Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  I thought about how soothing the sound of surf can be. How primordial. As each foot-high wave rolled in, the soft rumble gently massaged my spin—and then, as it receded, the sound washed down its length, bathing me like embryonic fluid.

  When I reached Jeff, we sat side by side on a huge log, watching gulls wheel overhead.

  “Our own deserted beach,” I said. “It’s like a second honeymoon.”

  “Except it’s not,” Jeff said.

  I gave Captain Jeff’s arm a squeeze and smiled to myself, thinking about the prospect of our night ahead as I stared out at the sun-streaked water with its little islands and trees. Jeff got up and grabbed a long bleached stick and began poking at a pile of storm-swept timber, causing explosions of splinter and dust. Nobody had any idea where we were. We’re on a wild beach on the exposed Pacific on the very edge of the Great Bear Rainforest, I thought with a kind of wonder. I felt lit up by being back in the world. And by the prospect of going farther still. It seemed a preposterous place for us to be, disconnected from our kids and friends and family as we were at this crucial time, each dressed in our one pair of jeans, pant legs rolled up, bare feet in the sand, our hair wild as that of unkempt dogs. But our perch on the beach was so heart-stirringly beautiful.

  I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the storm-lashed islands, which looked like something out of a Japanese landscape, ospreys circling overhead.

  Big mistake: no bars.

  My heart sank at the sight of the little screen. The message was clear: No Service.

  I simply hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like to be so far removed on our sailing journey north of Port McNeill, the last outpost of civilization. I’d wanted a true adventure: weeks without the exterior noise of the fraught world, days as uncharted as blank paper. But that prospect was hard, having just left the boys. I had the sickening feeling Jeff and I would just have to go with it. There was nothing we could do about it now. I put the phone back in my pocket, zipped the pocket shut, and stared out at the otherworldly islands again.

  A minute before, the sight of them had made me ecstatic. But now they seemed lonely, each its own tiny continent, heightening that sense of my own disconnectedness from the kids.

  We dusted the sand off our toes and, in silence, hiked the trail back through the forest to the boat. I felt a sad unease. I knew Jeff was missing his virile youth. And I was missing my boys—but didn’t know if it was for the life we used to have or for our life together on Heron. What is Sam reading now, I wondered. How were the final weeks of his summer job going? Jeff and I would be back on the boat and headed farther into the Great Bear Rainforest in the morning, even farther out of cell phone range—missing James’s reports on his first college classes, friends, lacrosse practices.

  But Jeff and I will be exploring a new place together, I reminded myself. Exploring the Great Bear Rainforest and maybe even seeing a spirit bear. And then we’d return to cell range and beloved voices—heading home to life not as it always had been but as it would be.

  SERPENT ISLANDS

  “Jesus, I didn’t see that rock last night,” Jeff says, alarmed, peering toward shore the next morning from the cockpit, where we’re sipping coffee and eating peanut butter toast. “Holy shit!”

  I scan the shore. Sure enough: the bald brown head of a rock—no, almost a small island—has emerged at the end of the long, narrow cove where we’d anchored the night before. As the tide receded the rock revealed itself: ten to twelve feet across, barnacle encrusted—“a total nightmare” as the boys would say—lying in wait just beneath the surface. If we’d anchored forty feet closer, it could have ripped a hole in Heron’s hull.

  “Was that thing marked on the charts?” I say, putting down my coffee in disbelief.

  “It wasn’t. Damn. I’m not gonna lie—that thing could’ve sunk this entire boat.”

  “Damn,” I say too.

  “And here we’d be, two fools screwed in the middle of goddamn nowhere.”

  “Christ,” I whisper.

  We both stare some more at the rock island, then a gull wheels by and lands on it. He cocks his head and stares at us quizzically, not like he’s wondering if we have any fish but like he can’t believe what idiots humans can be.

