I pictured us on a pointless, hopeless quest, hacking through the forest primeval, eyes peeled for some rotting cedar beams in an endless sea of pines and hemlocks. I could already see us stumbling, tripping over an ankle-twisting tangle of roots and branches, blocked by moss-covered walls of fallen trees, sinking into spongy forest floor carpeted in centuries of pine needles and mulching rot. What about bears?! What if we got lost?! What about trespassing? What if we did manage to find the longhouse but realized we were not only trespassing but also cursed because it was a culturally sensitive site? Or what if—and this was much more likely—we not only couldn’t find anything close to the long-lost longhouse but couldn’t find our way back to the boat?!
But in the spirit of adventure, and since the ancient longhouse would be Jeff’s thing much as the spirit bear had been mine, I said, “Sure, why not?”
SHEARWATER
We were headed to Shearwater Marina, the last jumping off point before miles and miles of mostly uninhabited Great Bear Rainforest. Shearwater was said to have good moorage, a restaurant, laundromat, fuel dock, small grocery, and maybe even a pay phone—both an artifact and minor miracle! Shearwater did not have fresh water for public use, though, so we stopped en route at Bella Bella, a small First Nations community situated on the east side of Campbell Island, overlooking Lama Passage. We nudged Heron into a snug spot along Bella Bella’s ramshackle wooden dock, found a hose with good fresh water, and ran the hose down to the boat. While Jeff took a shift topping off our water, I walked up the dock to explore the town.
Bella Bella is home to the Heiltsuk First Nation, which traditionally occupied thirteen thousand square miles of land and sea. But like many small communities along this remote coast, Bella Bella (with a population of about fifteen hundred today), has had a precarious existence since the closing of the region’s canneries and collapse of the salmon fishery. Heavy industry like logging and mining no longer seems profitable or sustainable. Consequently, unemployment is high, the economy is fragile, attendant social problems are ongoing, and you feel all that. Walking the muddy stray-dog-filled streets toward the band store (which serves as the tribal community’s only grocery store, liquor store, and post office), I thought Bella Bella felt like one of the bleakest places I’d ever been. At the base of the wooden band store building, however, there was a door overhung by a small sign: Koeye Cafe.
My heart leaped! A café? Here?
I opened the door and stepped into a small, inviting room. There were shelves filled with used books; random threadbare rugs, two worn leather armchairs nestled between wooden side tables set with reading lamps; a display case stacked with baskets of glass trading beads and artifacts; a counter where you could buy espresso. It was so unexpected, this oasis of warmth. I ordered a latte, my hands practically shaking with the thrill of it, then sipped my illicit coffee while scanning the spines of the lightly used books lining the walls: botany, birds, insects, natural history, anthropology, history of the Northwest coast, an entire shelf of ethnobotany, Canadian contemporary fiction, literary nonfiction.
It was a wonderful collection. Thrillingly so…
Here—in Bella Bella, where the muddy streets and ramshackle buildings and yards overflowing with debris revealed a hardscrabble existence.
“Excuse me, are these books…for sale?” I asked the young dark-haired woman behind the counter.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s a reading library,” she replied.
A reading library, I thought. Even better.
Another woman, a young girl really, wearing a chunky orange-and-pink sweater, was seated at a nearby computer; she was picking up books from boxes piled on the floor and inputting data. “What’s a narrative?” she asked the dark-haired woman.
What is this place? I thought, intrigued, but didn’t want to interrupt their work.
Bella Bella, I learned soon after, is the largest of twenty-three reserves set aside in 1913 for the Heiltsuk. Now the village is home to an amalgamation of tribes that originally occupied large winter and spring villages spread throughout their traditional territory. Canada’s First Nations people have had centuries of injustices inflicted on them—dispossession of native lands and forced relocation onto desolate plots called reserves, the systematic relocation to residential schools where young children suffered decades of abuse, the destruction of traditional language, culture, and ways of living—just as America’s Native Americans have. As I would soon learn, the Heiltsuk were facing another injustice as grave as all the others combined.
