Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  Tide and current are in our favour out to the Tar Islands, and we hazard modest sailing with reefed sails. We rest up in a kelp patch in a very strong current, where Bob and Mike pull in a quick catch of rockfish.

  We plunge onto a scarf of rock, shallow water scudding between dozens of low islands. Harbour seals surface shyly to watch.

  Landing on a rock for lunch, we hunt for a spot out of the wind and eat hummus mix, bread, cheese, sliced pear, mashed salmon, peanut butter and jelly. I’ve started coping with the stampede at mealtimes by hanging back. Bob says we’re the hardest group on jam he’s ever seen.

  Veins of tiny flowers are snugged in the rock. Bob says we don’t see them on the mainland because deer knock them off, though when they’re hungry, deer will make the swim, even out this far. A stunning image to me, deer churning in the salt sea.

  To the east lies Lyell Island, the famous region that brought a moratorium on logging in South Moresby. From here we can see that the hills have been clear-cut, except for an old-growth swath around Windy Bay too awkward to log. The bay is so shallow, low tide drains it of water, making the shore unapproachable for hours each day. This is our destination, and we’ll have to time it. We pack up, catch the tide and scoot over the water, weather and current altered again. We haven’t had the same paddle twice.

  Windy Bay is handsome. There’s a bit of a settlement. A watch-keeper presides in a longhouse with two enormously fat women. Behind their yard is a big golden forest with a full stream, a labyrinth of deer trails and the usual mob of ravens. Bob is excited to be here and eager to talk with the old man. He cooks up a special meal, a “jum” of our catch this morning tossed into a chowder broth. For hors d’oeuvres he serves the watchkeeper fried abalone and sliced sea cucumber with a sprig of dill. The old man remarks courteously on the hunting, the salmon expected next month, the two-point buck one of the women—his daughter, it turns out—shot and canned the other day.

  The bending riverbed behind us gradually fills with sunset, green and gold rills flaring up. An eagle rides down between the long trees, fishing.

  JULY 11

  By now I’ve worked out the perfect pack list. It’s a comfort knowing what I should have brought.

  For clothes:

  2 pairs nylon shorts with liners

  2 or 3 cotton undershirts or tank tops

  2 broken-in long-sleeved shirts with collars, Viyella or cotton

  1 pair fleece leggings, for evening

  2 or 3 pairs wool socks

  2 pairs running shoes: 1 dispensable, for the boat, 1 dry, for around camp at night

  1 nylon pants and windbreaker with pockets, fitted at wrists and ankles

  1 breathable rain suit. Sweat is a worse kind of wet than rain.

  1 pair bicycle gloves

  1 tie-on sun hat with brim, 1 wool beret for nights

  1 cotton bandana, as neck-shade and washcloth

  1 compressible jacket, wool or fleece, functional when damp

  Give up on underpants.

  For equipment:

  many small nylon stuff sacks containing zip-lock bags or—more expensive—several roll-top dry bags

  waist pouch, reachable while paddling, containing sunblock, lip balm, pocket knife, sunglasses, extra twist-ties, duct tape

  first-aid kit containing vitamins, Preparation H, antiseptic salve, arnica, menstrual sponge, Elastoplast Band-Aids

  several metres of nylon cord

  “leashes” for items loose in the cockpit that might stray or sink in a dump: water bottle, billy, camera bag, binocs. Paddle can be leashed as well. Nylon shock cords with clips either end work well.

  IT’S A FINE, STIFF DAY. I drum over the deer trails early to a place where the stream has some depth, where I can worm out over the water on the fallen logs and fill my bottle. We’re waiting for the tide and in no hurry. Bob takes us into the woods to look at old trees. These grandfather cedar and spruce grow very straight, not like the ones I saw whirling and bursting into boles on Vancouver Island. The behaviour of trees is a regional thing. Old-growth forest like this is a jumble, trees at every stage of life growing helter-skelter together, an understory of young and a canopy of mature trees mixed in with old, toppled ones that lie on the ground nursing new sprouts, their jagged stumps friable and dramatic.

