No sooner had the “she rain” started than she stopped. Heron was riding along on an immense amount of water, and as the channels narrowed and the tide began to still, the water’s rain-pocked surface smoothed, then braided into long sinewy strands. Where Stuart, Sonora, and Dent Islands crowd up against the British Columbia mainland, they form a narrow Y-valve through which nearly all the water in Desolation Sound has to pass on its way to and from the sea. To the northeast of us, Bute Inlet—a deep fjord that reaches more than thirty miles into the BC interior and falls to depths of two thousand feet—drains on the ebb tide. When this happens twice a day, two rivers of water crash into each other in a cauldronlike basin of angry whirlpools and violent rips before they shoot together through the mother of all rapids, Dent Rapids.
All the rapids, Yuculta and Arran, Gillard Passage, and Dent, are famous for catching and swallowing canoes, fishing boats, barges, and tugs, and for fatalities because the currents are swift and the water deep. At any time other than slack water—a fifteen- to thirty-minute calm in the turbulence—each of these rapids can gulp down even a large vessel. Which is why we’d nervously checked and rechecked our calculations before setting off.
The boys began stirring just as we reached the entrance to Yuculta Rapids five minutes before slack. In the cycle of Tidal Time, it was a relatively tame moment; Heron enjoyed a fast and easy run through, her big blue hull grabbing a little in the current but still taking her first set of rapids in stride, which gave us confidence.
“Go, Chet!” I called, encouragingly. “All right, Team Heron!” And then as a joke, and because I was high on adrenaline, I stretched out my arms to their bony fingertips, flapped them up and down, wide, and squawked like a great blue heron, “Rok-rok!…Rok-rok! Rok-rok!”
The boys looked on disbelievingly.
“You’re such a dork,” Jeff said.
“That’s pretty good, Mom,” Sam said.
“Yeah, good one, Mom,” James echoed.
* * *
By eleven thirty Team Heron had conquered its first set of rapids and was rounding Stuart Island. The docks of Dent Island Lodge came into view, and we all let out a collective sigh of relief. We’d made it! After days at anchor we were looking forward to being a little spoiled at Dent Island. Restaurants and accommodations become fewer and farther between, and then nonexistent, as one moves north into the Great Bear Rainforest. We nosed Heron in alongside one of two concrete docks as a young man and woman in khaki pants and dark green polo shirts cheerfully caught our lines.
We introduced ourselves, then clambered off the boat to explore the lodge, a series of rustic cedar structures with green metal roofs, all connected by paths winding through the woods. Although Dent Island Lodge looks about as relaxed as a summer camp, that impression is deceiving: people come from all over the world to fish for the BC coast’s legendary salmon. From May through September four species of salmon—coho, pink, chum, and the mighty king—run here; king salmon, also known as tyee or Chinook salmon, can weigh in at thirty pounds or more. We passed a chalkboard listing names of guests who had joined the honorary “Tyee Club” that summer by landing monster fish—30, 36, 38, and a whopping 42 pounds; an aluminum ramp led up to the main lodge. Inside was a reception area set with a tray of coffee and tea. There was also a game room with a stone fireplace, and an outdoor porch perched over the rapids of Canoe Pass, reversing tidal rapids, which are remarkable to watch: water roaring like a river at twelve knots in one direction, then slackening before roaring at twelve knots again in the opposite direction. The lodge is owned by two brothers from Seattle and their mom. We knew one of the brothers, Dan, and his wife, Amy; two of their three sons grew up with Sam and James.
Our boys, Jeff, and I explored the lodge’s winding paths and soaked in the cedar hot tub overlooking the narrow tidal cut of crazy Canoe Pass. At dusk Jeff and I settled in to enjoy cocktails on Heron’s stern. Sam and James set up a game of backgammon in the cockpit. As we looked out at the surrounding wilderness, the scene felt like something we’d earned: the water now flat and still and shining. Above us bald eagles the size of small dogs perched on branches in clumps of raggedy pine and fir, while their neighbor, a magnificent great blue heron, stood stoically, his pterodactyl wings folded against his sides, the long bones of his outsized feet extending and retracting as he contemplated the water’s edge. How do herons manage to stand for so long? I wondered, hoping our own Heron would prove to be as resilient.
