Twice, I’ve found home in an unexpected place. Each experience felt much like realizing the possibility of love — at first surprising, then perplexing, but eventually resolving into clarity.
The first time was sitting on the floor of my uncle’s apartment in North Korea, surrounded by my cousins. The second time was sitting in a fishing lodge in northern British Columbia, drinking whisky and talking about life with a wonderful woman who is 30 years my senior and still one of my dearest friends.
Mary Margaret Clay, “Margaret,” and her lodge were once the point around which the upper Kispiox Valley turned. Those of you who fish are now thinking, “Ah, Kispiox ...” Among us, it is a magical word. We think of pools holding steelhead trout that sometimes will come up through moving water to the surface and take a skittering fly. That was how I thought of the Kispiox. I still often do. But, there is more, and something about the Kispiox itself, that has me now.
In September of 1995, I was driving my mud-covered pickup truck back to New York City from Alaska. I was pretty much out of money, out of time and in a rush to get back to my job in the Stinky Apple. But, as I hurried down the Cassiar Highway at 70 sleep-deprived miles per hour, I hesitated long enough to look at a map to see how far I’d gotten. It wasn’t far.
But, I’m a lucky person. As I traced the line from Kitwancool to my Chinatown apartment, I noticed something. After crossing over the Cranberry River, I was in the Skeena River watershed. I had read about the Skeena and its more famous tributaries, among them the Bulkley, the Babine and the Kispiox.
I’d already taken dozens of detours during my long road trip. What would be the harm in one more? I was so close and probably would never pass that way again. An added incentive was that my brother Tim, an East Coast fishing guide at the time, would be unbearably envious.
So, I pulled off the highway at South Hazelton, went into a tiny grocery store and asked “the questions.” How’re you doing today? How’s the fishing? Where’s the fishing? Where’s the road?
A young guy next to me at the counter — the one buying a moose-hunting permit — grinned and told me to take the next left, then a right and then drive 20 miles upriver, passing the First Nations village. A few miles beyond, I’d find the Kispiox Sportsman’s Lodge. His smile seemed to promise that everything after that would take care of itself.
The next morning, he came into the lodge as I was having breakfast. James grinned again when he saw me, gave me a nod and then collected the visiting fisherman that he’d be guiding that day.
I had only meant to stay for a night, go fishing, then get in the truck and keep going. A week later, I was still there. Roger, a fellow American who had similarly stumbled onto the Kispiox as a young man 25 years earlier, had taken me under his wing. Two weeks later, I was still meeting Ron and Rene from Holland in the lodge’s bar each evening to report on the day’s fishing and to tie them a few flies. I started riding with Jack, the Sportsman’s Lodge janitor, visiting people up and down the valley.
But, one afternoon, Margaret said to me, “I’m sorry, Andy, but I need your room back. It’s peak season and it was reserved a year ago.” I told her that was okay, I had long since run out of money and was overdue getting back east. That’s when she got me. “Oh, you don’t need to leave. Go out and stay in the travel trailer with Aaron.”
At the end of the third week, my truck was finally packed and I was ready to get back on the road. I was having a last cup of coffee with Margaret and her grandson Aaron, when Margaret’s son Gordon, another fishing guide on the river, came in for lunch with a Japanese client. “Hey, Andy, why don’t you come fishing?”
Gordon took Mako, the Japanese client and the loudest man I have ever met, and me to where a tiny stream runs into the Kispiox. I knew the stream was called Cullon Creek. I had hooked my first Kispiox steelhead just below the stream on my first day, which was probably why I stayed a second day.
We crossed the creek and then bushwhacked down a long-abandoned logging road, before making our way into a canyon that I hadn’t been able to explore during my earlier trip. What I remember best about that day was how the late-afternoon sunlight seemed to jump up from the river’s surface and ricochet downstream off the canyon walls — that and Mako casting madly and bellowing, “Cut-trote mahn!” every time he hooked another little trout.
I didn’t go back the following year. That made me sad. But, like many things then, it seemed out of reach. So, I moved a little closer, arriving in Seattle to start work with Columbia Legal Services in August of 1997. I went back to the river that fall and have ever since.
In 1999, though, things changed. Margaret decided to sell the lodge and retire. For those of us who made the autumn pilgrimage to the Kispiox — some for many more years than I had — it was heartbreaking news. We went each year as much to see Margaret and others at the lodge as to fish.
But something else happened that season farther upriver. A “for sale” sign appeared at Cullon Creek. We had assumed it was public forestland, like everything around it. But it turned out that a lower-B.C. logging company that needed cash was selling its entire half-section on the river. That was when the Kispiox got me a second time.
Shortly before I left for Seattle, Margaret took me aside, seeming very solemn. She scared me a little bit, in fact, until she said, “When I sell the lodge, Andy, I want to keep a place on the river. How would you feel about buying Cullon with Mark, Jack and me?” A year later, Margaret, Jack, our friend and partner Mark from Ireland, and I were raising the walls of the cabin with the help of many friends.
Some of you might be thinking, “What does this have to do with the law?” or “Why isn’t he writing more about the scenery?” A few of you are even thinking, “What about the fishing?” I suppose I could write about financing, rural building codes or our partnership agreement. But most of it was done on a handshake backed by Margaret and Jack’s reputation in the community. We don’t yet have a partnership agreement and, to be honest, we just went ahead and built the cabin. It didn’t turn out half-bad.
In terms of local color, I could write an entire essay about the Gitxsan people, Dust Bowl settlers, Canadian hippies and Vietnam War-era American draft dodgers who settled in the valley, each following the other — and how these cultures together form a unique community. I could write about the river.
And I could write about the fishing. But fishing seems a lot less important these days; it’s now just another thing to do up there. No one is more surprised by that than me. But, that’s the Kispiox.
So, another trip north approaches, with all its anticipations. It will be quiet, but never silent. I’ll visit with Gordon and Mary Lou, the Lees, the Allen clan, Don Williams and others. I’ll see how their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have grown in a year and how the spring runoff changed the river.
I’ll keep watching for one more grizzly, cross fox, Kermode bear, moose or the wolves that we sometimes hear at night but never see. I’ll walk out with my coffee each morning to see how much more the aspens have turned and then peer into the canyon to watch the steelhead and salmon finning in the current. I’ll remember friends coming up the river on September 12, 2001, to tell me what had happened and then wondering if my brother and sister in New York were okay. I’ll consider the violence and death that my troubled country is now causing in the world.
Hopefully, I’ll find a place to think about my family, friends and the woman smiling sadly behind the curtain. And, if I have an especially good season on the Kispiox, I’ll catch a few fish and come back understanding better what I should do with the time that is left.
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Andy Ko is the director of the Drug Policy Reform Project at the ACLU of Washington.
