Ken picked up a pen, drew a few lines on a napkin, and slid the napkin across the table toward us. It was the harbor at Hartley Bay, where we hoped to meet Marven Robinson in a week. He’d drawn the floatplane dock, the ferry dock, and the community dock. “Here’s Hartley Bay,” he said. “It’s a small harbor, shallows up quick.”
Jeff and I stared at the napkin.
“You don’t want to block the floatplane dock, just head in and raft up to one of the fishing boats.” He pointed with the tip of the pen, then drew a few X’s along the dock. “Marven’s dad’s purse seiner hasn’t been out in years, just tie up to that.”
“He won’t mind?”
“Everybody does it up there—it’s no problem.”
“Hartley Bay’s great,” Jill and Pat chimed in.
“Oh, and look up Wally Bolton,” Ken added, printing WALLY BOLTON on the napkin in neat block letters.
“Yeah, who’s he?” Jeff asked.
“Just look him up,” Ken answered, sliding the napkin toward us like a treasure map. “You won’t be sorry.”
KLEMTU
Headed north again on our way to circumnavigate Princess Royal Island—and hopefully see a spirit bear—we were riding high. The wind and rain and angry gray storm clouds that had held us captive the past few days had decamped south, leaving a lightening sky in their wake. We were at the point of the journey where we didn’t know what day it was, and more importantly, it didn’t matter. It was late August, a glorious time to be northbound this late in the season when the few other cruising boats we encountered were all pointed south.
We’d been able to put calls through to the boys from the pay phone at Shearwater, and just hearing their voices reassured us all was well. Making our way up Seaforth Channel, it was as if the universe had freed up space—there was room to contemplate something larger. Just then, a violent splash. Jeff and I both looked up hurriedly. Humpbacks again! One was breaching in the distance, its white spray highlighted against dark mountains. And to starboard there were more whales lazily feeding.
“They’re in slow mo,” Jeff said, riveted. We watched them, a pair of humpbacks this time, their backs arching slowly through the water followed by the sensuous flash…splash, flash…splash of two forked tails. We were so close we could smell them. A big cloud of rank whale breath hung in the air; a fishy, planktonic smell like mounds of krill gone bad. But the thing that was most captivating was the sound of humpback breath. We could hear it—big breathy exhales, slow and drawn out; blowing sharply, then exhaling slowly. We listened, mesmerized, waiting for the whales’ wet-black humps to resurface, then slide back down.
Wow! I felt like I had eyes all over my head. Like the two of us were twelve years old, so excited. I raced up to the foredeck with the good camera.
“I wouldn’t get that close if I were you!” Jeff hollered.
But I couldn’t help myself. I wrapped myself around the forestay and waited for the whales to resurface. It was riveting. How could something so gargantuan be so gentle?
Although as the whales came up and arched their backs, breathed in, blew out, went under and disappeared again, I began to feel older—not twelve, not fifty, but more like eighty—and overcome with sadness. It wasn’t resignation; it was just plain old sadness, a mother’s knowing-but-not-wanting-to-know kind of sorrow. I understood intuitively that just as whales can be both powerful and gentle, humans can be both greedy and shortsighted. We were so flawed, so painfully stupid sometimes, so, well, human. It was, I knew, our nature, and the pipeline and supertanker battles would rage on. If not here, nearby—risking calamitous oil spills. How ironic, given that more than half the oxygen in each breath we take comes from the plants and algae in the sea.
* * *
The cruising guides had very little information on Klemtu, the Kitasoo native village we reached late that afternoon after rounding Ivory Island and heading up Milbanke Sound, six- to ten-foot swells rolling in off the Pacific. There wasn’t room to put up the mainsail with all the rocks, and even after securing things belowdecks, there was much crashing and bashing—books strewn about, the banquette drawer flinging itself in and out. I braced myself, went down to secure things, didn’t stay down long. But Heron took it in stride, riding the swells, relishing them even.
