Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  “We’re here, aren’t we?” Jeff said decisively. I knew what he was thinking: We’ve made it all this way. It was the spirit of the thing, the quest, but still…“It’s risky for sure, but we’ve got to go check it out.”

  I took a deep breath, held it, unsure.

  And when I could hold my breath no longer, I said simply, “Okay,” and went up to the bow to watch for rocks while we slid gingerly over the water.

  It was an hour before high tide, which was good, but that meant we had an hour at most to get in and out of there, which was bad.

  Halfway into the cove, we anchored in twelve feet of water.

  * * *

  Even today that part of my husband remains a mystery to me: What kind of man takes a risk like that in the middle of nowhere? What kind of man let’s a pin on an iPad lead him into some of the wildest, most remote waters on Earth? What kind of man sails five hundred miles, says “We’re here, aren’t we?”—risking not only himself but you and, let’s face it, the boat that’s his pride and joy—and then dinghies ashore?

  We’ve been married nearly three decades, raised and launched two sons who are now men, and parts of my husband still surprise me.

  Jeff is charming but in a prickly way, like a porcupine with a sentimental stripe. He’s a grinch with heart, beneath quills that keep you on your toes. He’s also loyal, upstanding as an old-growth tree, with the same two best friends since college. He’s a talker. A storyteller. A whiskey and wine drinker. He’s the type who keeps up with the latest rock music but also reads the New Yorker every week. He can be stylish, and outrageous. He’s a man of character. He’s someone who’s got your back. He’s the kind of guy who has worn the same pair of leather Top-Siders for fifteen years, socks poking out of holes in the toes, but he can’t throw them away because he’s steadfast. Instead, he buys a needle and leather thread and, sitting on the stern, stitches up the holes.

  He was twenty-nine years old when we met; now he was nearly sixty, weathered, fit, his middle slightly thickened by time. I watched him, wearing his sailing bibs and boots—there was no time to change out of them—lower the dinghy, jump in, and steady the rubber raft while I clambered aboard. Then, just before I pushed off, he said, “Wait!” He scrambled out, disappeared, and then climbed back in clutching the handheld VHF radio. He hurriedly tucked it into his front bib with one hand, revved the outboard with the other, and we were off.

  I was so thrilled, I could feel the blood fizzing though my veins. It was maybe fifty-four degrees out, but the sky had turned a bright sapphire blue, sunlight skittering on the water as we sped in toward shore. I watched Heron recede in the distance until it looked like a toy sailboat bobbing on a bathtub sea. And then it dawned on me: my husband was doing this for us. He’d made the decision to go ashore here, taken a calculated risk partly because he wanted to but mostly because he knew we needed this. Seeing this long-lost place was for us going forward, and for our marriage—which now, with the boys launched, would consist of shared experiences just the two of us.

  Assuming we made it to the longhouse and back, it would be a gift.

  And if we didn’t make it, it would be a nightmare: the two of us stranded on this huge, wet deserted island in the middle of nowhere, the opening scenes of some twisted reality show: Deadliest Catch meets Lost.

  The quest was very sweet. And I am very lucky, I should have been thinking. But I wasn’t thinking—there was no time for that; instead, I peeled my eyes from Heron and watched the beach, which was coming up quickly. The bay shallowed beneath us, Jeff throttled down, and when we were in a foot or so of water I jumped out, waded in with the line, then turned and pulled Jeff and the raft in toward the sand. We tied the raft hurriedly around a log, hearts pounding, then went to find an ancient longhouse hidden in the forest. We didn’t stop for anything. Soon the sun would be setting and the tide peaking and falling, leaving us and the boat dangerously exposed.

  * * *

  It’s an odd feeling, searching for something you don’t ever expect to find. The beach was maybe a quarter of a mile long and fifty feet wide. I was happy enough just to be off the boat, my sailing boots sinking into the sand.