  * * *

  Jeff and I have been taking more chances. The day before we’d pulled anchor and cut north through a cut on Calvert Island, then headed west into Hakai Pass, a wildly alive and exposed channel surrounded by hundreds of smaller islands and islets and fjords teeming with fish and wildlife. We’d raised the staysail just for grins and then cut west toward the open Pacific. Hakai’s waters are legendary, known for some of the biggest Chinook salmon anywhere on the planet. Not just twenty- or thirty-pound salmon, but Really Big Salmon, forty-plus pounders. Small guided fishing boats bobbed in the chop along the edges of the cut. We’d heard that anglers had pulled in seventy-pound fish here, and that the all-time record stood at a monster 124-pound Chinook. Imagine, a salmon the size of a teenager! But we weren’t there to fish.

  We blew by the fishermen and continued motoring and sailing out toward the Spider Islands, a maze of deserted islands and waterways bordering Queen Charlotte Sound. We’d read that the water here was complex, the scenery astonishing—and that there were rarely any boats.

  And once we left the fishing skiffs in our wake, all that appeared to be true. Threading our way (staysail still raised) between a narrow cut in a chain of completely exposed, serrated islands and islets—swells from the open Pacific pounding the rocks and exploding in sprays of white—I was suddenly aware that we just might be in over our heads. This wilderness sailing could be dangerous: it was something I knew but had never really felt before.

  “Do you think we’re okay here, Chet?” I wondered aloud. The narrow cut, the giant rocky outcroppings like the spine of the world poking out of the ocean, the force of the water—all those things sent a wave of fear through me. I sat up straight, trying to gauge our distance from the dark rocks looming to both port and starboard, the push of the current versus our power under motor and sail.

  “Yep, we’re good,” Jeff said. “Just keep an eye out for rocks.” His tone, focused and calm, contrasted with my own growing panic.

  I glanced around wildly. Heck, there were rocks everywhere! “Yeah? I’m not sure about this,” I squeaked as spray crashed over the bow and an osprey rowed through the air alongside the mast.

  * * *

  Making it through that rocky cut marked a turning point for the two of us. Pushing ourselves to take that kind of chance on Heron might have shaken me, but I realized the boat could handle it. And more importantly, we—Jeff and I together—could handle it. Jeff was a terrific boatman: fast thinking, responsive, logical, careful. A quick study. As his confidence in his skill and in Heron’s seaworthiness grew, my faith in him, in Heron, in just the two of us together—and in myself too—deepened. We were getting good at this and at the same time—by taking calculated risks—also learning our limits.

  Once we’d made it through the exposed rock cut, we spied a pod of orcas feeding in the Pacific and raced out to see them. Herring gulls and Caspian terns and Arctic terns were everywhere; from below they looked like white kites soaring against the piercing blue sky. We could see puffs of white vapor shooting up from the sea—orca spray! By the time we reached the white mist, whales were gliding all around us, gorgeous torpedoes shining black but for that surprise yin-yang patch of white, their wet dorsal fins slicing through the water like scimitars. High on whales, we didn’t want to be intrusive and chase them; instead, we’d backtracked and anchored off the Serpent Islands, a cluster of three uninhabited islands framing a small lagoon and pocket of white-sand beach. We’d read about the Serpents in our Cruising the Secret Coast guide. The only thing was that Heron was too big to anchor safely in the Serpents’ tiny bay, so we anchored out farther and dinghied in, abandoning Heron to a falling tide. Speeding in for our wet landing and scrambling ashore on a deserted wild
beach felt thrilling—like we’d morphed into castaways, my ultimate romantic travel fantasy come true. I shed my life jacket and was burying my toes in the sand, imagining myself rolling around in it with my Indiana Jones of a husband, when I looked down at my feet and froze…

  Uh-oh. Prints. Big prints.

  Prints with long tapered claws, each tipped by a sharp nail, were etched all over the beach.

  What was it?!

  Bear? Wolf? Cougar?

  Large dog in need of a nail clipping?