  In the case of second-growth forests there was an event, like lumbering or fire, that levelled everything. All the new growth starts together. The trees are all at the same place in their lives and have a smoother, more symmetrical look. In the old-growth tangle we have here, Bob points to some cedar scars the Haida made stripping off the bark a century or so ago. The light comes through in shimmering blotches, stained green. The forest is very still. Bob loses us after a while and we have to find our own way back.

  There’s a terrific wind out of Windy Bay, current and wind funnelling in with the tide. When we’re clear and turn north, the sea falls slack. There’s nothing to brace against in the calm, the mind finds no toehold. To relieve the tedium I recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” to Bob. We fish a bit and make stops to eat candy.

  Mid-afternoon we reach Kunga Island, a looming place with the old village of Tanu a leap across the water. We land on a steep, narrow beach with smooth black pebbles, slim pickings for ground fit to pitch a tent on. We string out along the edge of the trees and spend a silvery evening eyeing Tanu—tomorrow’s outing—across the water.

  Only days left now and the group is past storming. The outlines around the twosomes have blurred, everyone coralled under the merging force of the trip. Jim from Vegas has never forgiven me for objecting to his cigarette butts early on, but at least, after many days of swimming together and mumbling over welts and bruises, we women are in harmony. I’ve been reading aloud Haida tales from Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman at campfires the last several nights. The stories are exactly from these beaches. Even Bob parks within earshot.

  JULY 12

  Big wind this morning, blowing sideways down the water between Kunga and Tanu. I clang my way over the stones to hunch in the intertidal zone, a ritual I like, squatting in my wet shoes looking out to sea. My skin is starting to reject saltwater dousing.

  We have a prolonged pancake breakfast propped against drift logs, waiting for the water to steady. Heather crouches over the pan flipping pancakes, her wild hair bundled; Bob, toque pushed back, legs straight out and crossed at the ankles, plays his concertina. When the wind drops, we leave our tents set up on Kunga and cross to Tanu. This is an end-of-trip luxury, two nights in the same camp.

  At low tide Tanu beach has ramparts, a ragged buttress of rock cones sticking out of the sea. It was a large settlement, twenty-five to forty houses, facing two directions from a headland. Some five hundred people had to abandon it when smallpox ran through, taking so many lives there were not enough survivors to carry on village life. Now all the poles have fallen or been taken. There’s nothing left of the houses but the old foundations, shadows in the ground, their supporting beams toppled into the hollows and furred with moss. The place we visited at the start of the trip, Ninstints on Skun Gwaii, crackled with spirits, but Tanu feels abandoned, long gone, completely neutral.

  The forest Emily Carr painted pushes into the village from behind, the spruce and hemlock very straight, their roots like bird claws grasping huge clumps of earth mounded ten, fifteen feet high. The canopy makes a pagan church, tree trunks careening to heaven.

  We wander by ourselves. I find a burying place, a quiet lawn of low trees with one broken headstone bearing an engraving of a ruffled English sleeve in a handshake. It looks odd in this pagan place, this envoy, like a cluster of Christian spores flung out from Europe, landing meaninglessly, mouldering away without any link to its host.

  The cove beyond is a hodgepodge of driftwood, and I spend a long time picking it over, thinking about the Haida and about Leon. I’m out of all sense of what anyone at home would make of this, or how to tell them.

  JULY 13


  Last day. We make a dash four miles down Tanu, sailing our reefed boats to the pickup point where the plane will fetch us tomorrow. For me it is poignant. I don’t know when I’ll paddle again or if I’ll ever find my way into these islands again. Bob and I trade appreciation. He is specific. He commends me on my steady paddling and sensitivity to the place, and thanks me for asking so little of him.

  We have an east-facing beach at our last camp, the hills hunkered behind in dark conference. We soon lose the sun. Shadows spread into the ocean and I move from point to point to stay in the light. Wedged out of the wind, I write a letter to Bree, rinse a few things, anchor them to dry, and think about what I’ll need for the trip up the panhandle. I’m in a limbo state, the senses hanging on, unslakeable, the brain gone on. Dinner and evening are solemn in deep shade. The sun goes down without a murmur.

