by Jill Frayne
The place is tended in a rough way, the grass hacked by some kind of scythe. Clumps of spotted tiger lilies have been left to grow, their petals stiff and fleshy, salt-tempered. The air races offshore, tearing the high clouds in a brilliant sky. A bunch of ravens sail over my head and out across the road to a row of cedars backing the beach. The sea’s way off at low tide and shows a dozen shades of blue, whitecaps kicking up out in the strait.
In Skidegate, Mary told us this morning, there’s plenty of work guiding and fishing. Some people have the old carving skills and make art, elaborating and re-creating Haida designs. When I walk back, the road through town is empty, lined with prim houses, trucks and bicycles in the yards, wind chimes twirling on the porches. There are none of the usual residential postings, no SCHOOL ZONE or FOR SALE signs.
The scale must be why it feels good here. These huge beaches, quick skies and riotous vegetation run all over and people just tuck in where they can. Things are in the right relation for once, nature raucous and overgrown, humans cut down to size.
I know I’m romanticizing. This isn’t paradise. A fifteen-year dispute in South Moresby taken up with the government by the Haida and conservationists to preserve the area from resource extraction ended just a couple of years ago. Much of South Moresby is now a National Park Reserve, spared from logging by the skin of its teeth. There are clear-cuts just south of here. But the inevitable is taking longer in this out-of-the-way place. There’s still juice here, something wonderful, a compressed, bursting energy—the way the plants hop the fences and leap out of the gravel. It makes me want to spin around and yip.
JUNE 29
I lucked into the sweetest day today. I stepped into the road about noon and the “limo” driver who takes people from the airport on Sandspit across to Queen Charlotte City stopped when I stuck out my thumb. It’s his day off and he’s going up the coast to Tlell to have supper with his daughter. He said, “Come along.”
Sergis du Bucy is seventy-three and, except for six months’ military training in the forties, has never been off Haida Gwaii. He’s a bony man in a white, buttoned-up shirt, with a beaky face and big pale hands. His manner is mild and friendly; he’s comfortable with himself and used to showing people around. We follow a winding coastal road along the open Hecate Strait. Huge empty beaches roll away from the road and a big lowering sky makes the day portentous and grand.
Sergis’s daughter, Margaret, has a bunkhouse backed into a dune on the Tlell, a bright brown river that fills with sea water on the flow tide. The landscape is entirely different from the misty fjords I’m expecting in South Moresby. These are dune lands—fine gold sand and tufted goat grass pale as jade, wild tansy.
Sergis settles in to visit and I wander off, making my way over a barricade of beached logs onto a colossal shore bulging into the low sky as far as I can see. Gulls clamour under the cloud cover and, in the distance, sandpipers twinkle along the surf line. I head north toward the glowering horizon but gradually get drawn in by the watercolour stones underfoot, smooth and subtle as eggs. Finally I’m bent double over them, stopped. I collect a little company of black, plum and copper ones, and a snowy clamshell, and wrap them in my windbreaker.
Margaret includes me in a cold chicken supper with homemade buns and pie, this wonderful fare somehow emanating from a place without power or water. Her air of resigned courtesy suggests that her father regularly shows up with complete strangers. We talk about living out here, the seasons. “November’s the month you’d like to be someplace else,” Sergis says contentedly. Late afternoon we take our leave.
On the way home Sergis points out ranchland, uniquely low-lying, and tells me there were homesteading efforts at one time, now mainly petered out. We stop to investigate a dead whale, peach-coloured and mournful, washed up on shore, and a boulder the size of an outhouse, balanced on an edge no bigger than a breakfast tray.
When we’re back in town, we top things off with a visit to the dump to watch the black bears snuzzing in the garbage for food. I tell Sergis my impression that present-day Haida are prospering here and he replies, “Well, that’s fair. Makes it better for everyone. I couldn’t have a good house and him have a bad one. You’d never feel right.”
