Chapter 11 - Namu
Working at a West Coast Cannery
Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning
The next morning Trish went to the canteen for breakfast as Ronnie had instructed. She had lived in nurses’ residences for so many years, having her meals in a dining hall, or a canteen, as it was called at the cannery, seemed quite normal. What certainly did not seem normal, was the volume of food served to each person in the canteen. Pancakes were on the menu for breakfast that morning. A lot of very large pancakes. Each one filled a dinner plate, and the man behind the counter handed her a plate stacked high with six or more. Trish gaped at the heavy plate in her hands, then back at the server. He met her gaze and winked. Growing up in England, even after the war ended, food had been scarce. Long after the war ended, people still ate modestly and went to great lengths to avoid wasting food. As she grew older, she realized how fortunate her family was to have the vegetables from her dad’s allotment. Trish and her siblings had a much more nutritious diet growing up than a lot of kids had. Still, the portions were modest, and nothing went to waste.
She pushed the plate back toward the server, “I think just one will be enough, thank you,” she said. He grinned as he took the plate back, then smoothly flipped most of the stack back into the tray in front of him. He handed the plate back to Trish, this time just one enormous pancake filled it.
Trish looked around the canteen. It was large, with long rows of tables. There were about 30 people eating, spread around the tables. Some were in small groups, others sat alone. Trish took her plate and sat at an empty table. As she ate, she considered what she should prioritize after breakfast. The clinic needed a proper cleaning, and she needed to stock it with supplies. She still didn’t know exactly what to order, or who to order it from. She thought she would first walk around the site, maybe go see the village, and then perhaps she would have a better sense of the sort of work she would be doing.
Trish finished the last bites of her pancake and glanced around to see how others were handling their dirty dishes. She smiled when she saw Norah walking toward her. Norah offered to give her a tour of the cannery, and Trish eagerly accepted. Gathering up her dishes, she followed what others had done and placed her dishes on the rack by the door. As she did, the man behind the counter caught her eye and gave her an amused nod.
Back outside, sunshine warmed Trish’s face, and she breathed in the thick scent of the ocean and forest. There was another smell in the air as well, it came in wafts as she walked around the site. It was the smell of the cannery itself, the fish, their parts that were prepared for canning, and the parts that were discarded, blending to remind Trish of the docks in Hull where the trawlers brought in their catch. Norah asked if she was ready, and the women began walking.
Unlike the previous day where Trish and Ronnie had gone straight to the clinic, now Norah paused at each of the large warehouses, opened the doors, and let Trish have a look inside. There were only a few workers in the cannery. They were working on the machinery that was set up at various stations around the warehouse. Trish surmised they were setting it up for the upcoming salmon run. There were rows of large, tall tables near the door where Trish was standing. Norah said workers stood at the tables and cleaned, then cut up the fish, before it was canned. Trish shivered in the cool air that escaped the cavernous buildings. Norah explained the cool temperature in the building was to keep the fish as fresh as possible before it was canned. Cold water constantly ran over the fish to keep it clean and chilled. The water ran through the floor and back into the ocean below. Even though the workers wore rubber boots, their feet were always cold and wet. Their hands were cold and numb as they worked with the sharp knives to chop the fish to the correct size for each can. Each new tidbit of information helped Trish anticipate the types of illness and injuries she might encounter, and a list of the equipment and supplies she might need in the clinic formed in her mind.
The women stopped by the general store, stocked with groceries, marine equipment, and other basic supplies. They also looked in on the recreational areas. The cannery wasn’t all work, there were social activities too. Perhaps the most surprising were the bowling lanes. Norah said the bowling lanes were well used when all the workers were around.
Carrying on to the boardwalk that extended into the forest on the far side of the cannery, the women walked to the village where the seasonal workers and their families lived. There were rows of uniform wooden houses, simple in appearance but they appeared to be in good repair.
“By the end of the week, the Native families will come and move into the village,” Norah said. “They will be here for about a month until the salmon season is over.”
Returning to the main wharf, Norah left Trish at the clinic before carrying on back home to make lunch for Bill. Standing alone in the empty clinic, she decided the most sensible thing she could do in that moment was give the clinic a thorough cleaning. She found a bucket and a cloth and got to work cleaning all the surfaces. It seemed like no time had passed, but suddenly it was dinnertime. Norah had invited Trish to join her and Bill for supper at their house, rather than at the canteen. Trish was pleased, it was much more comfortable to eat with Bill and Norah, than to sit alone in the canteen. Besides, the meal portions were much more manageable.
The following morning Ronnie waved to Trish as she walked to the canteen for breakfast. When they met, he told her the doctor from Bella Bella was coming on the float plane later in the day to meet her. Trish was relieved. She could ask the doctor the questions that were swirling around in her head about operating the clinic.
