by Tim Cahill
As it was, I was enduring an unexpected and out-of-pocket adventure. We’d pretty much killed the bleeding last night—my head wound was taped shut—but the pain in my back was excruciating. That morning, I’d managed to hobble through thigh-deep water to get to a float plane that would convey me to the hospital in Queen Charlotte City, about a forty-five-minute flight north. I’d been hiking in the wilderness of South Moresby Island, and it doesn’t really pay to be stupid in such places.
And I’d been really, really, really stupid.
High-spirited but stupid.
It was, I suppose, a good day for a flight over the Queen Charlottes. In late June, at the 53rd parallel, there were still a few patchy bits of snow on peaks that rose to three thousand feet. The sun was burning its way through a scudding layer of low gray clouds, and slanting shafts of light fell across the otherwise gray North Pacific; fell as light falls in a cathedral. The islands themselves were almost black with vegetation, except where those purely religious shafts hit them like celestial spotlights, and then the ancient mossy forests seemed to glow from within. Emerald luminescence anchored in a tenebrous misery of unrelieved gray.
From above, I could almost make out the shape of the Queen Charlotte archipelago. It looked a bit like a giant fang: the broad expanse of Graham Island in the north, then Moresby Island curving down south and east, tapering off to a point at Cape Saint James in the far south. Interspersed around these two main islands, there were over 150 others—some were little more than rocky hummocks—located, variously, 31 to 95 miles off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.
The islands were separated from the mainland by Hecate Strait, a shallow, treacherous body of water one early sailor described as a “black-hearted bitch,” that seemed charged, in the sailor’s opinion, with the task of “protecting the Queen Charlottes.” The archipelago sits at the very edge of the continental shelf, so the rocky western headlands are pounded fiercely by the full force of the Pacific Ocean.
Back somewhere in the frosty reaches of geological time—during the Ice Age, when much of the world’s water was frozen at the polar caps—sea level was much lower and the Queen Charlottes were probably connected to the North American mainland by a land bridge. Enter a few mainland species, both plants and animals. Exit the Ice Age. The land bridge was drowned in meltwater and became the black-hearted bitch we call Hecate Strait.
The Queen Charlottes, in turn, became islands—Hecate on one side, the inhospitable North Pacific on the other. These rough waters have kept the Queen Charlotte Islands isolated over the millennia since the last Ice Age. No new plants or animals. No new genetic information. The mainland species isolated on the islands have been forced to respond to local conditions, and sometimes evolved survival strategies quite different from their mainland cousins. According to Dr. J. Bristol Foster, director of the British Columbia Ecological Reserves Program, the Queen Charlotte Islands are “an evolutionary showcase.”
Down there, in those undisturbed ancient forests of spruce and cedar and hemlock, there are species of flora and fauna that exist nowhere else on earth. The largest black bear in North America (Euarctos americana carlottae) roams the forests of the larger islands; there are subspecies of woodpecker and owl that are unique to the Queen Charlottes, along with several species of moss and flowering plants, including the alpine lily. The sheer volume of endemic species (species peculiar to one place) is, according to Dr. Foster, “astonishing.” The Queen Charlottes are sometimes called the Canadian Galapagos.
That’s what I’d been doing when it happened: I was hiking through the South Moresby National Park Reserve, looking for endemic species. Alone. Didn’t tell anyone at the camp where our kayaks were beached exactly where I was going. Just took off. I’d made my way through the dim forests, looking for bears, for the saw-whet owl and the hairy woodpecker. I’d come across a few tiny orchids, an insectivorous plant, and any number of mosses that I couldn’t identify. The Queen Charlottes are considered the moss capital of Canada, if not the world.
South Moresby is a temperate-zone rain forest, and I was trekking through country that had never heard the scream of the chain saw. The spruce and hemlock and cedar stood like monarchs, and only about 10 percent of the available light filtered through to the forest floor. The canopy above acted like a giant sponge, so the forest seemed to be dripping water even under clear skies. There was a strange green subaqueous quality to the light. Underfoot, the mosses were six inches deep and more.
