Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  That’s the rub. People want to see wildlife in their secret nests and dens raising their young, migrating, sparring for territory. People want an orca to leap over the bow of their kayak for their camera, but the more we press wild animals, the more we drive them off. Tension grows between the expectations of clients who’ve paid so much to get into these places and the needs of wild creatures.

  In testy moments I think, this is what consumerism does. It turns everything into product, habituates us to look for a certain kind of value, dims our recognition of the real watering holes. Dropped into wilderness, we act the same as we do rating a pricey hotel. How thick are the towels? How many grizzly sightings? Consumerism hones the powers of appraisal and discrimination and shrivels the capacity to be content. I think so. To be in these last places, these last wild places on earth, paddling along, living outdoors—that ought to be enough. As it is, we expect the day to go beyond itself, to cough up a sea lion or a snorting orca in front of us because we paid so much and it was so awkward to get here.

  I ram a tent peg into the moss and notice a problem with my righteousness. I’m one of the ones who goes home inspired, one of the enthusiasts Bob hopes for, but I also come back as often as I can, and every time I do I scrape the lichen off its thousand-year-old grip and alarm the pronghorns drinking at the river. I alter where I go, modestly deface and wreck it, and so do thousands of other keeners; and if this is nothing compared with the chemical sewage pouring out of Marathon into Lake Superior, I stand by my point, hypocritical as it may be. I don’t quite think we should be here.

  WE BACKTRACK TODAY through the pass at Rose Harbour to get to the east side of the archipelago. The rest of the trip we’ll be blocked from the open Pacific, tracking north along the leeward coast through the relatively protected waters of the Hecate Strait.

  This morning was a hard paddle, and I distinguished myself by staggering out of the boat at noon and shouting on the beach, “I HATED THAT.” My hands are swollen and my tailbone aches from bracing against the seat. We are human hinges out there, straining fulcrums between water and wind.

  We camp early and pass a hot, fine afternoon on a short, crunchy beach. I go off with the women to bathe in a glen, our white, moundy bodies bent in green light in the stream. There’s a seal playing offshore, its exhalations loud when it surfaces.

  This evening I walk back of the campsite into the woods and notice in the thick quiet the absence of birdsong or scuttle. Bob says there aren’t many animals, just a few black bear and a small kind of deer. The only thing I see is banana slugs. Overwhelmingly it’s trees, these old, moss-caked cedars, standing or toppled, sopping up all sound, the whole place like a sponge, gently, implacably filling.

  Conversation floats back from our camp on the beach, people propped against drift logs after dinner, getting acquainted. The group is taking shape. Cathy is one of those migratory Americans who’s lived all over. Lately she’s from California. She’s gregarious and generous, the one who extracted all our biographies and links us. She paddles with Jim from Seattle, handling his razor humour with unflagging good temper. She and Jan, the school principal, tent together, attending to each other in a practical, easy way, like a fold-up marriage.

  The couple from Utah, Mike and Pam, are Mormons; shy, unassuming, gently walled off from the rest of us, paddling, eating, tenting together, complementary in everything. Even their perceptions are shared: “We wondered … We think …”

  The Belgian student paddles with Jan and sleeps by himself. He’s out of his element both by age and by culture, virtually mute. I can’t gauge what he makes of the trip. I have a fantasy he’s on the wrong trip, that he meant to sign up for an oboe workshop in Vancouver and found himself here, too baffled to speak up. The two Jims have adopted him in a gruff way that both demotes and includes him.

  Jim and Jim are tent-mates, already the strongest force in the group. They didn’t know each other before, but they are a fit. Jim from Seattle is an advertising exec, strapping, pugnacious, a master of sarcasm. He has the American trait of exaggerated self-esteem that Canadians find vexing. The other Jim, from Las Vegas, is a tool and die maker, relaxed, absorbent, sly, a tireless foil. These two give every campfire a kind of edgy energy, one Jim delivering feints with his wit, the other chuckling and blunting the barb.

  Rhee and Ann are housewives from New York, long-time friends, self-assured. Rhee paddles with Heather, the other guide, and Ann with Vegas Jim. They’ve done this before, gone off together on adventures, and know the ropes. They have steady, unflappable pacing and enviable gear: pastel bug suits, functioning dry bags, effective skin lotion.