  JULY 14

  This morning we’re picking at peanut butter and jam, waiting for the plane in damp shoes, calm and wistful and relieved.

  Five

  THE INSIDE PASSAGE

  Southeast Alaska is an outer ruffle of the broad cordillera that stretches along the coast of North America, from California north to the Alaska Peninsula, that skeletal foot into the Pacific Ocean where it meets the Bering Sea. This landform is the work of tectonic action between continental and Pacific plates. Fifty or sixty million years ago the geological scum that we know as North America began drifting its way northwest, crunching and grinding into collision with a young sea floor, shoving the continent into stony puckers five thousand feet high.

  On a topographical map you can see the run of fjords, the state of rumpled uplift at the edge of this event. The cliffs indicate the fault line, the weak collision between two geologic plates. Glacial ice twelve thousand years ago scoured out the crumbling and broken rock from these fault zones and left them as flooded valleys, the bony-fingered, drizzling fjords known as the Inside Passage.

  JULY 19

  Signal Creek is a small campground in a rain forest five miles north of Ketchikan, Alaska, out of reach of the stench of the town’s pulp and paper mill. I ride here on my bicycle from the ferry docks, my load so imbalanced I’m afraid the front wheel is going to rear up and throw me. Now that this leg of the journey is upon me, I wish I’d thought it through. My bicycle is a mélange of spare parts; I barely used it on the gravel roads around the schoolhouse, and we’re not acquainted yet. The problems are fairly evident. I need to distribute the load front and back so I don’t have fifty pounds of weight on my rear wheel and virtually nothing on the front. I need fat tires with thick treads for these gravel roads, not skittish racing tires. I’m in the mountains; I need more than one gear. Where are the other nine on this thing?

  I labour my way to camp in a blast of afternoon heat, trying to decant as much weight as possible through my arms into the handlebars. On the grades I have to get off and push the whole wobbly assemblage ahead of me.

  An unencumbered cyclist who introduces himself as John, from Wyoming, joins me partway along, remarking on the obvious. He offers to bring an order catalogue around later, presumably so I can outfit myself with a front rack. There are a lot of men in Alaska. In summer they outnumber women five to one, filling up the coast to work the salmon boats. If my incompetence continues, I could become a beacon in the area.

  I choose a huge campsite in an arbour of giant Sitkas near the camp entrance. The trees give immediate solace, like grandmothers, and I sit down in their midst. This is the improvisational part of the trip that’s been hard to picture. I have about a month to make my way up the B.C. coast to the Yukon before I’m due back south in the Gulf Islands for a ten-day yoga residential I signed up for last spring. A month is a short time to visit a huge place, but a long time to pitch a tent on strange ground every night. I don’t know how it’ll go.

  Travelling the ferries is fun. The one I took out of Prince Rupert this morning was like a huge rumbling wedding cake. It had several decks, the best of them equipped with a see-through plastic awning where passengers can get out of the rain. Some backpackers were staking out floor space when I made a tour. I found powerful showers in several never-to-be-found-again locations and fresh berry pie in the cafeteria. I spent the trip in a deck chair perusing the ferry schedule, the sky so blue it seemed shocked. Arrivals and departures are set by the tides, not by human convenience, and about half the dockings I scanned occur in the middle of the night or are listed as “approximate,” since tides follow the moon.

  This shuttle, the Alaska Marine Highway, runs between Seattle and Prince Rupert at its southern terminus, up the Alaska panhandle to Skagway in the north. The route is a 700-kilometre slither through the protected islands scattered along the coast. The ferries stop at about a dozen fishing and lumber communities along the way, all of them, past Rupert, inaccessible by land except Haines and Skagway. At both these towns there are historical routes inland over the mountains to the Yukon or the Alaska Highway. The ferry trip between Rupert and Skagway takes about thirty-two hours if you don’t stop over anywhere, not counting the detour some runs make to Sitka on the outer coast. If you debark along the way, you can catch the next ferry whenever you like; they run like buses. Taking a car on board is expensive and requires reservations, but if you walk on, with a kayak or bicycle, you need only show up and pay your fare. It’s a well-loved mode of travel for its informality. Common practice is to sleep on the solarium deck anywhere there’s space to unroll a sleeping bag. Chaise longues are available, and the idea is to snag one as fast as you can get upstairs when you board.