That afternoon, Trish joined Ronnie to meet the float plane at the small wharf. Dr. Robert Henderson was indeed on the flight. After shaking hands with Ronnie, he greeted Trish and welcomed her to Namu. Trish noticed Dr. Henderson looked little older than her, and she also noticed he had only a small bag with him. She had been hoping he would bring supplies for the clinic, but it didn’t seem like he had. They chatted pleasantly as they walked to the clinic. Dr. Henderson had already been working in Bella Bella for a few years, and was very familiar with the area, and the patients that Trish would be seeing. He explained Trish would only be in Namu for a month, then she would move to Bella Bella, where she would work in the hospital. That sounded pretty good to Trish. A hospital, even if it was small, would be a much more familiar environment to navigate.
Once they arrived at the clinic, Dr. Henderson opened his bag and pulled out a handful of basic supplies for suturing and wound care.
“You might need these in case anything happens while the guys are turning over the canning line,” he said. Trish was grateful to have something—anything, in the clinic in case she was called on. He also thumped a thick book down on the counter. Though worn and dogeared, the book's title was clear, “Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties: The Canadian Drug Reference for Health Professionals”.
“I brought you my old copy of the CPS,” he said. “I get a new one every year, so you can keep this one.”
Trish gratefully accepted it. The doctor reiterated what the manager had told her a few days earlier, anything she thought she needed, she should order. If they had it in Bella Bella, they would send it on the next flight to Namu. If they had to order it in, it would take longer. Still, this was comforting to Trish, she was getting a sense of what resources she might have access to. He told her that depending on the weather and time of day, she could send more seriously ill patients by either plane or boat to Bella Bella, then, and only in the most serious cases, Dr. Henderson might decide to send them on to Vancouver.
That evening Trish sat down at Bill and Norah’s kitchen table with the CPS to make a list of medications she might need. It was arduous work. Even the most basic medications, like paracetamol, that Trish used in England to treat mild pain and fever, was different in Canada. She learned that acetaminophen was its equivalent. She started thinking about the medications she needed by their drug classification, rather than their name, then scouring the CPS for their equivalent. In time, she had a reasonable list of medications and supplies compiled, and she gave it to Ronnie the next morning. The following day, most of the supplies and medications she had ordered arrived, and Trish set up the clinic to receive patients. She also filled a bag with essential supplies in case the patient could not come to her, and she had to do a house call, or go directly to a patient in the cannery, or on a boat.
Late in that first week, although the workers from Bella Bella had not yet come to Namu, Trish’s first patient arrived in the freshly cleaned and stocked clinic, and it wasn’t a human. It was a dog, a Labrador Retriever. The dog belonged to Ronnie’s young daughter, and it had a messy wound on one of its legs. Trish had seen the dog roaming between the buildings but hadn’t known who it belonged to. The girl said the dog liked to jump off the wharf into the “saltchuck”, and she suspected the dog had gotten tangled up into some cables or debris in the water, or maybe on the shore. “Saltchuck” was a new term for Trish, she would learn it was the local term for the saltwater of the ocean.
Trish had never treated a dog before, but she couldn’t just leave it in its current state. The wound was nasty, and likely to get infected. With the girl’s help to hold the dog still, Trish shaved the area around the wound, administered a local anesthetic, and carefully stitched it up. She then wrapped the wounded leg in a neat bandage—so precise her St. John’s Ambulance Brigade instructor would have been impressed. Trish gave the girl simple instructions to keep the dog out of the water until the wound fully healed.
Later that evening, as Trish shared the story, Norah mentioned she knew the girl. The girl often spent time at their house during the day. She was a nice kid, but clearly bored. There weren’t many children in Namu, and her parents didn't allow her to play with the Native kids.
The next morning the child brought the dog back to the clinic. The dog was soaking wet, the bandage in tatters, and most of the sutures pulled out. Trish had expected that she would tie the dog up to keep it out of the water, but that had not been the case. The dog had likely spent the night chewing the bandage and the stitches then been back in the saltchuck first thing in the morning. Trish once again cleaned the wound, put in new sutures where it was possible, and wrapped the leg. This time she gave more specific instructions; the dog was to be tied up and kept out of the water.
It didn't surprise her when the girl brought the dog back the next day. This time, instead of a bandage, Trish applied a plaster cast to the wounded leg. She thought that might slow the dog down a bit. It didn’t. In the end, the wound healed as well as it could in the circumstances. Trish mused to Norah that the wound probably healed despite her efforts not because of them. The salt water from the ocean during the dog’s regular plunge off the wharf likely did more to keep the wound clean and free of infection than anything she could offer at the clinic.
