Carl Edgar recalls a time, at the age of 14 or 15, when an epiphany came. He was on the southwestern edge of Vancouver Island, camping at Cheewaht, when his father’s friend Rob Archer delivered words at the campfire that would remain with Edgar for the rest of his life.
“He said, ‘Carl, if you can find out what people need, what people want, if you can do it, do it’,” recalls Edgar, who is now 70. “Here I am.”
A year or two earlier Edgar had seen his first hiker, the boots and backpack a strange sight for someone who spent his early childhood at Clo-oose, located the next beach over from Cheewaht in Ditidaht territory. Young Carl wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but the first signs were becoming evident of what would become one of Vancouver Island’s major destinations for outdoor enthusiasts. Stretching 75 kilometres from Port Renfrew to Bamfield, The West Coast Trail now attracts over 7,500 hikers a year from across Canada and around the world.
And for the last 50 years Edgar has been an integral part of this, an involvement that began with transporting hikers across the impassible Nitinaht Narrows for $1 each.
“My grandmother told me, ‘If you own a boat, you’ll never be hungry’,” reflects Edgar.
It’s a bright July morning as he sits in his designated captain’s chair at the Nitinaht Crabshack, an ever-expanding collection of docks at the southern end of Nitinaht Lake, where the narrows give way to the open Pacific. To his right family members hustle around a well-stocked kitchen, preparing breakfast orders for a crowd of eager hikers. A wood stove burns by Edgar’s feet, helping with the remains of the morning’s chill as his daughter Krissy stands at the water’s edge, effortlessly cracking open crabs to prepare seafood for lunch, tossing the shelled remains into the saltwater lake.
Boats come and go to the floating assembly, some delivering supplies or hikers to start their journey from the mid-way point of the West Coast Trail, others crossing the narrows to transport trekkers in a service that Edgar began in 1975.
“There were no plans for this. It just evolved all by itself,” he says.
An ever-expanding operation
Along with his wife Shelley, Edgar owns Nitinaht Wilderness Charters, a multi-faceted operation that taps into the popularity of the West Coast Trail and the surrounding region. From May until late September the company transports hikers from the Ditidaht village at the north end of Nitinaht Lake to the narrows, where they can hike the trail halfway through.
Trips across the narrows now cost $28 per person - an indication of how much demand has grown since Edgar sat alone in a small motorboat, waiting to transport hikers to the other side for $1.
“I seen it never ending, then I had a glimpse of the future,” he reflects, admitting that it still took 25 years to make a profit from the operation. “This is a bunch of different jobs to keep this place going.”
With Shelley at the helm of kitchen operations, the Nitinaht Crabshack serves a full menu, ranging from eggs, hashbrowns and bacon for breakfast to a full seafood dinner. It’s not cheap, with the “Nitinaht Ultimate JACKED” meal of a whole crab, baked potato and accompanying ling cod of halibut topping the list of offerings at $85, but the hikers don’t seem to mind forking out the cash after days of subsisting off dehydrated meals.
Edgar started serving food to hikers in the late ‘90s, but at the time what he offered wasn’t popular and he had to eat the surplus.
“I sold burgers, fries, even tried sandwiches. We tried soup, stew, mashed potatoes, rice, nobody would buy it,” he recalls. “I quit trying to sell food. I built the dock in 1999. I was cooking my lunch, as you get tired of sandwiches after eating it for two or three weeks every day. So I started cooking lunch, crab or a salmon, and people would ask for one. They’d say, ‘Can I have one?’ And it turned into this.”
Tent decks and heated cabins are rented at the narrows, part of a continually expanding operation that has become a family business for the Edgars, who also offer accommodation in the Nitinaht village.
Carl’s daughter Sarah Tom remembers spending time at the narrows in the summer, making boats out of corks and balancing on the logs that float next to the dock.
“I remember playing here all the time when I was young, seeing how fast I could go and if I could go backwards on it,” she recalls. “My dad used to say, ‘If you fall in, clear the seaweed that’s there. Clean it up’. It was pretty rare that I ever fell in, though.”
At a young age a business ethic was instilled into Sarah, who saw opportunity abound as the flow of hikers never ceased. Sarah spent hours each day selling cookies, but she had to cover costs before she could keep any cash for herself.
“‘Don’t forget, you need to buy more to sell more’,” she recalls her parents telling her. “You say hello to everybody. You’re encouraged to talk to all the strangers here.”
‘No TV, no radio, nothing’
Under an open blue sky, the time is right one early summer afternoon for Carl Edgar to rush his wide-hulled fishing boat to where the Nitinaht Narrows meet the open sea. He’s trying to catch a “10-minute window” when a school of sockeye salmon will be passing into the narrows, and has gathered a group of his grandchildren for the trip.