As I said, however, our cruising guides had very little information on Klemtu. We’d found only a short paragraph, with basic info on the fuel dock, pay phone, Kitasoo band store—nothing about the community itself. Perhaps that was because cruising guides cater to, well, cruisers, and Klemtu has only one small dock with very little room to tie up, and no public marina. Prior to meeting Ken and Edith in Shearwater, we had heard from a sailing friend that Klemtu was a pit, basically “a garbage dump with a town.”
But Ken, who worked with the coast’s native villages, had insisted it was “great,” that we should simply tie up at the fuel dock or raft to one of the fishing trawlers. Still, we were intimidated approaching the harbor. It was small, surrounded by mountains that shouldered up behind a ring of modest houses whose windows all gazed out at the water like pairs of unblinking eyes.
As we made our way up the narrow channel, we took turns squinting at Klemtu through the binoculars.
“That must be the dock,” I said.
“Yep,” Jeff replied.
“Do you think we can fit in on the port side? Do a starboard tie?”
“Just barely.”
“Okay, give me a sec to ready the lines…”
We entered Klemtu’s bay and floated in neutral, the only sailboat, all fifty-four feet of us as obvious as an ostrich in a puddle, Heron’s seventy-five-foot mast and red-white-and-blue flag flying off the stern signaling: Hi, everyone, the Americans are here!
I secured the fenders, readied the bow and stern lines, then tied a short line around a midship cleat. (I’d figured out by then how to use leverage to my advantage, jumping off and lashing Heron to each dock with a quick side tie that stopped her forward motion.) Jeff maneuvered us slowly toward the splintered wooden dock while I leaned against the side of the cabin, line in hand and ready to leap. Since it was everyone for themselves up here, I was surprised when two young men in T-shirts, sneakers, and jeans stepped off a big black-hulled purse seiner with a sweeping bow that was tied to the other side of the dock, and offered to catch our lines.
“Thanks!” I said gratefully. “That was nice of you guys.” It turned out they both worked on the purse seiner, the Pacific Marl, a fishing boat out of Vancouver. One of them looked to be in his twenties, the other no more than a boy, fourteen or fifteen. Both had thick dark hair and shy smiles. A slope-shouldered, balding man in a wool plaid shirt climbed down from the back of the purse seiner and strolled over to introduce himself.
“Hi, I’m Bob Black,” he said. “This is my wife, Kathy.” He motioned up at a friendly-looking woman in a green sweatshirt who was waving down from the fishing boat. The Pacific Marl, we learned, was one of the last remaining wooden-hulled fishing boats on the coast. Captain Black and Kathy were heading home to Vancouver after a summer of salmon fishing out of Prince Rupert. Bob said it had been Kathy’s idea for the boys, their crew, to come over and help with our lines.
I smiled up at her and waved while salmon jumped around us in the harbor. We’d seen fish jumping up here, but these fish were fanatics—shooting clear out of the water, flinging their muscular fish selves with abandon around the bay.
“Heck, I’ve never seen anything like those fish jumping,” Jeff said. “Are they feeding?”
Bob said Klemtu is one of the places where fresh water mingles with Pacific current; nirvana evidently, if you’re a fish making a marathon swim.
“They’re jumping because they’re happy—happy they’ve made it home,” the older of the two young crewmen said matter-of-factly.
* * *
Klemtu turned out to be a small, remote village—the only one on Swindle Island and home to about 420 people. The residents consist of two indigenou
s cultural linguistic groups: the Kitasoo, from the outer coast, and the Xai’xais, from the inner coast. The village encircles the harbor, and a wide walking path runs from one end of the harbor’s bay to the other, like a communal front porch for the whole town.