“I’m making your mother a rum and tonic,” Jeff said.
“Amen, brother,” Sam replied, rolling the dice. “Wanna play, Dad?”
“Sure.”
Soon we were all lounging in the cockpit under a warm evening sky, Jeff and Sam playing backgammon; James and I reading by the Northwest’s long-lasting summer light.
“Lucky rolls,” Sam said as Jeff got the first move.
“Ooooh, you son of a mongrel sheep! I’m getting pasted!” Jeff exclaimed a few minutes later.
“Guess that doesn’t say much about you, Dad,” James said, looking up from his book.
“I make ‘em up as I go,” Jeff replied.
THE REAL WORLD
“So now you’re going to enter the Realll Worrrld…” said our friend Dan, clowning around, drawing out the last two words with enough weight to sink a freighter.
Dan had grown up in the 1970s and ‘80s, exploring the channels, fishing the rivers, and hiking the watery mountainous wilderness that separates Vancouver Island from the Canadian mainland. In the 1970s, when land was cheap, his father bought an overgrown property with a rundown old cabin and a dock on remote Dent Island, set in the maze of islands and fjords east of Vancouver Island. His rationale was that the island was strategically placed for launching annual summer sailing trips to Alaska. When Dan didn’t show enough interest in going to college, his dad flew him up to the island, dropped him off, and left him there in the middle of the BC wilderness with instructions to get rid of all the junk—the piles of moldy mattresses and old rusting appliances dusted with mouse poop—in the place. What he’d failed to mention was the guy who’d been living in the cabin for years. Dan was going to have to get rid of him too. As Dan recalls it, his dad and the man had it out, then Dan’s dad stormed down the dock and flew off without saying a word to Dan, who was left there holding his duffel bag.
“Best thing that could have happened to me at that age!” Dan recalled. “It was brutal! I couldn’t wait to get to college after that.” After decades of sprucing up, that run-down old cabin in the middle of nowhere has evolved, with several lovely building additions, to become the award-winning Dent Island Lodge.
* * *
We’d invited Dan and his wife, Amy, back to Heron for a nightcap. The four of us were sprawled on the fir-green leather couches in the main cabin, the kerosene lantern casting its amber glow over our impromptu party while the kids prowled around.
It had been a good day: we’d gone spin casting for “humpies”; these adult pink salmon grow a pronounced hump on their backs during fall migration, a morphological change to make them look bigger and badder (much as humans drive sports cars or big dumb boats and male peacocks have long tail feathers). We’d pulled on waders and boots, piling into a flat-bottom skiff and jet-boating up a river so shallow and clear you could see its bottom a few inches below. Everything felt wild and grand, and we felt small but exhilarated at the base of this evergreen mountain range. It was humbling, picturing it extending from the southwest Yukon through the Alaskan Panhandle and along the entire BC coast, sprouting a forest of fir and hemlock and spruce across its backs, capped by a collar of peaks sharp as incisors. Above them stretched a sky so blue it made anything seem possible.
We’d stood thigh-deep in the Southgate River, pulling salmon out, all nine of us, with Dan and Amy and their three boys plus ours, in a row. The pools at our feet were a riot of fish making their final journey home. It was a cinch to hook them—there were so many fish in the water it didn’t e
ven seem fair. Pinks jumping all around us and the boys high-fiving each other as they landed them, fish sailing through the air. It had been an epic day. But we would soon leave our friends and push on toward the Great Bear Rainforest miles and miles to the north—a place no one we knew, not even longtime locals like Dan, seemed to go.
To get there we’d have to pull ourselves away from the outdoor soaking tub and hot showers and dining room at the lodge and time our departure to make it through the gaping boils and boat-sucking maw of Dent Rapids around the corner, then pound our way up Johnstone Strait, the sixty-eight-mile-long, three-mile-wide channel separating the northeast coast of Vancouver Island from the mainland British Columbia coast.
“Those books behind you?” Dan was saying, he nodded at the shelf at my back. “In the real world they’ll be on the floor. Those wineglasses hanging in the galley?”