Wearing bright orange fishing overalls, helper Garrett Edgar scrambles at the bow of the aluminum boat when they reach the mouth of the narrows. He tosses a net with a float on the end into the ocean, which soon extends across the water flowing from the Pacific. After some sockeye are caught, Marques Edgar, Carl’s 14-year-old grandson, joins Garrett to quickly pull in the net, and with it the latest seafood harvest to supply the crab shack.
Later in the day the vessel heads out again to pull up crab traps scattered along the coastal water and across Nitinaht Lake. Carl’s irritation becomes evident, as some of the youngsters appear more occupied with their phones than the task at hand, so he directs them to help pull up the traps and measure crabs to determine if they’re large enough to keep. Females are tossed back, identifiable by the shell pattern on their bellies.
“We never had technology down here,” recalls Carl of his childhood in the area.
On the distant shore Carl points to a large sand dune up from the beach, a centuries old mark from the 1700 tsunami that hit Vancouver Island and its many coastal Indigenous settlements. Then he points to Clo-oose, where Carl spent his early childhood, one of several formal settlement sites that dot Vancouver Island’s southwestern coast. For countless generations Ditidaht people subsisted off the ocean resources by their doorstep, but as the modern era took hold, the First Nation moved to its current main reserve at the north end of Nitinaht Lake in the mid 1960s.
“I remember absolutely no communication with the outside world,” recalls Carl of his time in Clo-oose, where he lived with his grandparents among the seven houses at the time. “No TV, no radio, nothing.”
At the age of six young Carl moved to Bamfield for a year, then was sent to the Alberni Indian Residential School. He didn’t speak English, nor was he familiar with typical Canadian food. He remembers peeling the skin off of sausages.
“I’d never seen cheese before,” he says with a slight smile. “I remember picking the bread off a grilled cheese sandwich because I didn’t know what cheese was.”
As a means of assimilating Aboriginal children into Canadian society, the Indian residential school system disallowed the speaking of Indigenous languages. For Carl the Ditidaht dialect of Nuu-chah-nulth was soon replaced by English, leaving only whispers of his mother tongue in the distant corners of his mind.
“I do know more than half of my language, but I don’t use it too much,” he admits. “Sometimes it comes back, I remember some words now and then.”
After five years at the residential school, Carl moved from Port Alberni to live with his parents.
“We went right back to Clo-oose, and then the house burned down, so we moved up the lake,” he says, referring to the growing Ditidaht reserve of Malchan, which has the traditional name balaac̓adt.
That was the last time Carl would return to live in his childhood home, where the remains of past settlement are gradually being overtaken by the encroaching wildness. Past the beach a boarded-up church can be found, and nearby sits a palatial A-frame cabin built by the late lawyer Martin Chambers in 1970, which is occasionally used by those who own the structure through a shared property agreement.
Across the beach a collapsing roof is visible within a sea of berry bushes and ferns. Inside are rusted appliances and scattered household items, the remains of the last year-round residence at Clo-oose. This is where Carl’s brother Ralph lived for the last decade of his life, a return to his childhood home after a 40-year absence.
Carl’s older brother Sam says that his late sibling returned to Clo-oose as a means to overcome the lasting effects of residential school. Ralph passed a dozen years ago.
“He went there to get the residential out of his head,” says Sam.
“When he was out there, songs came back to him, and he started singing,” continues the brother. “He was our cultural leader for our family.”
Reclaiming business and culture
When he was 14, Carl saw people coming to Nitinaht Narrows in a herring skiff, taking bricks from an abandoned cannery to sell them. This was the remains of the Nitinat Cannery, which operated from 1917-31.
“When I learned, I got mad,” says Carl. “Back in 1920 all the big fish companies came in here, BC Packers, Canadian Fish, all the big companies, and they fished seven days a week, 24 hours a day. They outlawed our people from selling fish to them.”
Carl first ran for band council at age 30, and represented his First Nation in fisheries issues for many years. This was his way of taking back power for his people.
A generation later, Carl’s daughter Sarah did this by picking up where her father left his language. She studied Ditidaht for many years, along with other Nuu-chah-nulth dialects, and now teachers at the Ditidaht Community School. She considers herself “proficient”, but has yet to gain the fluency that Carl was once surrounded by at Clo-oose.
“How can we say we’re Ditidaht people if we don’t know our songs, our culture, our protocols in life? We need to be proud of who we are, what we are,” says Sarah.
She speaks at a table full of hikers, people from various corners of North America who on this day have converged at the Nitinaht Crabshack. Included in the group are Cindy Browse and Kamie Brainard, international trekkers from Phoenix, Arizona who the previous month undertook a hike in Slovenia.
“We’re unique in the world,” continues Sarah. “We’re not as common as French speaking, we’re not as common as Spanish speakers, we’re distinctly Ditidaht, and that’s something to be prideful of.”