Jeff and I decided to take a walk along the path. A single paved road ran alongside it, and the majority of Klemtu’s houses sat off this road, facing the bay. The water was still full of crazy jumping salmon, and soon a Great Pyrenees as big as a bear appeared out of nowhere and began following us. Then we noticed the ravens: enormous glossy birds with curved black beaks sat everywhere—on trees, atop phone wires, along the boardwalk railing. They didn’t fly off as we passed them but, oddly, kept on sitting right where they were, cackling, like brazen old men and women on a park bench, checking us out.
At first we felt somewhat intimidated and self-conscious. We couldn’t be more conspicuous, just off the boat, but everyone we passed (including kids with fishing poles, Kitasoo and Xai’xais moms pushing strollers, even surly teens) said “Hi.” And everyone who drove by waved. Everyone was so friendly it was almost creepy. We continued along in this manner, waving back as we passed yards scattered with plastic toys, bikes, and broken-down fishing boats.
As we rounded the south end of the cove, a lanky, long-limbed man wearing jeans and a dark blue fleece stepped out of a wooden house as if he was going somewhere at the end of the day, “Hello, enjoying the beauty?” he said.
“Uh, yes,” we both said, startled. “Yes! Yes we are.”
Then, instead of hurrying off down the boardwalk like an American would have, the man just stood there with us, laptop bag slung over his shoulder, gazing out at the bay.
“Just visiting Klemtu?” he asked.
We nodded.
“You’re on the sailboat, then?” he went on, glancing out at Heron.
She was hard to miss, and it dawned on me, chagrined, that all Klemtu knew we were here. We were the people on the sailboat. We laughed, asked if he lived in Klemtu.
“No,” he said, going on to explain that he worked with the community as a therapist once a month.
“Really? What kind of therapist?” I asked.
“Neurolinguistic. I do Time Line Therapy,” he said. Then Richard Hunt introduced himself and went on to explain about neurolinguistic Time Line Therapy, which has to do with memory and how it’s formed—how when an experience happens, our subconscious assigns a texture or a mood to it: happy, sad, anxious…
An incredible calmness emanated from Richard Hunt. He appeared to be going somewhere but instead stood rooted to the ground, as if he had all the time in the world. We’d only just met, but he seemed so fully present; there was a solidness to him that put you immediately at ease. It was one of those encounters that instantly forms your impression of a place. And for me, my impression of Klemtu was the aspect of Richard Hunt: friendly but mysterious; spiritual, deep, fully inhabiting the place.
Then he explained in the most astonishing way how our earliest memories shape us.
And how our reactions to those earliest memories, according to indigenous beliefs, are based on our earlier spirits.
The spirits of our ancestors.
“Wow,” Jeff and I both said. It was a lot to take in.
The three of us stood there in the road, looking out at the bay some more. Richard told us he lived in Alert Bay, near Port McNeill. He wondered whether we’d stopped there.
“No, but I wanted to!” I burst out, glaring at Jeff. Alert Bay was famed for its indigenous cultural center, the largest collection of First Nations masks and artifacts in all Canada. But we hadn’t stopped. That day had been a long one and I couldn’t talk Jeff into it.
Richard Hunt smiled and said that he’d picked up from our conversation that Jeff probably felt “some tension” about not stopping at Alert Bay. That Alert Bay now resonated for us with a significance created by our shared memory of my wanting to stop and Jeff’s not wanting to stop, and our not stopping.
We had to laugh. “Wow,” I said again, conspiratorially.
“Well, that pretty much nails it,” Jeff said.
We stood watching the delirious fish continue to jump in circles, and Richard Hunt, apropos of nothing, launched further into the metaphysical, into a conversation you’d never have in the States with someone you’d met only minutes before but that made perfect sense here: “In our culture, we believe that spirit never dies,” he explained. “That when you die your spirit is released to continue its journey into the next life…It’s a form of reincarnation, if you will. So you may contain many earlier spirits.”