PACKING UP in the hostel later on, I try to prepare myself for the kayak venture tomorrow. The outing is unimaginable. We are to assemble on Sandspit tonight, camp together and fly out in the morning to the put-in place at the bottom of the islands. I have only the orientation package I got in the mail to go on—a what-to-bring list and an itinerary of the expedition. The trip is fifteen days. There will be two guides, non-locals with kayaking expertise and graduate degrees in some natural science. We’ll travel every day, never the same camp twice, visiting the old Haida camps at the tip of South Moresby and along the sheltering east coast. We’ll see the village of Ninstints on Skun Gwaii and, to the north, Tanu. We’ll be flown in and out by Twin Otter and paired in tandem boats—“surprisingly stable” according to my “What to Expect” page. I’m expecting to be among the least experienced, never having kayaked at all.
I’m more depressed than excited. The inevitability of this adventure presses on me, like being trapped in line for a Ferris wheel ride, my ticket bought and paid for, the wheel swinging overhead, closer and closer. I’m thinking how much I’d rather just make taxi runs with Sergis.
Four
HAIDA GWAII
We are twelve, including two guides, Bob and Heather. The orientation package described Bob as “musical,” a natural history graduate, with twelve years’ experience leading trips in Haida Gwaii. He’s in his late thirties, a fine-boned man in a plaid shirt who spends our first eight hours together frowning at weather readings and going over lists. Heather is tall, athletically glamorous, with a mass of red hair. There’s one other Canadian besides the guides and me, a wiry school principal from inland B.C. A youth from Belgium arrives late, looking baffled, an expression he wears for the entire expedition. The rest of the group are Americans. There’s a pair of women friends from New York, Rhee and Ann, a biologist and his wife from Utah, a woman on her own from California and two Jims, one a machinist from Las Vegas and the other an advertising executive from Washington state. Most are outfitted in brand new Gore-Tex and neoprene booties. None of us has been in a kayak before.
We met last night in Sandspit, a tiny settlement of general stores and bed and breakfasts on a low table of sand sticking into the Hecate Strait, flat enough to land airplanes from Vancouver and Seattle. This was our departure point, halfway down the Queen Charlotte archipelago. A seaplane was to carry us to the southern tip of South Moresby early this morning, but the day came up low and blowing, heavy mist drifting over the airstrip, blocking visibility. We waited all day for the clouds to lift, the group getting acquainted in the canteen without me. I have no idea how to manage this, make friends with a group of strangers I’m about to be confined with for fifteen days. I stayed outdoors, roaming the gloomy beach, the small measure of readiness I’d mustered for this venture leaking away. By the time we rattled down the runway mid-afternoon, I’d lost all will to go.
When the plane lands in Rose Harbour, we climb warily onto the pontoons and make our way to shore. The kayaks are here, six double-seaters drawn up on the beach, looking incongruous. I have no idea how they got here. The place feels not only uninhabited but never inhabited. The air smells never breathed, the rising hills look uninvaded, no clearing or seam. The water shows every sunken stone. Bob says Rose Harbour was a whaling station, a white man’s enterprise, and before that the Haida made it a summer camp. Carrying gear up the beach, I notice tokens in the black gravel: coal and clots of iron from the whaling station, machinery filigree and ocean drift, a tiny shard of porcelain from Japan, huge chalky scallop shells, like cupped hands mauve at the wrist.
When we’re all ashore, Bob flings six tent bags on the beach and tells us to pair up. The twosomes fall together, the Belgian student and I unmatched at the end. He takes the last comp
any-issue dome and I unpack my Eureka.
Back of the beach is a lime green meadow, soaking wet, rocking with tussocks and tree stumps, a clearing that’s barely holding out against the flow of forest. We put up our tents in grass so heaped and lush, the rolling ground beneath is no bother at all when we lie down to sleep.
Outside my tent tonight I hear water running under me and, in the dark, sink my toothbrush in the grass to catch it.
JULY 1
Today we paddle out of Rose Harbour after a demoralizing morning adjusting foot pedals and breaking down equipment into kayak-size bundles. I realize that all of my carefully selected gear is silly. Where can I stow a twelve-gallon backpack? What do I do with a Siwash sweater that folds to the size of a toaster oven? What to make of bulging cotton socks that take three days to dry? It’s evident to me now that this trip is about getting wet and quickly getting dry.