  Heather is an apprentice guide. This is her first trip with Bob. She moulds herself to his leadership perfectly, skating in sync with whatever he’s up to. She’s strong, deft and shy. She and Bob tent together, join each other in every task, Heather smoothly putting flesh where he’s lean.

  JULY 4

  How many days out? Four? My hands want to split out of their skin. They’re hot and swollen from clenching the paddle, the backs glazed and salt-baked like fired pots. Last night I walked up and down the beach gripping a cobblestone in each hand for their soothing cool. I’d pace, heat up the rocks in my palms and set them down for fresh ones.

  We had a wretched paddle this morning out of Rose Passage and north into Hecate. I was searching every cranny of myself for some last cache of energy, glaring at the shore as it passed inch by bloody inch. Bob had the wherewithal to point out a bear somewhere ahead and a sea lion huffing in the water beside us. Eventually we stopped for lunch at an old camp, skidding on the steep beach as we pulled the boats up. My role in landing requires clambering overboard into the surf to lead the boat in, and the reverse when we take off—I tow us into the sea. I live in wet running shoes. This detail is a significant feature of the expedition, easily on a par with seal sightings, and ought to appear in the brochure: “Visit Abandoned Haida Camps in Wet Shoes.”

  While we napped in the shelter of drift logs after lunch, the weather changed. The sky cast over, the wind dropped and we went on in a different day, a hazy cheesecloth sky drawn across deep, easy swells. I sang sorrowful folk songs to myself.

  In the middle of Carpenter Bay, in silence, in no current at all, we paused and drifted for a few minutes, falling into reverie, floating in a gossamer sky. This is the inside-out of the morning’s wrenching exertion, the bliss on the other side of the moon.

  Many times each day the splendour and solace sweep me up, take me out of the paddling and thrill me past anything. It’s a ravishing place, like steering through live velvet. I am moody, though, a scrapyard of emotions, the welling and brooding a mystery to me since it isn’t tied to thoughts. On this trip I don’t think at all—the life’s too demanding. My senses are pried open and I get tossed around.

  At dusk tonight, in the woods far down the beach, standing in a triangle of trees, I’m gradually surrounded by chanting. Under the wind, slow but unmistakable, comes a far-off, solar-plexus-rattling ululation. Craning to hear, out on the water I see a night tableau, or think I do: thick men in gusty torchlight standing in their boats in the blackness, and on the shore a black surge of women, filling the air with singing. From the sound I catch a vision of Haida men putting to sea to fish or make war, and their women sending them off. Gradually the sight thins and wears away, though not the sound. After a while I come to myself, standing in the trees in the dark, and walk back to camp.

  NOW I START to dream—protracted, hectic dreams that stay with me, distinct, when I wake up. This hasn’t happened for a long time. When I was laid up for a year after my bicycle accident, my dreams grew huge, which I attribute to the simplicity of life as an invalid. Dreaming must be partly problem-solving, and, during that laid-up time, each day took so little to resolve that I had to go deeper for material, grist for the psychic mill. All sorts of ancient puzzles surfaced, in one disguise or another.

  It’s like that here. Each day burns everything to
nothing. We work so hard breaking camp, paddling, setting up camp at the next place—always outdoors, always someplace new—there is no residue, nothing for the mind to pick at in the night. So I oar backwards in my sleep, find old reserves. The water and hills and sky imprint themselves all day, pre-emptive, and in my sleep, in darkness, my own life glides up, portrays itself, seeks consolation.

  I’m dreaming about Leon. He’s with me out here, where I thought he’d never come.

  JULY 5

  I turn in my bag, grey seeping under the slope of the tent. I slept poorly for the first time in a long while. The air is still charged, the Haida present, last night’s scene electric. I feel like a tuning fork. To add to it, I’m pushing my body too hard. Every morning I crawl out of the tent not nearly ready for the day’s exertions. This pace is not mine. I’m begging muscle and bone to give more, to catch up and build strength. I lie in my slippery bag at night and talk to my forearms like a coach in a locker room in the middle of a tough game. “Now, men, you can do it. Just get out there.”