Hanging above the library’s tasteful framed prints of northern BC’s whales and schooners and rugged islands were large hand-lettered posters declaring: Solidarity of Nations, NO to Tankers, NO to ENBRIDGE! and Don’t Waste 10,000 Years!
STAND UP FOR THE COAST: FIGHT ENBRIDGE! proclaimed a banner strung across one corner.
“What’s Enbridge?” I asked the young woman behind the counter, who turned out to be Jess Housty, a twenty-five-year-old force of nature who would soon be elected to the Heiltsuk Tribal Council as its youngest member. An accomplished poet who had created Bella Bella’s first and only library while she was still a teenager, Housty explained that Enbridge was one of Canada’s largest exporters of western Canadian oil and that there had once been a plan to ram through one of the most contentious new pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure in North America: the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline.
Bella Bella did not sit directly on the planned oil pipeline’s route (that was 125 miles farther north), but its Pacific Ocean waters lay in the treacherous path the oil tankers would have taken en route to loading up with diluted tar sands oil. Housty, with her library as command central, had helped galvanize the local community’s engagement before a review panel created by the Canadian government.
The plan to ship crude oil and bitumen through the Great Bear Sea along the northern coast of British Columbia was insane, but it took people from all walks of life working together in resistance for the Canadian government to finally introduce legislation in 2017 formally banning oil tankers from the Great Bear Sea. The ban was the direct result of thousands of people speaking up, a movement led by coastal First Nations like the Heiltsuk, which were forced to put enormous time and energy into justifying why the project could never go ahead. Individuals like Jess Housty had led the fight—and won that battle. But I had a sinking feeling there would be more.
“How was town?” Jeff asked twenty minutes later when I marched back to the fuel dock.
“There’s a wonderful library and a café—can you believe it?” I asked, handing my cup over as proof. “Do you want a latte? It’s a rare chance…”
“Nah, this place is rough—let’s get out of here.”
It was rough, not just the town but the dock, with sport fishermen and a steel-hulled charter schooner both jockeying for space at two splintery finger piers, and the reek of rot and fish guts, fuel and slime. Unlike marinas down south where there always seemed to be someone offering to catch a line as we kissed Mighty Heron up to the dock, here it was every boat for itself. We were expecting this and, having come this far, were ready for it. Still, as a boatload of fishermen watched, I felt self-conscious as I untied our bow line, tossed it over the rails, raced back along the dock to untie our stern, heaved it aboard, then hustled back to midships and casually, I hoped, pulled myself aboard.
Rough as Bella Bella was, there was so much more going on beneath the surface.
Buzzed on caffeine, energized by just being in a roomful of books, I felt my spirits lifting like the weathered gulls blasting off the docks and careening past our furled sails. Bella Bella was our first foray into a Canadian First Nations village, and something about it had not only gotten under my skin but also touched me.
* * *
As we continued up the channel to Shearwater Marina, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jess Housty’s reading library. There was something powerful there in this unlikely corner of the wilderness, and in the physical fact of tha
t collection of books and regional histories and ideas celebrating such a remote part of the world—and also in the presence of the two young women working together. I was at home there. I didn’t know why and I didn’t ask. But I think it had something to do with the realization that even in a place as isolated as Bella Bella, there were people whose innate spirit, energy, and belief make an incalculable difference—one book at a time.
Even so, the fact that pipelines like Enbridge’s were still threatening the planet—and that a recently proposed liquid natural gas project involving supertankers was looming on the Great Bear Sea’s horizon, even after plans for the Northern Gateway Pipeline were dashed—horrified me.
But the tiny library gave me a kind of hope.
* * *
A few days later we were tied up at Shearwater Marina, listening to Coast Guard Radio Canada’s continuous weather forecast: “Frontal system located over Haida Gwai…Visibility less than one mile. Gale warning in effect, wind southwest fifteen to twenty-five, increasing to twenty to thirty, then twenty-five to thirty-five this afternoon…Rain ending Wednesday morning.”