Bob squinted up at a certain point in his routine this morning and picked me as his kayak partner. A nose for a fellow introvert is my guess.
Through the morning the weather stirred around and changed its mind till it seemed unlikely we’d leave at all. I’d wandered off down the beach when I heard Bob yelling to heave the boats into the water. After hours of standing around, suddenly we’re off.
The sensation is startling. A kayak is not a canoe. Rather than gliding on the water, one is in the water, reconstituted as a seabird or water creature, a sleek swimming pod, part of the circle of sky and sea.
These big tandems are blessedly steady. At least, I feel steady, paired with a maestro and freighted with the heaviest load. Stroking out of the silver bay is pure joy.
A dawning drawback, as we settle into a rhythm, is the constancy of paddling. I’m used to a canoe, to the long, varied paddle strokes and the practice of switching sides. In a kayak the stroke is unvarying. You hold your arms straight out, collarbone height, rolling your shoulders in an endless rhythm, levering out of your hips. My paddle is an uncontoured, oar-like shaft of heavy wood, unwieldy to the bitter end.
Before we leave the channel and tackle the open ocean, we stop for lunch, pulling up on a small rock beach with the usual background of lime green plush. Our blood’s up and we’re feeling relieved to be off. Heather digs out a Tupperware box that holds the perishables. Lunch will be the same every day: two slices of bread open-face, one with the special of the day, something like tuna salad, chickpea mix or tinned salmon, the second slice a filler of peanut butter and jam. We’ve each been issued a water bottle, stowed in reach under our spray skirts, to be refilled at passing freshwater streams, and a zip-lock goodie bag, precious as emeralds, full of nuts, dried fruit and a single Mars bar.
I eat happily and ease my back onto a flat rock that’s almost warm. The sky’s plain and kind. Before we push off I climb into the woods to pee. Bob advises that toilet paper pollutes and won’t be offered. He suggests sphagnum moss, springy and slightly antiseptic, or handfuls of sea water if we’re crouched in the intertidal zone—an ecologically sound place to defecate. This ritual isn’t for everyone, but I come to like it.
It’s another world when I enter the forest. I’m enfolded in the spongy trees, all sound absorbed, the place so zingy and oxygen-stuffed I forget everything and become simply a bunch of senses. I lose track, muse on the trees, inhale the vibrant calm of the rain forest. These are ghost trees, these cedar, spruce and hemlock, breathing old hymns. Moss covers their entire length, the whole forest stoked in velvet—a sanctuary, thick and humid and cool.
It occurs to me tonight that we paddled in the open Pacific today, onto the savage west side, ten inexperienced people who’ve known each other one day, out on the wild ocean in small boats.
JULY 2
I crawl out of my tent this morning, two moon snail shells the size of softballs glowing on the ground where I left them last night. The tendons in my forearms are hollering for more rest. The sky, edging toward clear yesterday, has a water-filled radiance. I sink my head in a stream, stained bright brown by the surrounding cedars, and clamber over drift logs like straddling a succession of horsebacks to get back to my tent.
I hardly know what to make of today. It is an astonishing day of sunlight and wonders and sorrow and fatigue and debris and discouragement and spirit world.
We leave our campsite at Fanny Beach and paddle out in the ocean around a flat rock called Flat Rock, riding the swells and watching puffins and seabirds whose names I try to memorize. Pigeon guillemots are the black, chubby ones with a white streak on their wings, and oystercatchers have very round heads and long red bills. There are many puffins, lovable natural comics. In flight they look like big cigars.
I’m enjoying the kayaks a lot. When we cruise up to an island or a rock, the water slops crazily back and forth, the boats somehow holding their own in the rambunctious backwash off the rocks.
I begin to have a rapport with Bob, which I would describe as a communion of silence. He tends to commentate briefly if he’s making a decision: “Hmm, there could be orcas in that channel. Let’s check it out.” Otherwise he shows no inclination to get acquainted. Within a few days I’m in the same cloud of private musing as I was on the drive out.