One morning at the end of the first week, the rumble of engines from fish boats alerted Trish the workers were on their way. Workers from Bella Bella and surrounding communities; Klemtu, and River’s Inlet, and probably other places as well, began arriving in Namu. Whole families arrived, they would spend the summer at Namu, as many of them had done for years. The adults and teens would work, and the older generation would care for the younger children. By the day’s end there were dozens of large fishing vessels tied up in a row along the wharf, and families had moved into the village at the end of the boardwalk.
The next day Trish saw her first human patient. Trish was called to a house in the village near the end of boardwalk to see a “very sick woman”. The elderly Native woman had arrived in Namu the previous morning with her family. Her family was around her but not offering much information. Trish could see the woman was indeed very sick. She was pale, weak, and it was clear she was suffering from ongoing diarrhea and vomiting. Trish had no means of diagnosing her, and couldn’t get a proper history as the woman was so weak she could not speak, and the family was choosing not to. Trish arranged for the woman to be taken back to Bella Bella by boat to be seen at the hospital there.
Late the next day Trish received an update from the doctor at the hospital. Dr. Henderson told her the patient had botulism, he had given her the anti-toxin, and she was already recovering. Trish had been worried when she could not diagnose the patient, but botulism was not something she had encountered before, and she didn’t have the anti-toxin on hand. She was very relieved she had sent the patient out to Bella Bella instead of trying to treat her symptoms, which would have wasted time and not addressed the cause of the symptoms. Sending the woman to Bella Bella had been the right thing to do.
Dr. Henderson told her he thought the woman had picked up the botulism from fish eggs. It was a local custom to collect the eggs from the salmon that were caught and cleaned. They fermented the eggs, then washed them in running water to remove any toxins before eating them. If the eggs weren’t prepared correctly, they could be a source of botulism.
After fully recovering, the woman returned to Namu. Trish visited her for a follow-up. However, the moment the woman saw Trish, she was openly hostile toward her. She wanted nothing to do with Trish. Surprised and unsure what to make of it, Trish respected the woman’s privacy and left her alone. Still, she kept replaying their previous interactions in her mind, trying to think of anything she might have said or done that was offensive, or inappropriate. The next time she spoke with Dr. Henderson, she mentioned the troubling encounter. He then shared more of the woman’s story.
The woman had lost her husband about a month earlier and hadn’t had enough time to mourn him before being brought to Namu to look after her grandchildren, while her grown kids worked at the cannery. She had fallen ill soon after arriving, and as Dr. Henderson treated her and she began recovering, her anger grew. By the time she returned to Namu and saw Trish, she was furious. After hearing the story, Trish wondered if the grieving woman had actually wanted to be returned to Namu and treated, or just left in peace.
The rest of the week was more routine as the cannery scaled up into full operation. The fishermen left at dawn, the rumble of boat engines announcing their departure. Around 8:00am each morning, a steady stream of workers from the village arrived at the cannery. They began their day with breakfast at the canteen, before heading onto the canning lines. The fishermen came back late in the day with their catch. Workers unloaded the fish from the boats and readied the day's catch for processing the next morning.
Trish continued to eat breakfast with the other workers at the canteen, always marvelling at the amount of food being served. On occasion, when Bill and Norah didn’t invite her for dinner with them, she took her dinner at the canteen as well. Dinner portions were even more staggering than breakfast; instead of pancakes, massive steaks covered the plate, the biggest steaks Trish had ever seen. Some workers took two, or even three of the huge steaks. As Trish became more aware of the poor conditions the workers toiled in all day in the cold, always wet from slushing water to clear off the fish scales and standing in cold water, she thought they probably needed the extra food. The fishermen also worked hard in dangerous conditions; they too needed the extra calories. Trish did not. She was always relieved when Norah asked if she would be home in time for dinner.
Trish was soon busy as a variety of patients came to the clinic with cuts and other skin issues, coughs, and colds. One day, she was called down to the wharf to see someone onboard a fishing boat. It didn’t take long for her to realize how impractical her nurse’s uniform was—a thin white outfit with a skirt instead of pants - when she had to climb across several boats to reach a patient farther down the row.
Her unexpected popularity among the fishermen made her eager to resolve the issue. Back at the house, Norah showed her a Sears Canada catalogue. Along with everything you might need for your home; cookware, dishes, bedding, clothing, and even your tool shed, there was a selection of nursing uniforms. Aside from the inappropriateness of the uniform skirt, Trish was having more difficulty keeping her uniform clean throughout the day. She ordered three new uniforms—all with pants. As far as she was concerned, they couldn’t arrive fast enough!
Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning
If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.
Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!
Author’s Notes
N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Namu, Bella Bella, and other communities where she worked, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.
Namu and Bella Bella sit on the traditional territories of the Heiltsuk Nation. Workers came each summer to Namu from Bella Bella and surrounding territories including, but not limited to Klemtu, the home of the Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation, and from River’s Inlet, home of the Wuikinuxv Nation.
If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.
N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.
Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.
Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.