Two hours by floatplane northwest of Vancouver, at the edge of the Broughton Archipelago. Seventeen of us, grandparents to grandkids, for my grandmother's eightieth.
British Columbia was in a heat wave – forty degrees – so the first thing anybody did was swim in the waterfall that supplies the resort's drinking water. The boat day through the archipelago turned up almost no wildlife, which is how boat days go. We had a picnic on the rocks and somebody tried the kelp. It tastes like seaweed.
Better: a wood-burning sauna floated out on its own dock, and a harnessed walk through the forest canopy. Dinner was the anchor – five-spice short rib, fourteen hours on the barbecue, and sablefish with a maple glaze.
On the third morning my grandfather took a helicopter to Port Hardy for a rabies vaccination. He had slept with a bat in his bed. I found the first one and killed it, and we found a second dead on the wall the next morning. Three needles, and he came back saying it was the best flight of the trip.
The night of the birthday, my grandmother told the table she had taken all the cards back to her room and read every one of them, some of them twice, and cried both times. You cannot imagine, she said, how lucky I feel to have all of you in my life.