After circling Flat Rock, Bob catches a fish, whacks it with a piece of kindling, strings cord through the gill and mouth and tosses it on the deck. From there we go straight out to a mound of rock frequented by Steller’s sea lions. Bob informs me there are big colonies further south. The dozen or so animals we see here are the outlaws and cripples—defeated bulls who lost the squabble over harems, along with some barren females and immatures. Exiles. We paddle closer to get a look. Their golden bodies are slung as though boneless on the rock. The air is a din, the atmosphere grouchy and charged. As our approach stirs them up, they start bawling and shouldering one another into the sea. I didn’t expect to be so thrilled by animals in the wild. I didn’t reckon on their power, the way they create a whole environment with their odour and noise and mood. We creep among them elated by their non-human presence, their pungent, unknowable life.
Then we rock and reel to the back of Skun Gwaii, where the village of Ninstints still stands. Our expedition begins with the high point, a lingering Haida village, now a World Heritage Preserve, standing where it has always been, a treasure of history. Because of the wind we cannot approach the beach front-on but must park in back of the island and hike to the village over an old forest trail. The Haida took the first trees, but even this second-growth is formidable, the ground around the trees snaggled and torn as though from huge seismic shifts.
I cannot enter the place. When we come to the cove where Ninstints stands, I stay back in the trees, stunned by the presence of spirits. The air in the place strums. I have to sit down and watch from the edge until it grows more neutral and I can go in. The village stands in a small gravel cove, a crescent, the silver remains of posts tipping at angles around the beach. Afternoon sun lays shadow on the scurry of surf at the waterline.
Haida lived here. For thousands of years they fished and went on raids; for a couple more centuries they traded on this beach with arriving Europeans. Then they got sick and died, and those who didn’t die had to leave and go up to Skidegate. I’m amazed to find the emotion of those events still here. There’s been so little in the way of trespass to disturb or dissipate what happened. There was the trauma that soaked the air with adrenalin and grief and then a hundred years passed like sleep, and now we enter in the low afternoon and find the poles still sighing.
The quality of quiet is so deep that one by one we stop talking and sit down and lie down, and finally we are all lying in the moss in the old village and a few deer come in and begin to eat.
JULY 3
A thing that is troubling me from time to time is the ethics of our being here. When we’re in these camps at night I think how troops of us pass through every summer, and no matter how no-trace we try to be, we make an impact.
When we’re dicing onions tonight I ask Bob why he does it.
I know he loves the land, but these expeditions are hard on it. Why does he take people stomping through the old forests? He gives the answer I’ve heard before.
“People coming on these trips are often travelling in wilderness for the first time. Hundreds of inexperienced people sign up every year to be escorted beyond habitation—to paddle, trek, fly into places like this, the world’s last places. The physical world is powerful, but it’s also fragile. My hope is that travellers who come will be changed by it. The exposure will get to them; they’ll go home more conservation-minded. They might change some habits, take a different side in an argument, write a letter. That’s the hope.”
He’s bound to say this, but it’s not a rationale that settles me. We still leave our mark, we still disturb little and big circles of life. It’s the slow death rather than the quick one, is all. I know wild places die faster by chainsaw and strip mine than by the gentle harassment of the wilderness business, but the outcome is the same.
LAST SPRING was the first time I came out here. I was in Tofino on Vancouver Island, and on a rainy day I took a tourist boat—a coast guard boat with room for twelve—up the coast to visit a hot spring. Away we went, zipped up in red spray suits and navy blue toques like a brace of bowling pins, myself and eleven German tourists. We roared north, keeping well out in the swells, and on the return we meandered through the little coves along the mainland. Puttering into one tiny bay, the guide said we were entering a favourite nursing ground for a certain kind of shark. He thought if we were very quiet … and I thought, “Oh, sure. A tourist season five months long, two trips per day, this company alone—we’re bound to come upon sharks raising their young.”