  We snapped a photo of the prints, which we were later told were from a wolverine (the largest member of the weasel family as well as a fierce and muscular carnivore). Except that, hilariously, they weren’t from an elusive wolverine but instead from a frat party of sea otters. We went on to explore the rest of the beach. Past a small cut it opened onto exposed rocks and tide pools, bare now at low tide, facing the Pacific. Piles of bleached driftwood lay stacked along the high side of the beach, against low cliffs. We sat awhile, our backs against the driftwood, but it wasn’t long before the hair on our necks began standing on end as we wondered what the sharp-clawed beast lurking above us in the cliffs could be. So much for my wild island fantasies…

  We got up and explored tide pools instead, both of us feeling safer on two feet. Sea stars the size of hubcaps were glued to the rocks, and ginormous strands of bull kelp—which grows a remarkable seven inches a day, like seaweed on steroids, and whose bulb, resembling a small weird onion, is filled with carbon monoxide gas—lay strewn about everywhere. The database for seaweeds has identified about six hundred species and twelve thousand different Canadian seaweed specimens by DNA analysis, we’d read.

  “I wish we had our pocket plankton book with us,” I said, eyeing some bright green strands of surfgrass and leaves of eggplant-colored winged kelp. “I bet a lot of this stuff is edible. Seaweed’s packed with nutrients, you know.”

  “It’s all I can do to keep myself from getting down on my hands and knees and scarfing it down, it looks so good,” Jeff deadpanned.

  After that, sun sinking, we began looking for a place to anchor and ended up at the head of a long, forested finger cove—Leckie Bay. We were tired, on edge from pushing ourselves and the boat. But pushing ourselves further continued to serve up surprises. It was hard to imagine a day more intense or surreal: huge salmon leaped around Jeff as he dinghied out to drop the crab pot. Then, once the pot was set, he looked up, and there at the head of the cove stood a lone wolf, watching. I know because I was sitting in the stern, mesmerized by the airborne fish catapulting themselves around us, all iridescence and instinct. Concerned that Jeff was sitting in the middle of a flying fish storm, I’d peered past him to the head of the cove. And that’s when I saw her: a wolf, female we assumed, with long legs and a silvery-brown coat. She stood, for a long time, watching us. Curious. It’s possible that we were the first people she’d ever seen in the wild. Minutes passed. Jeff and I stayed very still, and the wolf did too. Then she turned and vanished into the forest.

  When Jeff got back to the boat, he was pumped.

  “Did you see that?!”

  “I did. What a beauty…”

  “I know, and what a cool encounter…the way she stood there, watching us. And these fish! I swear these damn fish think they’re birds.”

  * * *

  We’d heard about the wolves of the Great Bear Rainforest, knew the remote coast was home to some of the world’s most mysterious and iconic wildlife. But we had no idea we’d be lucky enough to see a wild sea wolf. Genetically distinct from their inland cousins, indeed from wolves in any other part of the world, coastal wolves are rare. They’re a unique subspecies of wolf that roam the estuaries, fish like bears, and swim like otters. That’s right, these wolves swim—for miles between uninhabited islands, searching for salmon, black-tailed deer, intertidal crustaceans to eat. Smaller than gray wolves, which populate western Canada and now Yellowstone again, sea wolves are highly elusive and fiercely intelligent; the coastal wolves endure as fragile symbols of this rugged coastline, although not much is known about them outside of British Columbia.

  Little did we know how rare our wolf encounter was.

  In later seasons, exploring these same waters, we never again saw a wolf. It was only after years had passed—as we watched for wolves but never, ever, saw one—that we began to fully appreciate how singular and rare that encounter had been. Perhaps for the wolf too.

  * * *

  After a few days in Heron time we’d gone from feeling lost and adrift and punched in the gut to feeling as alive and attuned to the world as either of us had felt in years. There was the Frisson of Fear, shooting through that exposed rocky cut, followed by the Intense Euphoria of our own orca whale sighting and the mysterious print of an unknown paw, and then the quiet gaze of a lone wolf. Each encounter had brought a sense of elation tied to nothing but the moment.