There were fallen trees everywhere, covered over in moss. Spruce saplings grew out of every even vaguely horizontal surface. Old Man’s Beard, a kind of wispy green moss, hung from the branches of the living trees, and there were standing dead snags everywhere. The cedar trees, in particular, were spectacular in death: a hundred feet or more of soaring silver wood, like a monument on the land. No wonder the local Indians, the redoubtable Haida, used cedar to make their totem poles.
I was looking for woodpeckers in one particular dead cedar when the thread of linear thought abandoned me, as it sometimes does in the wild. The tree was standing at a Tower of Pisa slant. What if I were that tree? And what if I retained some shred of consciousness, even in standing death? My life span had stretched out over several centuries, and now here I was, falling, slowly, toward the forest floor. Given my life span, it would seem to be happening very fast. It would be like catching your foot at the top of the stairs: the arms windmill about; there’s a brief shout; then thump-thump-thump.
And what did I, as a conscious cedar, have to look forward to on the forest floor? Over the span of several months—to me, the blink of an eye—I’d be covered over in moss, fungus, parasites. Insects would penetrate to my core and eat my cells from the inside out. Other living trees would colonize me with their seeds, and the saplings would suck the last living thought from my marrow.
Now, I know that this is all part of the biological cycle of regeneration. Perfectly natural. Perfectly healthy. My problem is that I tend to personalize everything. You’re a tree, you fall; everything on the forest floor feeds off your body. It would be like a slow-motion horror film.
I was, in fact, indulging this eccentric train of thought when the forest right-of-way presented me with a mossy cliff wall about fifteen feet high. Easy climb. I even took my walking stick with me. I recall reaching over the top of the cliff, but then—and this seemed totally unacceptable at the time—I seemed to be falling face first toward the mute forest floor. Happily, I landed in a thick bed of moss. Unhappily, I gashed my forehead rather deeply, probably on my own damn walking stick.
I lay there for a while, assessing the extent of the damage and wondering how badly I’d hurt my back. What if I couldn’t move? It would be the whole cedar scenario—that slow-motion horror film of rot and decay, with me in the lead role.
Which, I suppose, got me onto my feet and kept me moving for four hours, until I got down to the seashore, where my kayaking companions were already at work searching for me. A radio call was placed to the hospital.
And now here I was, being medevacked out of a place I considered to be an earthly paradise because I’d been stupid enough to put my adventures in the same pocket as my problems.
The Queen Charlottes—like Nepal or Tibet—are one of those places people go for emotional renewal or spiritual enlightenment. In the 1960s and ’70s, the islands had been a little-known hippie Mecca; and survivalists, known as “coasties,” had colonized some of their more remote areas. In those years, several timber companies were hard at work, clear-cutting the ancient forests.
There had been an acrimonious controversy. The hippies, conservation-minded locals, the coasties, and the Haida had all gathered together to stop the logging. After almost fifteen years of bitter argument, on July 11, 1987, the Canadian government saved a substantial portion of the Queen Charlottes from the chain saw when it made the southern part of Moresby Island a national park reserve. The South Moresby Reserve includes 138 islands and comprises about 15 p
ercent of the land area of the Queen Charlottes. Gwaii Haanas, it’s called: “place of wonder.”
An article I read in The Queen Charlotte Islands Observer said there was a movement afoot to change the name of the islands to its aboriginal appellation, Haida Gwaii (place of the Haida). There was to be a referendum. After three weeks in the islands, I had a sense that it would pass.
People on the Charlottes still make a living logging the northern islands. Halibut and salmon are plentiful and many folks earn their daily bread fishing. There are about six thousand people of various ethnic descent who live on the islands. Tourism is in its infancy.
The soul of the Queen Charlottes—the wilderness of Gwaii Haanas—is available by float plane or by chartered boat. I chose to kayak South Moresby with Grant Thompson, of Tofino Expeditions, out of Vancouver, who had invited me along on a scouting trip of the place of wonder. There were ten of us in the party.
