly a lifetime of separation. Davidge doesn’t overdo the ‘amor vincit omnia’ theme. Much of the charm of this oddly-structured memoir comes from Rosina’s recollections of her childhood when she often accompanied her father in his boat on long patrols of the telegraph line he maintained so diligently.
What resonates in this memoir is an intimate look into the lives of people living in supposed ‘isolation’ without feeling isolated. About a thousand people lived contentedly in a dozen small cells of a larger community connected by a fragile web of marine radio, telegraph wire, small boats and boot-leather in a wilderness of wild seas and rainforest.
Des Davidge’s memoir reminds us that as we navigate groomed trails through barely suburban forests, satellite-based GPS transponders in hand, constantly checking how many bars our cell-phones register, we should all take a moment, turn off the electronics, sit where we can look at a river or ocean, read the weather in the clouds, measure time by the position of the sun, and re-think our concepts of ‘connectivity’. 9781777392901
Reviewer John Moore’s most recent book is Rain City: Vancouver Essays (Anvil, 2019).
[BCBW 2021]