  “Where the hell are we?” Jeff had said in bed as we’d drifted off to sleep that night of the wolf encounter. “We’re in some unbelievably remote cove. No one knows where we are…”

  “That’s the whole point,” I’d said, reaching out to riffle my fingers through his hair.

  “Yeah, it is. I’m liking this, this taking a little time between kids and returning home.”

  “You are?”

  “I am. You know what I’m going to tell all my friends from here on out? I’m going to tell them, once you take your kids to college? Or once your kids leave? Whatever you do, do not go straight home! Do not rush right back to work—even though that tuition is terrifying. Take some time, even if it’s just a few days. Go somewhere, anywhere. Rent an RV. Hit the road. Try van life. Get lost for a while! I think it’s important, just taking this time. It makes more sense, really, than a honeymoon.”

  As we settled into our sailing-trip version of “it,” our shared goals grew. We wanted to make it to the far reaches of the Great Bear Rainforest. We wanted to witness something rare and beautiful. We wanted to somehow try to see a spirit bear, a wondrous creature that exists only on this one corner of the planet (a corner that’s ridiculously difficult to get to but happens to be almost in our own backyard). The spirit bear had started to assume a Holy Grail feel for us both. Sitting there in Leckie Bay that next morning, realizing how close we’d come to disaster with the uncharted rock, we realized that if our luck held, we could push ourselves and the boat in the gunk-holing department—seeking out smaller coves and deserted inlets even farther off the beaten track.

  In our first months cruising Heron with the boys, our instinct had been to follow the herd, pointing ourselves toward places described in the cruising guides. But it didn’t take long for those places to lose their appeal in favor of the Pacific Northwest Coast’s rich wilderness of serene anchorages in the wild. That’s when we also began to think seriously about trying to find a long-lost native longhouse Jeff had heard about. It seemed preposterous: like trying to find a splinter in a forest. But it also felt like something that was a part of a larger journey to these strange, faraway, mythical-seeming, nobody-we-know-has-ever-been-there kinds of places. And we had a rough idea where to look.

  Jeff had heard about a native settlement, an ancient longhouse said to be partly standing in the Great Bear Rainforest. There was word of its potentially being named a World Heritage Site. He’d met a pilot—a cool, long-haired, thirty-five-year-old who flew a 1948 Grumman Goose around the islands up there—and asked him about it. The pilot, who flew a vintage amphibious aircraft originally designed for reconnaissance because he loved flying over uncharted waters in the same way we hoped to explore them, told Jeff he’d heard of the longhouse—but that it was so mysterious it wasn’t on any maps, or in any books, and there were no pictures.

  “But here’s roughly where I think it’s supposed to be,” he said, describing the terrain to Jeff.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool,” Jeff thought, “to try and find it? Just because?” I had my doubts. All we knew was that the long
house, if it existed, might be somewhere on the largest island along BC’s northern coast, an island that was an almost nine-hundred-square-mile, densely forested, steeply mountainous wilderness with no maintained roads or permanent residents.

  The pilot had described the rocky coastline and long fjords, the thickly treed cliffs. The site was so remote, the coastline so rugged, you could only reach it by boat, and then on foot. Jeff had pulled out his iPad loaded with electronic sailing charts and pinned the part of the island where the pilot thought it might be. But it was an enormous island and a tiny pin. The territory might as well have been a mark on a child’s hand-drawn map.

  * * *

  Now we had a boat, we had time, and the site where the longhouse supposedly stood would be en route to Princess Royal and Gribbell Islands, the islands that were home to the legendary white spirit bear.

  “What do you think about trying to find that ancient longhouse as well?” Jeff mused as we headed up Hunter Channel the next afternoon.

  My heart froze. I’d seen enough of the Great Bear Rainforest these past days to know how dense, how inaccessible it was. How you could be twenty paces from shore and become totally disoriented. There are no straight lines in a forest. My husband might as well have been asking: Hey, want to see if we can find a place where we can anchor in an exposed channel in the middle of nowhere, then bushwhack around and see if we can see anything?