Jeff and I glanced warily at the cabinet from which eight wineglasses hung suspended in rows from their feet, like bats.
“Forget about ‘em—pieces of broken glass,” Dan went on.
Everyone laughed. Jeff and I, a little uneasily.
“Seriously! That’s why most people never head north from here!” Dan said emphatically, gesturing in the very direction we planned to go the next day: north.
The five boys were off exploring or rather, as we’d learn later, ordering drinks for themselves (and being served) up at the bar. No wonder they loved Canada.
* * *
We pushed off from Dent at dusk the next day, timing our departure to cross Dent Rapids during its brief window of slack, which was at 6:20 p.m. Having seen the water, a raging maelstrom, from the safety of the lodge, we were all on edge. As Heron approached the wide rapid, it was eerily calm. The four of us were uncharacteristically quiet on deck as the boat nosed into a bend where, for most of the day, angry boils raged and swirled. But during this brief window twice a day, an uneasy stillness hung over the pallid surface of the water. Gazing down as the current tugged at Heron’s hull, jerking it unnaturally, I couldn’t help but to think of all the boats it had gulped down over the decades. Centuries, even. In 1792 the Spanish expeditions of Galiano and Valdes put them among the first to explore the passes. The indigenous people guided them through, explaining how during a few minutes each day they could transit when the standing waves and violent whirlpools quieted and became navigable.
Some fifteen thousand years ago, ages before the Spanish, the earliest people to migrate to North America from Russia were Paleo-Indians: they made their way across the Bering Sea to Alaska and from there traveled down the Inside Passage and through this cut between the Coast Mountains and Vancouver Island Ranges. How many had perished? In 2009 a fisherman had been thrown from a lurching boat into Dent Rapids. His body was pulled under, popped up like a log, and they say the last thing his friends saw was his hand reaching up, circling in the whirlpool, before even it disappeared. He was never seen again. We passed through, imagining swirling bones beneath us in the dull water, dark watery graves.
Minutes after making it through Dent Rapids, we saw a splash ahead. And then another. Dolphins!
I sighed with relief and grabbed the binoculars, handing them to Sam. James grabbed the camera, and the three of us rushed up to the bow and leaned over the lifelines…Dead ahead of the boat we saw them: three, four, five Pacific white-sided dolphins, leaping in breakneck arcs! Their smooth shiny grayness caught the light.
They sped straight for us, all muscle. “Wow!” one of the boys said.
Then they disappeared and it was quiet again.
“Where are they?” Sam said, watching intently. “Under the boat?”
Soon they resurfaced, their powerful dark forms curving out of the water, like kids surfing both sides of the bow.
“That’s the closest dolphins have ever been to us, not even five feet off the boat!” Jeff said.
“That was way cool,” James added. “Those dolphins, the way they came straight at us, then divided flanks?”
They felt like young escorts, an unexpected welcoming committee from the wild, and just when we needed it most. Jeff and the boys hadn’t been sure at all about heading on—leaving Desolation Sound’s warm, inviting water, dashing the prospect of bumping into more friends and having more fun. But now, I hoped, after the excitement of sighting the dolphins, the prospect of exploring these more adventurous waters would be thrill enough.
* * *
Somehow, we all noticed it. Everything felt different, as if Dent were the dividing line between north and south, wild and sheltered, the Real World and the idyllic. The weather was cooler. There was a sharpness to the air. The water darker. The surface was glassy now, surrounding us, reflecting the hillsides with their thick stands of fir, hemlock, cedar, and pine. Even the evergreens seemed greener. Long wisps of vapor clung to the channels, and a thick white blanket of cloud caressed the water’s surface.
And there were so many birds! Bald eagles perched in the fir trees, their sharp eyes peering down from enormous snow-white heads. Small flocks of white gulls scattered like snowflakes across the dark sea. And hundreds of plump brown murrelets bobbed beside us, diving deep in search of fish, essentially “flying” underwater, using their muscular wings as flippers and their feet for steering, as Heron neared.
