Previous chapter [“The fight,” October 25]: Thanks to Nancy Crowther’s father and a few other enterprising locals, oysters had been brought into Okeover Arm and Desolation Sound. The Pacific Japanese oyster spread rapidly and has been a valuable if invasive inlet crop to this day. In the mid-1950s, Cougar Nancy worked for an Okeover oyster plant. One summer day she let the social divide between she and her co-workers get the best of her. Mary Masailles was one of those girls who Cougar Nancy took umbrage with on the oyster floats. Nancy shoved one of the girls into the ocean, and when they got back to the dock, Nancy turned on Mary.
Mary Masailles was shocked. When they arrived at the oyster plant’s dock, Cougar Nancy ripped off Mary’s blouse and threw into the ocean, leaving Mary standing there in nothing but shorts and a bra.
“She was going to kill me,” Mary told the CBC’s Willow Yamauchi, in an interview before Masailles passed away.
Before Mary could react, Cougar Nancy charged at her, knocking her flat onto the dock. As Mary tried to defend herself, Cougar Nancy slammed punches down upon her.
Meanwhile, Mary’s friend Tiny, still soaking wet from being pushed into the water, rushed up to the oyster plant to tell the workers that Nancy Crowther had gone as wild as the cats she hunted. Several men rushed down to the dock. When they got there, they found Nancy dragging Mary towards the water.
“She was going to drown me,” Mary recounted incredulously.
The workers couldn’t believe their eyes. There was Nancy Crowther, trying to throw a half-naked girl off the dock. They entered the fray.
“Well, it took three boys to pull her off of me,” said Mary. “And when they got her off, they told me to run. ‘Get in your truck and get the hell out of here!’”
Mary did exactly what the workers urged her to do: she ran for it. Meanwhile, the workers held onto Cougar Nancy, who struggled mightily, until she eventually calmed down and returned to the reserved behaviour she was mostly known for.
The entire incident left Mary Masailles perplexed for decades.
“I don’t know why she was mad at me,” exclaimed Masailles. “I hadn’t done nothin’ to her.”
It was a type of wariness of others that would grow in Nancy over the years. Needless to say, Nancy Crowther wasn’t seen around the oyster plant after that for some time. Instead, she worked her family’s fertile oyster lease, on the beaches on either side of the isthmus their log cabin was built upon.
Before colonization, that isthmus was a Tla’amin Nation site that boasted rich clam beds on either side, the evidence of which is still there: deep middens of ancient discarded clamshells in the shoreline soil.
Many of the modern day oyster farmers still consider the Crowther lease to be the very best oyster-growing beach in the entire Desolation Sound and Okeover area, a region that is now known as “Oyster Country Canada.”
Throughout the 1950s, Nancy Crowther continued to work on her parents’ oyster lease on the weekends and at the company store in Powell River during the week, but she was no longer hiking the long and arduous 60-kilometres there and back.
Averse to getting her driver’s licence, Nancy Crowther instead cycled the bumpy dirt road on a dusty red, CCM bicycle with big black balloon tires. She was indeed a sight to see in the 1950s, in her plain country dress, black rubber boots, and red-checkered mackinaw jacket, bouncing along, often with her rifle slung across her back.
Between the demanding physicality of her life on the farm and cycling to and from Powell River, it explained why her biceps and calves looked like cannonballs to the gawking onlookers of the era.
“There goes that Cougar Nancy on her bicycle again,” they’d say. “Don’t mess with her. Did you hear what she did to Mary Masailles?”
Then, in the late 1950s, there came a gesture that would change the course of Cougar Nancy’s life again. A man would ask for Nancy’s hand in marriage. That’s in the next chapter of the Cougar Lady Chronicles.
Grant Lawrence is an award-winning author and a CBC personality who considers Powell River and Desolation Sound his second home. Portions of the Cougar Lady Chronicles originally appeared in Lawrence ’s book Adventures in Solitude and on CBC Radio. Anyone with stories or photos they would like to share of Nancy Crowther are welcome to email [email protected].