  A TRAIL LOOPS over the creek that runs through the campground, and I drum along it after supper, the chortle of ravens and the screech of a young eagle ricocheting through the trees. I recognize Sitka spruce by the purple sheen on the bark, and salal in low, glossy bundles along the path. It is drier here than on Haida Gwaii, the sky sharp and high and the ground a scuffle of duff. There’s a feast of berries on the bushes: pale orange soapberries like inflated raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants.

  A sign on the trail calls this a “climax” forest—vegetation growing under the best possible conditions. I’ve come during salmon harvest, the season when the fish, sleek from living in the ocean, return to their birthing rivers to spawn. On the way they’ll turn colour, go from silver to Day-Glo rose or rusty green. I’ve seen them in the spawning beds after their ordeal, an air of surfeit about them, their heads battered and snaggle-toothed, their bodies haggard.

  JULY 20

  I’m on a tree stump in my campsite this morning, the company of spruce around me exuding an air of kindness with their ancient trunks and quiet limbs and drizzle of dusty needles. They soar up to some other stratum, imperceptible from the ground, where they’re young and gleaming and growing fast in the light.

  Their atmosphere makes me want to stay around, but I coax my bike out into the dazzling road with half my gear and coast back to the ferry docks to stow my load in a locker—a manoeuvre meant to spare me a repeat of yesterday when I leave. I wrap my bicycle seat in my toque to re-contour it. There’s no relation whatsoever between the human pelvis and the design of bicycle seats.

  Now that the gold is gone, Ketchikan gets by on salmon canneries, sawmills and tourism. There are two huge cruise ships in town at the moment, in a sweltering heat wave. Ketchikan’s motto is, “If it isn’t raining in Ketchikan, wait five minutes,” and the citizens look unnerved by this climatic mutiny. I walk my bike around town, peeling off layers of clothes. The streets are jammed with shoppers. Every store has the same enticements, the same real-fur toy seals on key rings, the same sliding silver buckles on leather lariats, the same miniature totem poles and decorated fur moccasins.

  I head out of the hub and watch some Native kids leaping off the bridge into Ketchikan Creek, limbs untidy and exuberant. The salmon hatchery, further on, has no tourists. It’s a group of low buildings in shade, linked by interpretive signs that explain the life cycle of the coho or “king” salmon. In the
last building there are pools, fake homelands, containing millions of shimmering finger-lings being raised for release into the ocean. I follow along, stunned by these astounding fish and their kamikaze swim. Does fostering them here mean they’ll have to hurl themselves on the hatchery lawn when it’s time to spawn?

  I heard about a large totem park a few miles out of town and, with the heat abating, I churn out along the shore road to look. On a slope of parched grass facing the sea I find the poles, painted house-paint colours, carved in a crude, cartoonish way. They must be a spoof. Someone must have thought the vaunted Haida poles were too serious and needed parody. These posts, so I hear, are transplants from their original villages, but they have no artistry or verve at all. I don’t know why they’re here.

  I sit in the grass watching the flat shapes of shore and water, almost invisible in the late white sun. I’m miserable and can’t figure out why. Everything I see looks like those tawdry poles.

  Back in town just at closing time, I get a chocolate malt in a filmed aluminum shaker almost too cold to touch. There’s no one in the café and it’s refreshingly dim. The waitress is middle-aged, in a rumpled shirtwaist and nurse shoes. She chats while she swabs the floors, telling me she intends to leave Ketchikan sometime and go visit her son in Montana. “You get feeling trapped any place you’re in,” she says.

  JULY 21

  A lost chance last night, which I regretted all day. John whatever-his-name-is, from Wyoming, who walked me into camp the other day, came by last night with a bike catalogue. I’d already gone to bed and it spooked me to hear my name called in a place where I’m a stranger. I couldn’t recover myself to crawl out and visit with him, and after a while I guess he rode the six miles back to town. I thought about trying to find the boat he’s seining on, but I don’t know what it’s called.