Everybody has a ferry story or two. They will be about a missed sailing, or about the wind that blew the Anscomb all the way to Pilot Peninsula, or about a particular Christmas Eve crossing, all the cars jammed onto the smaller Balfour as the storm waves crashed over the bow. There are even stories of an already-departing ferry reversing to pick up a car that arrived a few seconds late.
Tom Lymbery of Gray Creek confirms that the Anscomb did make a habit of going back for tardy cars, as long as the ferry hadn’t started to turn around. Tom knows a lot about the lake area, and he has written a book about it. Part 1 of Tom’s Gray Creek: A Kootenay Lake Memoir is being published this month.
I remember a family trip to Kamloops via the ferries on a snowy Sunday in December. Our 1969 Volvo did not have the required oomph to make it over the hill to Kootenay Bay. Apparently, the gas line was freezing.
In Crawford Bay nothing was open. Our only hope was the Gray Creek Store, which is where we found the stuff you squirt into the gas tank to make the car go. You can still find anything you need (or don’t need) at the store, which has been operated by the Lymbery family since 1913.
Tom Lymbery writes in detail about the history of the business. But he writes about so much more: about the families who settled, had children, established a school and a hall, raised fruit, went to war, struggled to make a living, lost children, and went on.
Tom’s Gray Creek is a fascinating compilation of reminiscences, historical data, photos, maps and writings of the personalities who lived on the East Shore. It has good guys and bad guys, heartache and romance, comedy and tragedy. The glossary alone is entertainment.
The book features the beloved sternwheelers that served the lake communities in the first half of the last century, and the convolutions of Kootenay travel in the days before roads. When his father enlisted for the First World War, his journey began on the sternwheeler to Nelson, then train to Robson, “the overnight sternwheeler to Arrowhead and a local train to Revelstoke,” and finally connection with the main Canadian Pacific Railway line to Vancouver.
As early as 1931, Greyhound buses traveled the newly completed dusty lake road; later modifications to the SS Nasookin allowed them to be transported cross-wise on its bow to the other side of the lake.
Many of Tom’s experiences are unexpected. In 1939 the Gray Creek one-room-school class of eight students, a teacher and a chaperone (Tom’s mother) were treated to a trip to Banff in two cars to coincide with the visit of King George VI and Elizabeth. Tom writes, “Many of us had never been even as far as Creston, so a four-day trip to Banff and back was a tremendous adventure.”
In 1940 he witnessed an amphibious Grumman Goose taxi to the Gray Creek beach during a reconnaissance to search out landing sites across B.C. The war came to Gray Creek in other more significant ways, and so did the Depression.
The book resonates with me. I now realize my first ferry ride must have been one of the last sailings made by the Nasookin from Gray Creek wharf. My father, Vaughan Mosher, was working for the Water Rights Branch as a hydraulic engineer, locating snow courses (for measuring snowpack) in the Kootenays. He established the course in the Gray Creek watershed.
Among his jottings I found a couple of paragraphs from 1947. On the day mentioned, he, my mother and I were driving to Nelson, where we would eventually live for three years before moving to Creston. He wrote, “We travelled the narrow gravel road to the ferry at Gray Creek, and of course missed the boat by five minutes. I guess I must have made a rude remark, because when we reached the Nelson ferry and missed it, too, my daughter leaned over to me and said, ‘Another damn ferry, eh, Dad?’ ”
(Tom Lymbery writes on topics of historical interest for the East Shore Mainstreet. His book is published by Gray Creek Publishing, edited by Frances Roback, designed by Warren Clark. Everyone who participated in the book process lives on the East Shore.)
Betsy Brierley lives beside Kootenay Lake. She used to write for the Advance a long time ago.