We camped, for the most part, on the southeast coast of Moresby Island. The gray cobblestone beaches were piled, at the high-tide line, with gigantic piles of drift logs that had escaped logging booms. Piled at the base of the logs, or flung beyond them, was all the flotsam and jetsam of the North Pacific Ocean. The Japanese current tosses three-year-old material up on the beach. Hawaiian garbage takes a bit longer to get to South Moresby—about five years. There were plastic detergent bottles, disposable diapers, beer cans (from Canada, Japan, and Hawaii, judging by the labels), along with treasures like the hand-blown glass balls that Japanese fishermen use to float their fishing nets.
Sometimes the beaches were covered over in a slick glaze of tiny transparent jellyfish, like small disks with protruding dorsal fins that catch the ocean breezes and give these organisms their name: by-the-wind sailors. There were broken dolls staring up from the drift logs, and huge plastic floats that boomed loudly when kicked and were handy for impromptu soccer games. Indeed, I was standing on a beach, booting one of these beach-ball-size affairs around, making a lot of noise, when my friend Linnea asked me to stop. “Shhhh …”
It seemed there was a bald eagle sitting atop one of the dead spruce trees that fronted the ocean. This was pretty much par for the course. There are more eagles per square mile in the Queen Charlottes than anywhere else on earth, with the exception of Alaska’s Admiralty Island. I looked closer and saw that there were, in fact, two eagles, sitting shoulder to shoulder, high up in the bare branches. I got my binoculars and watched what I considered to be an odd performance. Each eagle seemed to be pretending that the other one wasn’t there. Each scanned the beach and ocean, and through the glasses I could see the stern eyes, the hooked beaks, the implacable nobility. And then each of the eagles turned at the same time, and their heads collided with an almost audible thump, like two humans stooping to pick up the same sheet of paper. They regarded each other with visible annoyance, not to mention their usual implacable nobility, each of them staring fiercely at the other as if to say “You dork!”
One day we paddled several hours up to the head of Rose Inlet, where a freshwater stream ran through a grassy meadow. The tide was high, and we paddled up the meandering stream. A small harbor seal frolicked beside us for a time. The grass in the meadow was knee-high, and I could just barely see the tops of my companions’ heads gliding through an undulating lake of greenery. A black-tail deer, drinking from the stream, glanced up to watch us pass. I was close enough to touch it with my paddle. The deer just stood there, watching. His attitude seemed to be one of “Yeah, so?”
That day we gathered clams, and a large bag of sea asparagus, a kind of thick-stemmed grass that grows at the edge of the ocean. We cooked up the sea asparagus with butter and garlic, wolfed down the clams, and sat, sated, at our campsite while the sun took about four hours to set.
The next day we paddled through a large flotilla of purple jellyfish the size of Volleyballs, skirting a rocky island where red and orange starfish bigger than my head clung to craggy rocks just under the surface of the sea. Ahead, there was a point of land that caught the worst of the ocean swells. Booming plumes of spray exploded off the rock, and for a moment, with the sun before me, the great wall of seawater scattered the light and dozens of tiny rainbows fell across the rock.
We gave a wide berth to the rainbows and came back along this small island, a sloping hummock of rock, where several dozen Steller’s sea lions were basking in the sun. The males weighed over two thousand pounds, and they grunted at us like foghorns as we passed. I’d never heard a grunt sound lordly before.
One day, a pod of killer whales passed under our kayaks, and we could hear the great glottal pop of their breathing. My friend Linnea was so excited that she kept drumming her feet on the hull of her boat. We didn’t see any gray whales. A local boatman told us that the last one he’d seen had passed through over a week ago on the long southern migration.
Our campsites, just up above the drift logs, near clear freshwater streams, were hard to leave. We pitched our tents on beds of moss a foot thick. During the long twilight hours—the sun didn’t set until almost eleven—we talked about what we’d seen that day and the incredible journeys the Haida made, and still make, in cedar canoes forty feet long.
Indeed, early on, a few of us had seen some of these canoes being built.
Soon after I’d arrived on Graham Island, several of us drove from Queen Charlotte City north to the town of Old Masset, an Indian village the local people prefer to call Haida. We stopped at the White residence, a functional boxy affair, to see the canoes Morris White and several friends were making. The canoes would be paddled to a great meeting of the Northwest tribal bands at the mainland town of Bela Bela at the end of June.
