Product Description

The Wastell family had much to contend with on a daily basis. Besides running a sawmill and surviving in very un-genteel circumstances, Norris's mother, a registered nurse, was the only source of medical help in the community. Not surprisingly, she had to treat all types of ailments ranging from pneumonia to severed fingers and deliver numerous babies in all sorts of conditions. The sawmill's tugboat often had to serve double duty as an emergency ambulance. It was not an easy life or childhood for Norris and her younger sister, but it was an exciting one. She never learned how to ride a bicycle, but she could row a skiff or hook a runaway log as well as any grownup. As kids, Norris and her sister ventured out in an open boat with a 2 hp engine to salvage wood, all the time contending with tides and unpredictable weather. They grew up in a world of kelp dolls and killer whales and a very odd assortment of West Coast eccentrics, new Canadians with little English, mill workers, coastal drifters in leaky boats and jacks-of-all-trades from the streets of Vancouver. Norris's memoir, full of humour, hardship, and remarkable events is "one of the more charming and insightful portraits we have yet had of upcoast life between the wars, a busy and colourful period justifiably described as the golden age of the BC coast."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #990174 in Books
• Published on: 1995-01-01
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 88 pages

About the Author
Pat Wastell Norris was carried aboard her father's tugboat before she could walk, and has been addicted to salt air ever since. The author of Time and Tide: A History of Telegraph Cove, (Raincoast Chronicles 16) the bestselling High Seas, High Risk: The Story of the Sudburys and High Boats: A Century of Salmon Remembered, Norris now lives in Vancouver BC.

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Telegraph Cove ranks as one of the notable man-made landmarks of the BC Coast, a tiny notch in the desolate Vancouver Island coastline between Kelsey Bay and Port McNeill almost totally encircled by an elaborate system of boardwalks and wooden buildings built on shorefront pilings. It is a tour de force of barnacled architecture, a kind of accidental gumboot theme park. A first-comer to Telegraph Cove feels just a tiny bit like a first-time visitor to Venice: the natural landscape has been taken over by a structure of great elaborateness, but there is scarcely a clue left as to who made it and to what purpose. The mystery is made more enticing by the feeling something remarkable must have gone on here, to have left such remarkable remains.

In the following pages Pat Wastell Norris answers the questions about "who?" and "why?" with gratifying completeness, and also confirms all suspicions about remarkable goings-on. It turns out that the rough-sawn mini-metropolis was built by her father, Fred Wastell, who needed something to do after the Great Depression interrupted his rather genteel existence as the son of a well-bred factory manager in nearby Alert Bay. Pat grew up there in a world of kelp dolls and killer whales with her younger sister and a very odd assortment of millworkers, coastal drifters and well-bred relatives, who goodhumouredly rolled up their sleeves and learned some very un-genteel survival skills. Remarkable events, ranging from her aging grandmother's mastery of gasboat handling to her mother's emergency medical heroics, performed aboard storm-tossed towboats on battered loggers and expectant mothers, were a daily occurrence.

Pat Norris' memoir of growing up wet does more than fill the intriguing blank left in BC Coast history under the name of Telegraph Cove; it provides us with one of the more charming and insightful portraits we have yet had of upcoast life between the wars, a busy and colourful period justifiably described as the golden age of the BC coast.
-Howard White (Preface by Howard White )