  But Jeff was like Indiana Jones on speed; he was striding ahead, intensely focused, eyes raking the forest a few feet to his left. I smiled to myself. He was still lean and handsome and bold, I thought. The kind of man who looks straight ahead but stays open to a good time. He was about thirty feet ahead of me when he suddenly stopped, turned at a lone stick standing straight up in the sand like a marker, and veered off into the forest. Oh, Jesus, here we go.

  I knew about the sheer jungle energy of the trees and plants in the Great Bear Rainforest by now. How from the beach you can see far, but that once you enter this coastal forest, just twenty paces from shore you can become totally disoriented. The trail of a person, or the path to an ancient longhouse, can be easily lost.

  I wasn’t liking this experience so far, was jogging to the place where the stick stood, where Jeff had turned and headed into the trees, when I heard him yell…

  * * *

  When I reached the place where he’d gone in, I saw there was actually an opening in the trees, and a faint path between them. Most coastal forests are claustrophobic; there are ankle-twisting tangles of roots and vines, and every few feet or so your way is blocked by moss-coated trunks of fallen trees, with ferns and lichen and younger trees sprouting out of them. Most coastal forests are dark, thick, and wet. You have the feeling that if you lose your way, you could be grown over and swallowed up by the steady, ancient riot of growth.

  But this forest was different. It was huge and eternal feeling, but instead of being dense and dark, it was airy and light. The air was intensely aromatic. The pine-needled path was soft and spongy underfoot, muting our passage, and when I looked up, shafts of sunlight were piercing the trees. It was like a silent, branched and needled cathedral, an awesome place to behold.

  The trees, mostly Sitka spruces, were tall and slender, and Jeff was standing among them in his red Musto sailing bibs, beaming.

  “You’re not going to believe this!” he shouted. His face was lit up with the thrill of the hunt. “Hurry, it’s insanely cool.”

  He turned, I followed him a short distance into the woods, and then I saw it: before us, the skeletal frame of an entire longhouse leaped out from the trees. It was preserved in the hush of the forest, like the bones of an ancient fallen-down Chartres. Massive cedar posts, five feet in diameter, stood in two corners, and on all four sides cedar-log beams—two suspended in midair, the others half fallen, all wrapped in a cloak of soft moss—outlined the structure of a Kitasoo longhouse. It looked strong and weathered and sacred. It looked like something from another century. It looked like time itself. I stood staring at the site, and the silence was so profound that I felt like I could hear for miles and miles, every sound off the water, every leaf stirring in the breeze, every twig, crackling and distinct.

  But most astonishing: as my eyes settled upon the site, I could see the remnants of what was at one time tiered seating, like bleachers, descending into the earth. Now the tiers rimmed a sort of sunken garden filled with leafy salal and salmonberry, and fallen logs and entire continents of lichen, and thin saplings and hundreds upon hundreds of ferns. The wind blew from the west, bearing the salt of the sea and the perfume of ferns and the herby scent of hemlocks. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of silence and oblivion, protected from the beat of time. The forest, naturally, was reclaiming the site, but the space, as mystical as a medieval church, felt charged. I was transfixed. There was something magical and powerful in the sheer jungle energy of the leafy wilderness, in the quiet watchful witness of its unseen long-gone inhabitants. There was something sacred here.

  Twenty minutes had passed, and we knew we didn’t have much time. We needed to get back to the boat. There was much we could say—we’d somehow managed to find the ruins of the longhouse in the middle of all this wild
ness, a place where vanishing cultures once gathered, where people told stories to one another in languages now almost forgotten—but we were afraid to speak. We both knew that speaking here would be like dashing some very delicate bond to pieces, like kicking a cedar log into a thousand splinters—the papery, sinewy length of it scattering in the wind.

  So instead, we stood there for a moment wondering at this place, claiming it as an intense and shared memory while the light beamed down through the trees and illuminated the fragile cedar bones. Then we turned and raced back to the boat.