With a cockpit open to the sky, we could watch all the weather unfold, and feel it too. There might be water shining with clouds high above, backlit so that their centers looked gray and their outlines electrified, with windows of blue opening and closing between them. Or furrowed seas with a sharp wind whipping up spray as we hunkered behind the windscreen. Or we might have no wind but want wind, and instead sit staring up, cursing a clear blue sky that looked painted in, or a pale blue sky with numinous clouds drifting across its open face. We might lift our chins toward the blue and feel mist light as air whisper at our cheekbones, or the warmth of the sun.
You might look out and spot a mew gull, white with gray wings, surfing a log through the current. Or you might see delicate snow-white birds with carrot-orange legs skittering low. Or a fish jump clear out of the water. Or a seal splash. And splash again. Or two seals slapping the surface of the sea with their flippers. You might hear the slap-slap, slap-slap of seal on water and look up just in time to catch it: a shiny-wet brown body sinking, its splash flying up like a fountain.
One of the things you realize once you strip everything else away—the timeless unspooling of information and entertainment in a 24/7 media world—is that so many of us seem to hover, paralyzed by distraction. Believe me, I know. This hovering in a perpetual state of anxiety over stuff and the inequities induced by our commercial, capitalist culture may be part of the modern condition. But once you turn off everything and listen, really listen, the answer to all our wanting is so simple it’s shocking.
And I think it’s this: worldly failure is less of a soul killer than the failure to find clarity and grace, to be astonished by wonder, wherever it might occur.
* * *
When we finally turned into Blind Channel, fifteen nautical miles and two and a half hours later, it was almost dark. Tensions were high. We were tired and hungry and anxious about docking there for the first time in the near dark. We careened into a cove between two hulking islands of black forest, East Thurlow and West Thurlow. The current is so swift and strong there that as we approached Blind Channel—a humble boaters’ resort with weathered wooden docks leading up to a little store with a single head of lettuce (which I bought) and a restaurant that’s been run by the same family for two generations—a nasty side current pushed us too fast toward the docks.
On top of this James wasn’t feeling well. At first we thought it was a hangover from Boys’ Night Out, but eventually we realized it must have been some sort of intestinal bug. He hadn’t complained, not once—but on every level, he wasn’t himself. He was sleeping more than a typical teen, if that’s even physically possible. He was suddenly not as engaged in the trip. Or if he was, he was j
oking around with his older brother, the two of them goofing off on the bow. Unfortunately, at the very moment we were entering this tense docking situation with its mean three-knot crosscurrent pushing Heron’s shiny blue hull too hard and too fast toward the wooden dock pilings, James dissolved in a fit of defiant giggles instead of helping secure the fenders and bow lines.
The more ticked off Skipper Jeff got, the funnier it all seemed to James. He couldn’t recover—was, in fact, way beyond recovery…He was standing in his gray sweats and black-and-white wool plaid shirt, high on Heron’s bow as it swept through the dark over the blackening water, doubled over, derisive peals of laughter ricocheting back over the cockpit and toward the Blind Channel docks—which were full.
This didn’t go down well with Skipper Jeff. Not well at all…
“Just shut the f*ck up!” Jeff shouted, exploding, not understanding yet on this inaugural trip just how efficiently sound carries over water.
It was too late: the F-word blasted out, echoing over the water and spreading like a toxic stench across everything.
The boys fell silent.
Everyone on the docks fell silent.
Bloody hell, I thought.
We made an epic entrance: slamming into the dock, the crosscurrent scraping Heron up against the big wooden pilings, Sam and I jumping off but not being able to lash the boat to the wooden dock rails in time to stop it, while Skipper Jeff scowled, barking directions. We were a disaster. By the time we were secured and the engine shut down, not one of us was speaking—we were just standing there, shaking. Plus, all our stomachs were growling—it was after eight, and dinner was no further along than a dripping bag of defrosted chicken thighs.
Feeding people is my strategy for resolving most tensions, even extreme family tensions in a small space. (Good music is Jeff’s strategy.) I put the boys to work setting the galley table, had them put on some mordant but calming Randy Newman ballads, and then, utterly exhausted, we all finally sat down to our grilled chicken and rice.
Uncharted Page 12