We’d learned a lot, hanging around the Shearwater docks while waiting for the weather to clear. We’d met the green steel-hulled Achiever’s Captain Brian, whom we instantly recognized from the National Geographic film on the Great Bear Rainforest; he was doing laundry in the marina’s communal laundry room.
“Hey, it’s Captain Brian!” Jeff had said heartily by way of introduction, and I swear Captain Brian blushed from head to toe, all six-foot-four of him.
Then the three of us had stood around amiably folding T-shirts and boxer shorts on a massive twenty-foot-long table carved from a single cedar plank. The table was a thing of beauty, polished to a honeyed luster. I tried to hold Captain Brian’s gaze casually, like the no-bullshit-don’t-give-a-damn kind of chief mate I aspired to be, while folding my underthings. We talked about the film crews and biologists he’d had aboard his sloop, and the surfers he’d ferry to the outer coast of the Great Bear Rainforest in the fall to shoot a documentary.
The international film crews and surfers, it turned out, were all coming to draw attention to this remote corner of the world, to raise international awareness for its fragility.
* * *
We’d also tracked down Marven Robinson, one of the top spirit bear guides in BC, who lived in Hartley Bay, home of the Gitga’at First Nations community. With the realization that finding a spirit bear would be even less likely than finding Jeff’s ancient longhouse in this impenetrable forest, I’d logged on to the intermittent Wi-Fi at Shearwater and looked up wildlife guides I’d read about in the National Geographic spirit bear article. Only one name kept popping up: Marven Robinson. I kept sleuthing and tracked down his phone number. Then, bolstered by a glass of wine, I called him from the pay phone inside the restaurant bar at the Shearwater Marina.
He picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Marven Robinson,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. He’d actually answered; I had Marven Robinson on the line…! I was nearly speechless with astonishment.
“Marven, uh…!” I said, stammering. “I’m headed your way on a sailboat. My husband and I are very interested in spirit bears. We’ve come all this way from Seattle, with the goal of trying to see one. I was wondering if we could possibly, um, hire you to guide us?”
“Sure,” he said, easily. “They’re not easy to see, and there’s no guarantee. There’s a small window of time when the bears are feeding, but you’re in luck—this is a really good time of year for them. There’s a white bear who was feeding just last week along a river inlet on Princess Royal Island. Where did you say you are now?”
And then we calculated the number of days and nights it would take us to make it all the way to Hartley Bay.
Marven wasn’t actually in Hartley Bay. He was in Calgary buying a new truck. But, miraculously, he’d be back in Hartley Bay by the time we got there.
“Just call me when you get here,” he said.
“Really? That would be fantastic!” I exclaimed, hardly able to believe our luck, that I’d just called from a pay phone and tracked down one of Canada’s top wildlife guides: Marven Robinson, on his cell.
Thank you, thank you, I breathed to whatever gods must be crazy, clearly listening out there in the water, mountains, rain, and endless trees. And then I swaggered back to our table in the Shearwater pub and told Jeff he’d never believe what had just happened: I’d found us a Spirit Bear Guide.
And not just any bear guide: if we could make it all the way to Hartley Bay, we’d meet Marven Robinson himself.
* * *
Shearwater turned out to be a sort of hub for everyone who cruised these cold rain-swept waters, its marine shop the only place within hundreds of miles for haul-outs, parts, and serious repairs; its docks and pub a wealth of local knowledge. There was a welcome-aboard, join-our-table sort of joie de vivre: if you’d gotten yourself this far, you were part of the club.
One afternoon there was a rap on Heron’s hull. I looked out the window—and saw ankles on the dock. Who could it be? I poked my head out the hatch, and there stood a man who introduced himself as Richard Ying, smiling. “Join us for cocktails?” he asked.