  WE’RE OFF to a fragile start. It’s a bright ride out of our cove, but the north wind assaults us as soon as we turn the corner. I’m in no man’s land, wan and captive, and I paddle hard. The fragility wears off, my muscles warm and, as they take the bit, I stride out of the grasp of spirits. Matter over mind.

  I cannot tell where the Haida tableau last night came from; whether it was a phenomenon outside myself, a ghost scene there on the water, arising from a ritual repeated so many times or so potent that it shimmers still, a hundred years later, for any overwrought person to see, or whether I imagined it, created the scene in the back of my own eyeballs. Bob, at least, believes me. He has seen ghosts and commiserates in his brief way.

  Late morning, the headwinds drop. We get into a straggle of islands and headlands, and stop for lunch at the foot of a sheer hill. Our boats keep sliding back into the sea and we have to run for them.

  I love the slack time after lunch when we crawl off somewhere behind a drift log to doze. My bones give over to the warm bank with its fizz of grass, and every thought empties into the ground, the kind of release you get only if you’ve been racking yourself.

  Dead calm this afternoon. Paddling is tedious and heavy. Swells and currents, even headwinds, are better than this flat calm with nothing to brace against. “I need the wind to animate me” is how Bob puts it. I focus on my life preserver stowed on the deck, watch the dipping paddle blades out of the corners of my eyes. Paddling becomes yoga in this lull. I attend to the effort in my body, pushing away on the stroke, levering off alternate feet, trying to loosen my grasp on the paddle to save my thumb joints.

  To ease the boredom, Bob rigs a sail. Not much air to catch, but it’s fun, groping with another element for a way to meet and fit.

  Behind us I catch drifts of conversation. It’s the habit of the group to paddle within chatting range—the Jims and Cathy, at least. Bob leads, Heather sweeps and, if the going’s easy, the rest bunch up and talk.

  It’s smart, this pairing off with a partner in the boats and tents. It fosters a buddy system, everyone having someone to look out for. The emotional needs of the group tend to stir around within these pairs, freeing up the leaders to navigate, fix rudder lines, lead.

  It’s stressful out on the ocean. We may be having fun, spiritually moved, loving every minute, but we’re stressed. Under the exhilaration we feel the strain on our nerves. There is so much strangeness. In the mornings Bob pulls out the laminated sea chart and we crowd around, staring at the blue and white shapes, the course we’ll take that day, but we don’t really know where we are or where we’re going. The map has nothing to do with the actual prospect, the shoves and pulls of the real ocean, the boundless sky and wheeling wind, the enormity of weather and tide and current with no handrail. Out here our routines and habits are blasted to kingdom come. The quirky comforts we’ve built up over years are gone, unreconstructible. After a day of newness comes a night of newness. Under the circumstances, emotional connection is crucial; someone to fuss to, someone to help you find your bug lotion.

  I have no buddy and no bond yet with the group. My mood of exile—Rapunzel in the tower—keeps me off, as if I must do this, must let the land bear down on me, muse on Leon, stay apart. If I could start the outing again, I wouldn’t do this. I’d avoid isolation, fake sociability, join in somehow. Paired in the kayak with Bob and sleeping by myself, I have no one but the landscape to turn to, and as a consort the landscape overwhelms me.

  JULY 6

  This morning started raw. I was dreaming of Leon. We had no home and no place to be together. Today my palm feels the back of his neck.

  The day heats up and flattens out. We’re floating through a skein of offshore islands, the ocean floor plainly visible beneath us, a waving lawn of empty clamshells and lounging starfish of every colour. Swaying among them is the concoction of some kind of snail, a whirl of glue and eggs that looks like broken clay pots.

  This afternoon we make an early camp in a hemmed bay and, after setting up, venture into the live wall of forest back of the beach. The place is a den of filtered light and ancient trees on the verge of shattering. We clamber over seeping primordial stumps that collapse and crumble in our wake. Our shoes kick up divots of moss. Our exuberance makes such a path of wreckage, I’m glad when we go back.

  Later, with the low sun straight in our eyes, we women swim off the barnacled rocks, stroking out in a lamé sea. A harbour seal rises beside us like a ghost.

