Chapter seven recap: Linda Syms and Wayne Lewis purchased five acres of coastal wilderness adjacent to the Desolation Sound Marine Park. There, they planned to homestead and live full time, sharing a cabin with another couple. They named their new home Salubrious Bay. In the fall of 1977, Linda’s first guests were her sister and a tall, bearded man named Russell Letawsky.
Right from the start, Linda didn’t like Russell Letawsky, the future “Hermit of Desolation Sound.” Russell and Linda’s sister Audrey had just completed a treacherous month-long hike across the Coast Mountain range, up through the interior, over the glacier and down through the rainforest, following only a map and a compass.
“I thought he just barely got my sister out of it alive,” said Linda years later. “I was not at all impressed with him.”
Linda maintained that Russell put her older sister Audrey at great risk by convincing her to follow him on that hike. But didn’t Wayne put Linda in the same kind of risk, crossing the Pacific Ocean on the dilapidated sailboat, covered earlier in this series, thereby risking Linda’s life? Not so, according to Linda.
“It was me who wanted to go, Wayne was hesitant,” she clarified. “I pushed him to make that crossing. He wanted to turn back.”
And while others thought of Russell as a charming and philosophizing outdoorsman, Linda thought he was all talk.
“We felt like we were trying to make it on our own, and Russell just wanted to just use everybody and everything and then wanted to take all the credit for it,” she fumed.
In an odd twist of fate, it was because of Linda that Russell discovered Desolation Sound in the first place. When he and Audrey emerged from their hike, skinny and starving at the head of nearby Toba Inlet, it was Linda’s new homestead where they had a logging barge drop them off a few days later.
Russell fell in love with the area, infamously becoming the Hermit of Desolation Sound in the very next bay, spending the 1980s living alone in his homemade shack in the little cove next to our family cabin, becoming a longtime friend of our family. Despite living so close to each other for many years, Linda and Russell never became friends.
Back in Salubrious Bay, Linda and Wayne were slowly building the cabin of their dreams when they had a major falling out with the other couple they bought the property with. Wayne decided he couldn’t share a cabin with them, and much to my dad’s chagrin, Wayne and Linda began building a second cabin on their lot, about 75 feet away from the first cabin.
Dad’s original plan was to have no more than one cabin per lot, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Within a few years, Linda and Wayne’s cabin was complete, up the steep hillside, which was by design. Wayne thought that if they built the cabin 100 feet up the hill from the ocean, it would always keep them in shape. They had a beautiful view and lots of sunshine, but when it came to schlepping supplies up that hill on town days, Linda eventually came to curse the cabin’s chosen location so far from shore.
The two-year build of the cabin had depleted their savings, and cash expenses began to plague them. Despite living off the land as much as possible, Linda kept coming back to the same conclusion: even in the wilderness, you needed money, because eventually, you needed to go to town.
Oyster inspiration
One breezy spring day, she looked down from her deck and noticed clam diggers methodically working on a wild pick; they were harvesting bags upon bags at low tide, right on their beach.
Of course, anything below the tideline was open to a licensed pick, and that’s when it hit Linda. She was staring down at the cash they so desperately needed. It was right at their feet, right on their very own beach.
In 1981, Linda sent a one-page application for a parks use permit and within a month, by return mail, they had become shellfish farmers, specializing in oysters. A year later, they expanded their tenure lease to 10 acres of park shoreline.
So began a shellfish farming career that for Linda, would last for over 40 years.
Their farm was growing on land, too. True to the Salubrious name, Linda developed a tremendous garden, growing more than 30 different kinds of vegetables and almost equal that in fruit, including five kinds of apples, as well as peaches and even kiwis. Once, she remembers making a salad that contained 18 varieties of veggies, in February.
They also added a herd of goats, which followed Linda around like pets. They still didn’t have refrigeration and she longed for milk for her coffee, which the goats provided. But just as Cougar Nancy had discovered 50 years earlier, larger livestock attracted larger predators.
One night while Linda and Wayne were having dinner, they were startled to hear what sounded like a piercing shriek coming from the yard. Linda grabbed their largest flashlight and Wayne flung open the side door.
They couldn’t figure out what they were looking at; it appeared to be four thin white sticks waving about in the air. Then they realized those sticks were goat legs.
A huge cougar had one tawny paw on the goat’s neck, effortlessly pinning the struggling animal to the ground. The mighty cat stared right into the flashlight beam. It let out a screech and showed off its gleaming fangs.
What did Linda and Wayne do? You’ll read that in the next chapter of Wild Pick: The life and adventures of Linda Syms, oyster farmer of Desolation Sound.
Grant Lawrence is an award-winning author and a radio personality who considers Powell River and Desolation Sound his second home. Wild Pick originally aired as a radio series and podcast based on Linda Syms’ two books: Salt Water Rain and Shell Games. Both are for sale at Pollen Sweaters in Lund and Marine Traders in Powell River.
