The last time a wild West Coast storm threw Peter Knighton from his boat, he might have died had daughter Sandi not pulled him from the crashing surf at Carmanah.
That was in 2017. Peter was spent, but not so far gone that he couldn’t half-joke as Sandi carried him off the beach.
“He told me: ‘One of these days I’m going to die at home,’ ” a tearful Sandi said this week. “Well, he kept his word.”
Peter Knighton drowned Tuesday, his aluminum boat capsizing after a supply run to Port Renfrew. It happened right near Chez Monique, the legendary off-the-grid restaurant and store that West Coast Trail hikers call a middle-of-nowhere oasis, but that to the Knightons was the centre of their world. Home.
Peter was 78 — the same age his wife Monique was when she died in Victoria General Hospital on New Year’s Eve. For Sandi and her family, that’s both of them gone within six months.
Peter’s life ended just a few kilometres down the beach from where it began, back when there was a native settlement at Clo-oose. His surname evolved from his grandfather’s Nytom, which itself was an anglicized version of an Indigenous name. (When Peter’s grandfather got a lifesaving medal for tying a fishing line to himself and swimming through the pounding surf to rescue a pair of shipwrecked sailors, the accompanying certificate identified him as Jimmy Night-Time.)
Peter was only a few years old when he was scooped up and taken away to residential school. He would later tell his longtime friend Pete Hovey that when he finally made it back after residential school, his family, who had lived in the old ways, found him different. There was a divide.
“He always thought that he had lost some culture there,” says Hovey, who owns Port Renfrew’s Trailhead Resort.
Peter was gone from Vancouver Island for a long time, spending more than 20 years working for a chemical company in the Lower Mainland, which was where he met Montreal-raised Monique in 1984.
How they ended up at Carmanah wasn’t straightforward. Peter once said it had a lot to do with connecting with his dad, who trapped, hunted and fished there. It was also a factor that Peter didn’t love authority, not after that residential school, not after the way officialdom decided which Indigenous families should be shifted to which reserves.
A quarter-century ago, at odds with both Ottawa and elements of the Ditidaht band at nearby Nitinat, Peter put some distance between him and them and moved west. The federal government says the land on which Chez Monique sits is part of the Ditidaht reserve, but Peter only recognized it as being his family’s traditional territory. He called it Qwa-ba-diwa, its historical name.
Monique, Peter and 10-year-old Sandi arrived there on July 1, 1991. “We just had a shelter on the beach with an air mattress and a tarp over our belongings,” Peter once told me.
Later would come a 12-by-12 cabin, an outhouse, a garden, hoses to run water from the creek.
Chez Monique — tarps and plastic wrapped around a driftwood and timber frame — just kind of emerged as hungry, shivering hikers, halfway down the 75-kilometre trail, turned to the Knightons for help. The store’s isolation, along with Peter’s claim of title, spared it the regulation and red tape of the urban world: No building permits, no business licence, no health inspection, no zoning, no nothing.
For a family just wanting to be left alone, it was Eden: May to September catering to hikers, and seven months of no people at all, save for the keepers at the Carmanah Point lighthouse. No visitors except the mink, otter and marten, with the occasional orca or grey whale putting on a show.
It wasn’t that they were anti-social. Monique was a wonderful raconteur as the hikers slumped around the chairs and tables scattered in the sand, and Hovey says Peter had a great, dry sense of humour. There was a funny story about Peter accidentally puncturing his brand-new inflatable boat with the spine of a rockfish. “Everybody loved the man,” Hovey said. “He was a good, straight-shooting guy.”
Peter was stubbornly independent, though, neither asking for nor wanting help even as age caught up to him. Hovey would spot him hauling 200 pounds of ice to his boat, alone, while preparing for one of those supply runs to Carmanah. “He was a solitary guy. He wouldn’t rely on other people. … He took his burden on his shoulders.”
Eventually, time took its toll. With Monique’s health deteriorating, the couple (Sandi had moved away as a teenager) wintered in the paved parts of the world. Vancouver Island’s rugged west coast is a hard place to live.
That was proven by last year’s hair-raising episode: Peter, attempting to save an anchored boat in a storm, made his way to the vessel before crashing it onto the beach. Sandi heaved him over her shoulder and away from danger.
After Monique’s death, the family was uncertain about whether to reopen the store this year. Once they did decide to go ahead, the challenge proved even greater than expected. In January, the wildest storm in decades devastated the site. Chez Monique was left standing, but giant logs were strewn about like matchsticks.
It was worth the work, though. Sandi says Peter was in his element chatting with the hikers after the West Coast Trail opened in May. “I’ve never seen my dad so happy.”
Then came this week. Hovey says people in Port Renfrew always worried about Peter making that boat trip to Carmanah, a journey that could take two hours if the weather turned. The Island’s west coast — the Graveyard of the Pacific, the history books call it — is unforgiving.
By mid-afternoon Tuesday, Sandi’s husband had already completed the trip in another boat, but by the time Peter arrived the water was too rough. “The waves were absolutely horrifying,” Sandi said.
Unable to land, Peter turned back, called out that he would head to Port Renfrew. Then the fog rolled in and they lost him. What happened next is uncertain. Maybe a rogue wave.
When they next saw his boat it had capsized, was floating toward shore. There was no sign of Peter. Sandi was beside herself. “I searched all over the beach but I couldn’t find him.” It was the Coast Guard that finally found his body near Carmanah Creek.
Sandi, as you might expect, is distraught. Her guiding light is gone.
“He was my hero, my superman,” she says. “He was a very, very wise man. Even though he thought I was never listening in my younger years, I took in everything he said.”
She says she intends to keep Chez Monique open. It’s home.