  BLACK BEAR

  People ask me if I’m ever afraid on the boat. We’ve taken our fair share of risks for sure. We’ve done some treacherous things, like anchoring Heron off that wildly remote beach on a rising tide when we wanted to find the ancient longhouse, then threading our way through Philip Narrows, a cut that resembled the eye of a needle, a few hours later. Philip was one of the trickiest passages we’d ever attempted: only thirty feet wide and twenty-two feet deep, with submerged rocks to port and a huge mapped rock lurking dead ahead. But it was the only way to reach Kent Inlet, a series of hidden bays gracing the southwest coast of Princess Royal Island. We’d read about Kent Inlet and how this nearly landlocked chain of bays could, in fact, be entered through Philip Narrows at slack tide. Newly emboldened, we decided they looked worth the risk. With Heron’s sixteen-foot beam, we had to hug this shore, then that, to avoid this rock or the next—all fine, except there was so little maneuvering room to begin with.

  “Oh hell. Don’t tell me that’s the way in?” Jeff said when we first spied the opening.

  But it was the way in: a channel so narrow I instinctively sprinted to the bow; once stationed there I could barely breathe, I was so intent on willing us not to hit rock. I wrapped one arm around the headstay, gripped the bow rail with the other, and leaned out, peering into the dark green water. One of us always does this in tricky spots, although it feels futile, staring down at an impenetrable sea, watching for rocks. The water was almost black from my vantage; it was impossible to see through it at all. I stood there squinting anyway, watching the hull slice through the murk, praying that if we hit or, god forbid, scraped something, it wouldn’t be on my watch. Finally, after ten or so tense minutes, we were through—then gliding among a string of one, then two, then three completely enclosed, forest-rimmed bays; each secluded body of water opening to the next. It was like entering a country of quiet—a place where our awareness suddenly shifted. We held our breath as we passed silently from one large body of water to the next in the late-afternoon light: not a single boat. Was it possible that we had this whole secret realm to ourselves?

  We did.

  We set the anchor.

  Shut down the engine.

  Shed our foul-weather gear.

  Grinned in disbelief, then…

  Slipped a kayak over the side.

  * * *

  The inlet’s third and innermost bay, like so many on Princess Royal Island, was oblong and edged by Sitka spruce forest. Where the soil ran out at the shore’s edge, trees teetered on rock. At its head, not far from where we’d anchored, a small waterfall tumbled. Heron floated maybe a hundred yards from the falls, so close you could hear the water chattering as it pooled over rock and watch salmon as big as your arm catapulting themselves toward the river. This, I knew, was precisely the kind of place you might be lucky enough to spot serious wildlife fishing for dinner: black bears, grizzlies, wolves.

  I couldn’t believe that finally, after days and weeks beating our way north toward the Great Bear Rainforest, we’d found the ancient longhouse and landed within range of the spirit bear—both on the same day.

  Jeff, tired and elated, climbed into the dinghy and motored off to set a crab pot.

  Alone on the boat, I noticed the pace of everything took on a delicious strangeness, as if I were watching things in slow motion. I lowered myself carefully, in jeans and bare feet, into one of two kayaks we kept lashed to Heron’s bow. Slim and light, the kayaks were a splurge. But in the weeks since we’d picked them up on Vancouver Island, they’d paid for themselves time and again. Our bodies ached from so many hours afloat. The kayaks, in addition to being beautiful, proved crucial: allowing us to not only get off the boat and get some exercise but also to have a bit of independence. One of the key things, we’d learned quickly, about surviving for long stretches in remote places, was the necessity of being able to take a much-needed break from each other. I grabbed a paddle, sliced through the water with light, even strokes, and glided toward the head of the cove. It was late afternoon, the hour when the angle of the sun was heading toward the ocean, and there was an odd clarity to the blue-gold light, the rinsed air illuminating the spruce trees sharply. At the base of the falls I sat and floated, listening. There was the riffling of water on rock, the splash of froth tumbling over boulders, the rhythm of the water, its steady patter massaging my spine.

  I sat gulping in lungfuls of crisp air, while silver fat salmon flew past my head like jumbo jets. The salmon, crash-landing, sent up plumes of white. The mournful wail of a loon echoed overhead: Where-are-you? Where-are-you? Such a plaintive, wistful call.