* * *
One thing I’ve come to learn as a traveler is that if your journey is long enough someplace, it changes you a little while you are there. It’s a subtle shift that, given enough time and space, might even surface in your dreams. Usually, it creeps up on you so gradually you’re not even aware of the moment you’ve crossed over. But as Jeff and I walked back to the boat, I felt not only that I was different somehow but that we were different somehow. We could have gone on for a long time, standing there and talking with Richard Hunt about Time and Memory and Spirits. But instead, when the conversation came to its natural end, we bid Richard Hunt goodbye and ambled back to the boat, both of us lost in thought.
Here in this wild landscape hurled through with fish and birds, everything felt so blown open by wind, and rain, and sky. I felt blown open, and I could tell Jeff felt something like that too. I was thinking about Native American culture and First Nations culture and also people I’d encountered on assignment in the Himalayas, and Africa, and the Amazon; their “religions” wildly different, but all with a profound spiritual sense.
And although we’d only just arrived, I felt the same thing in the village of Klemtu: Spirit.
It’s remarkable by comparison how divorced our sped-up Western culture is from the spiritual. We’re big on religion, of course, but small on spirit—a casualty of our collapsed sense of time. We worship speed, but on an island in the middle of a rain-drenched forest on the edge of the sea—an island that had taken hours and days and weeks to reach—we’d met someone who had mastered the art of slow. Maybe part of our quest to glimpse the spirit bear, I realized, wasn’t really about the bear itself but about the journey.
Back on the boat we did chores and grilled up dinner. I was rereading The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiesen’s classic account of his 1973 trek to Nepal in search of the rare and elusive snow leopard, and came across a particular Rilke quote I’ve encountered from time to time: “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
It seemed so strange, almost uncanny, that we’d walked into that moment with Richard Hunt, had that conversation on the street in Klemtu. I wished those moments would happen more often: experiences when you are lifted outside your life, separated from ego, freed from particularity, where there is no time or space. But, I think, when one does happen, the singularity of the moment is proof that you’re where you’re meant to be.
* * *
What did it mean? Jeff and I had sailed and fought our way through currents, and motored through driving rainstorms, and flown across straits with all the sails raised, and soared together, and sank together, and struggled, and awoke in the mornings and faced each other and done it all over again, for years, really, days of grinding tedium and days of bright triumph, days of sorrow and sadness, others made up of quiet small moments that meant everything but I couldn’t see past them. And now the boys, with both of them leaving, had turned our lives upside down; their presence had become, a
fter a rocky start, the wind in our sails; their departure blowing away our moorings as effortlessly as a wind shakes leaves from a tree, scattering everything we thought we knew, leaving an emptiness unlike any I’d ever known, waiting to be filled.
With what? I wondered. I didn’t know.
I didn’t know what next, what there could possibly be that would invest our lives with as much meaning. All I knew was that we were mysteriously here: a place where the past felt as distant as the boat’s long-dispersed wake, the future only as pressing as tomorrow, and there was a healing immediacy to this moment. We were both standing together outside ourselves; no one knew us or cared what we did, what successes we’d had, what failures. What we’d achieved with the instincts of two salmon fighting our way upstream mattered not one wit. We were vulnerable, stripped of all pretense and defense.
We were facing a question: What now?
But the answer seemed less urgent once we’d allowed ourselves to ask.
* * *
We sat around the small table in the main cabin, curtains drawn, eating a late dinner of grilled chicken. A knock came at the hull. Jeff turtled his head out, and there stood one of the two deckhands off Pacific Marl. Did we want to walk over and see the longhouse with them, he wanted to know? His cousin was the caretaker and had a key. Of course we did. Klemtu longhouse is revered as one of the most beautiful re-created longhouses—a type of long, proportionally narrow, single-room building representing the earliest form of permanent structure in many cultures—on the entire Pacific Northwest Coast. We’d been admiring the cedar facade with its striking red-and-black eagle, raven, wolf, and rare double-finned blackfish (orca) crests overlooking the harbor all afternoon. We leaped up from the table, left our plates, laced up our shoes.
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