89 Bikes Don’t Float

Flying in to the floating camp at GMG Logging the first time was not quite the shock it might have been if Sandy and I had not both grown up on an island. Sandy was introduced to island life when her dad moved his family to Shaw Island, just south of the border, in the San Juans. They lived in Kirkland Washington, but because her dad, Bill, was in construction, his work led him to the San Juan Islands, where he eventually moved the family just after Sandy turned eleven. As an eleven year old, Sandy thought it a neat place but her mother, as Sandy tells it, just sat there and cried. It was more then she could handle, when she realized she had moved from a house with all of the conveniences, to an old broken down farmhouse with no power or running water and an outhouse.

The floating camp at GMG, however isolated, had all of the conveniences of the city, but as I mentioned before, no roads to go anywhere, unless of course you were content to just walk up and down the boardwalk in front of the houses. For children this was fun enough as the school also had a play area and each house had its own decked area to walk or play on. The rule however was that no child could be outside without a life jacket as the floats did not have any protective railing whatsoever and the water was deep and ice cold. The unwritten rule stated that as soon as you could swim you did not have to wear your life jacket. That meant that each child yearned for the day when they could swim and get rid of the demeaning life jacket and join the world of the adults. As I just stated a moment ago the water was cold, and I mean cold and deep, so to learn to swim was no mean feat and if achieved did deserve some recognition.

Sandy as a good camp mom, was given the pattern designed by one of the boss’s wives, and certified by the WCB, so she could make both our kids life jackets. Knowing the nature of kids it was a certainty that one of them would fall in, and the lifejacket would enable them to live, and tell about it.

It wasn’t long before Teri who was about three, was out running around and went sailing off one of the floats into the frigid waters and came up gasping. Not to be out done by her, Joe a little foster boy who was up on a visit with my mom for a few weeks, a little while later found one of the camp triks and went roaring around the floats on it. Wouldn’t you know it? The inevitable finally happened, and off he went hell bend for leather into the water and came up sputtering. You should have seen the look on his face as he gasped for air, his eyes just about popping out of his head.

It’s times like these when parents are glad that they do all the right things, of course that did not save the trike as it was at the bottom of the inlet but at least the kids weren’t under forty feet of water with it.

Things sometimes turn out OK as a few weeks later Bruce Rayfuse one of the guys who lived in the bunkhouse put on some scuba gear and fished the trike from the briny deep