And that was how Jeff and I found ourselves, an hour later, gathered around the galley table on Richard and his wife Jill’s exquisite 1930s wooden motor yacht with our friend Pat Freeny and local marine biologists Ken and Edith Cripps, having a discussion about the secret of life. Richard was quick-witted and kind, a Chinese American who had retired early in his fifties after founding a software company and now exuded the easy confidence of a man who had found the time and space in which to even consider topics such as the secret of life. Jill, his wife, was petite and as exotic as a rare bird in these parts: pale white skin, dark brown hair piled beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat (even indoors at night), dramatic penciled-in eyebrows and wine-red lips. Pat was wiry, polite and patient, with a stealth wisdom playing in his eyes and an air of competent self-containment; he was an audiologist, a PhD and physician who taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, and for the past six summers he had been exploring the northern BC coast aboard his forty-eight-foot custom-designed sailboat, Nirvana. Hipster Ken was bearded and barrel-chested, with wire-rimmed glasses, quick eyes, and a black wool cap; he was a marine biologist who had sailed extensively. His wife, Edith, was blonde and outdoorsy; she exuded the complete confidence of a woman who had sailed herself around the world and now had two young daughters aboard her boat for summer cruising.
“I once asked the chairman of Wells Fargo what he thought the secret of life was,” Richard said with a sly wink. “And you know what he said?”
We all waited, expectant.
“Yogurt.”
“Yogurt?” Ken barked. Everyone chuckled.
Jill rolled her eyes; she’d evidently heard this one before.
“I think,” Pat Freeny chimed in, “it’s like that James Taylor song—’The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.’”
We all nodded conspiratorially, sipped our whiskey or wine.
It was great to see Pat. He was, in fact, one of the first people we’d ever heard mention the Great Bear Rainforest. He was the person I’d originally met at the dinner who’d been spending his summers hosting National Geographic photographers aboard his boat. He’d had the good fortune to accompany Paul Nicklen, the photographer who had taken the astonishing spirit bear photos we’d seen, on those shoots, day after day. Now he was helping Paul photograph a new story about the last of the rare, wild coastal wolves. We told Pat about the mysterious wolf we’d encountered, and how unafraid she’d been.
“That’s because the BC coast is one of the last places on the planet where wolves live relatively undisturbed by humans,” Pat said.
Everyone nodded again, then drifted back to the topic of Time. Sailors, more than any other group of people I’ve met, have a different relationship with Time, understand how
sailing is so much about settling into, getting comfortable with, accepting that different relationship with Time. And with Silence.
“When we were down off the coast of Ushuaia, and later exploring Antarctica? There were days when Ken and I realized we barely knew what month it was,” Edith said wistfully.
I didn’t say anything. Just sat listening, thinking how much I liked all these people—all but one of whom we’d only just met, but who were kindred spirits—and also how inexperienced I suddenly felt by comparison. One of the things I was beginning to understand about boating, and life in general, was that no matter how far you think you’ve traveled and how much you think you’ve seen—there are always those who have gone farther, who have lived more and seen more. I was in awe that Ken and Edith had sailed themselves to Antarctica. And yet I also got the sense that Edith’s life now, this chapter, raising two young daughters on an island off the BC coast, was also an adventure, just in a different way.
Maybe that is the secret of life, I thought. Fully inhabiting it, being in it, embracing each chapter; recognizing that life, for most of us, isn’t smooth sailing during which we can alter our course whenever we choose, but instead full of uncertainty, and more of a long slog through bumpy seas, with waves tossed at us and tossing us around. Sometimes, the waves are so high and come so fast it’s hard, really hard, to just stay afloat.
And at the same time, I knew, have always known, that you can’t discover new oceans unless you learn to live with that uncertainty and dare leave the shore. It was strange and energizing, meeting these new people in the middle of nowhere. Yet I already ached for the long, dreamy afternoons and evenings afloat, for the solitude.
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