Morris White, the patriarch, appeared to be in his early fifties. He spoke slowly, with a kind of throat-clearing stutter. He introduced his son, Christian, a handsome and rather cosmopolitan young man (a handshake for me, a continental hand kiss for my friend Linnea). Christian’s son, a boy who looked to be about twelve, dozed on the couch while a Saturday afternoon kung fu movie blared away on a small color TV.
“Haida canoes,” Morris White said, “like the ones we’re building? In the olden days, Haida paddled these canoes to California.” He cleared his throat.
I expressed some amazement on this point and mentioned that I had never read anything to corroborate such a boast in the historical record.
“Oh, no one knows about it,” Christian said.
“The elders tell us,” Morris added, “that we paddled to Chile. In South America.”
“Japan,” Christian said.
In point of fact, early Euro-American explorers were forever pointing out that the Haida people were fairer of skin than those in the coastal tribes. They are also bigger people, and the men still tend toward a certain Polynesian immensity. They look more like Hawaiians than coastal North American Indians.
“Hawaii?” I asked.
There was general agreement among the White men on this point. “The Hawaiians are our relatives,” Christian said. “Our cousins.”
We stepped out back, where there was a huge wooden airplane hangar of a barn. The Whites and three friends had been working nonstop on the ceremonial canoes for the past several months. Morris White had lost so much weight that his clothes hung loosely on his large frame. Three huge boats, each over forty feet long and made from a single cedar log, were placed upside down on oversize sawhorses. The whole place smelled like Grandma’s hope chest.
The canoes, even before they’d been carved and painted with the appropriate totemic symbols of the Haida people—with the bears and eagles and beaver and ravens and killer whales—were beautiful. Works of art, built as they had been built over the centuries. Built for the rough waters of Hecate Strait. Built—who knows for certain?—to withstand the long paddle to Hawaii. Chile. Japan.
Later, over a beer in the White house, we sat chatting while Oriental people kung fu-ed each other on the television.
The Whites, it turned out, were a remarkably
talented family: Morris carved silver bracelets of the type I’d seen selling for $500 apiece in Queen Charlotte City. Christian carved traditional figures out of argillite, a soft slate quarried on the Queen Charlottes. In Canada, only the Haida may work with and sell argillite. Christian’s work sold for as much as $8,000 a sculpture.
Still, the Whites weren’t rich people. Morris was bitter about the clever white men who somehow cheated the Haida out of their fishing boats in the mid-1950s. Worse, the forest all around them was being cut down, hundreds of millions of dollars were being extracted from the land, and the Haida people weren’t being compensated. A good percentage of the population of the village of Haida was on public assistance.
“If we had lawyers and chartered accountants,” Morris White said, “then we’d be a wealthy village.”
Christian nodded over toward the couch in front of the television, where his young son was sucking on a Tootsie Roll Pop. “My son,” he said, “is going to be my lawyer.”
The boy glanced up from the television. “I said I was going to be a lawyer,” he replied. “I didn’t say I was going to be your lawyer.”
Our kayak party camped for a time at Fanny Bay, near the southern tip of Moresby Island, and only an hour’s paddle away from Skungwai Island (called Anthony Island on some maps). On Skungwai (Red Cod) stands the remains of Ninstints, a Haida ghost village, abandoned sometime late in the last century, where magnificent totem poles still tower against the sky. In 1981 the United Nations recognized the totemic art at Ninstints as a World Heritage Site. (Other such sites include the pyramids of Egypt and the palace at Versailles, France.)
We decided to visit Ninstints at dawn, and notified the resident Haida caretaker by radio phone from Fanny Bay.
It was a clear night when we left, with a full moon low in the sky, throwing a silver trail across calm black waters. By the time we reached Ninstints and pulled our kayaks up above the high-tide line, a fog bank obscured the rising sun. The world was pearly-gray, and wisps of mist floated low among the sacred poles. It was very still, and even the birdcalls seemed subdued.