  The sun on the water was lit up, incandescent, the surface glittering and the concentric rings left by the salmon perfect and particular, even as they widened and dispersed, washed by the light.

  I sat and floated and made myself very still, barely breathing, just watching and listening…There was the creek endlessly clattering, and the forest smelling of rain and moss and fern. There was the scent of damp earth and sun. The rising of mist, and the burning off of mist. The ravens in the trees, the bald eagles in the trees, the glossy sheen of their backs. I thought about the interminable boat chores, both large and small, that endlessly occupied us. Above us, the black night sky splashed with stars bright as knife points. The cacophony of birds at dawn.

  I knew it couldn’t be sustained, this intense awareness. But for the short time that Jeff was off on the distant shore, the exquisite solitude felt glorious. It was like a gift to myself, and I tried to memorize these moments in the wilderness and the silence of the longhouse in an effort to keep all these things inside me so I could rearrange them, and later tell the boys about them—and after that carry them around with me to create my own peacefulness when I was home, perhaps stuck in traffic. I was thinking all this, watching the falls, utterly transfixed, when I sensed a quick movement off my left shoulder.

  I looked up and froze: an enormous black bear was standing onshore, maybe fifteen feet away, watching me.

  How long has he been here?!

  He was on all fours, snorfling up salmon in a gravel bed just past my ear, and he took a step forward, watching me watch him. He had a big salmon clenched in his teeth, and he was chewing. Bits of salmon and blood and river water streamed from his jaws. He had a massive square head. He was so close I could see one huge rib flex slightly beneath the black tips of his fur.

  I was so shocked I pivoted and paddled away as fast as I could from him, putting a little distance between us. He was only interested in the salmon, of course, but he kept watching me, and was probably—let’s face it—even more apprehensive than I was.

  When I stopped paddling and turned to look back, he was still standing there, chewing. Our eyes met, both of us silent, curious. He lowered his ponderous head—he had huge jaws—picked another fish off the ground, ate it, eyed me. Was I food to him? No, I am just here, I thought. Part of the coastal forest. Maybe like kelp or a log.

  I didn’t move and the bear didn’t move. He just stood there, gorging on salmon. Then he stepped into the stream, took a look at me over his shoulder, trundled out onto a wide flat rock, and fished his paw around in the water. He moved onto the next rock, then the next—and in this way he made his way back up the river. At one point he turned his whole body, so I could see him in perfect profile from snout to stub tail, as distinct as a black shadow against the river’s white foam. Then he galloped off into t
he brush, splashing water up and making the rocks clatter even more loudly than the clattering falls.

  My body had frozen and my fingertips beat. I felt as light as air, frail as an insect; a tiny, two-legged, human fly afloat in a fake fiberglass shell. The breeze tingled on every inch of my arms, my neck, my scalp, like I had antennae all over my head.

  “A bear! I saw a bear!” I kept saying to myself, looking around wildly so I could tell Jeff. But by then he was a speck on the distant shore.

  I couldn’t believe this had happened: that in a single day that started out so darkly Jeff and I had, in fact, managed to find the longhouse, and I’d had this intense solo encounter with a black bear. I began paddling back to the boat, and with each stroke became happier and happier. I was filled with an ineffable joy, a magical lightness of being. By the time I reached the transom and heaved myself out of the kayak, then lay sprawled like a beached porpoise on the stern deck, I was absolutely elated.

  “You’ll never believe what happened!” I hollered at Jeff when he circled back in the dinghy.

  KENT INLET

  Was it Wednesday or Thursday? Jeff and I were in time beyond time. Tidal time. After our intense push from Klemtu to this hidden inlet, a broad bay overhung with deep green spruce and cedar—relishing our intense luck to have this place all to ourselves—we’d decided to take a day. Miraculously, the sun had stayed with us and the sky was a passionate blue. Cloudless. Catching up on boat chores in shorts and flip-flops during the morning, we were aware of the sun warming Heron’s decks and our limbs, and were also attuned to the moon’s pull—the rising and falling of the rapids feeding into the inlet, as well as the shifts in the tidal rapids and current marking the far end of the bay.