  WE’RE IN A PROTECTED ENCLOSURE back of Burnaby Island that was cramped and stifling when we arrived in the blankness of noon. Now, at low tide, the perspective has changed, the view wide and lifting. Fog muscles down the hills to the west like lava, sneaking under a clarion sky. There’s wind in the trees high up, and seabirds cry around the empty bay. The beach has become a live museum, the out-tide exposing mounds of rock slathered in gold kelp. Thousands of barnacles cake the shore rocks, their mouths clicking at the deserting tide. Stranded jellyfish, like messy organs, gape on the wet stones. Ravens will pick them off before the tide flows back.

  Tonight it’s buckwheat and saltgrass for dinner, butterscotch pie, ocean on three sides, wind and eagles. Bob plays the concertina, stretched out against a log. Heather leads Cathy and Jan in some shy dancing in the cool sand.

  THE KIND OF VEGETATION we get when we’re paddling further out is bull kelp. It anchors in thirty feet of water, growing a foot a day toward the light in spring. We find it sprawling on the surface, the slippery stalks wrist-thick, rubbery amber-coloured streamers trailing out for yards. In heavy wind or current, we steer into a patch of kelp, grab an armload of these floating ribbons and hang on, anchored to the ocean floor. I like to handle it. I like the urgency, rocking on the sea, struggling to catch hold, to yank a bundle over the hull and get a cord around it just under the gas bulb, like choking a throat. Fastened to the kelp patch in the ocean, we can relax, stretch back in our seats, enjoy the tumult.

  The paddling life is established now. There isn’t so much preamble and milling around when we take off. Bob has discarded the tensor bandage he wore around his wrist the first few days and I’ve outlasted the hand-padding arrangements I used.

  There’s a joviality out on the water, a dome of good spirits whether we’re paddling close in a pod or strung out. Our boat leads the way and behind us through the day, unless we’re flat out against current or wind, I catch voices pitched light. There’s a link between exertion and high spirits. Once the body is equal to the demand, the stress of physical effort works toward euphoria. Neurologically, emotionally, humans love a pounding heart.

  Balancing the long, repetitious bouts at the paddle are the rests—the rollicking rests in the kelp beds when it’s blowing, or the heavenly rests in flat water when the sky is gauzy and windless. We rip open our spray skirts and dig in the damp air between our knees for water bottles or candy. When the water’s easy, we let ourselves drift, arching a little in our seats
, letting our arms go slack, lapping up the atmosphere. Sometimes we see jellyfish straying by on some submerged, mysterious errand. One today looked like poached eggs.

  We’re changing, softening like pummelled leather. The experience of being here is intensely physical and emotional. The barrier we normally keep between ourselves and everything else, the filter that organizes experience, gets mashed in a place like this, where the trees are a thousand years old and the sea sweeps over the edge of sight. We’re released from our lives with only what tokens and comforts we can cram into small bundles, and the work of paddling and bending and lifting all day dissolves our defences, drives us into our bodies and our senses. With the casing pounded thin, we seem more life-size, more human and susceptible.

  On this trip I fit myself to the land in the most literal way, opening my skin to it completely. I lay my spine down on the ground and take warmth from the stones. I press my ribs and belly on the moss and the ground takes me to itself. I open my eyes like sponges. Live nature seeps into my body, blanks my mind and dismays me with her force. When the wind blows, I perk up; when we paddle in calm, I flatten. On broad beaches, my chest spreads; when we draw up in hemmed coves, I constrict. It is union with an overpowering lover, no different, I think, from the experience of being in love. My cells feel swollen and crowded, my nerves strummed. I am woozy and irritable and rapt.

  JULY 7

  Halfway point. Now I expect perfect consciousness, my body equal to the task, my spirits imperturbable. It doesn’t go that way, of course. I spend the morning trying to think of ways to impress Bob and worrying about the gash in my toe that won’t heal because my feet are never dry.

  Bob is a big preoccupation. We all admire him for his skill and aloofness. He isn’t unfriendly, but he keeps a reserve that’s beyond professional, tantalizing to us women, of course—the hard nut to crack. It’s obvious the place thrills him, and his excitement makes him spontaneous and open to the day. I think he took this job as a way to be in Haida Gwaii. Meeting people or being the leader—even paddling—wouldn’t be the draw, not after twelve years. He never seems quite involved in any of these activities. He has the look a mother gets sitting by the wading pool watching her toddler, the senses scanning, alert for mishap, the mind gone elsewhere.