Our world was reduced to Heron, water, forest, rock, sky. The sound of the waterfall spilling from the woods just off the bow. The splash of the occasional salmon leaping, lazy now. The idea of bears, the mystery of them—the mythical white bear; all the bears unseen in the forest; even my own private black bear. That was all. And yet…How could a day feel so full?
* * *
To live successfully on a boat, one must take a conscious step backward in time. A lot of things don’t work, or work only intermittently, or are forever on the verge of breaking and not working—and you can drive yourself nuts if you don’t come to terms with all that. Along most of the northern coast we had no cell service; internet required finding a port with Wi-Fi, and even those signals were spotty at best. Learning the ways of living aboard Heron—where Facebook friends were traded for books, and twenty-four-hour news feeds were replaced by days that stretched into ages—had begun to change all that. Jeff and I had begun to move with the rhythms of this more exacting, but also simpler, way of living. Although there was no gym or yoga or jogging, it was a more physical way of living, with our bodies stretched by moving in ways they weren’t used to—and where light and wind and weather dictated the day’s routine.
Thinking about time and how nature used to be the theater of life for all our ancestors, I tried to imagine the people who carved and carried the big cedar poles of the ancient Kitasoo longhouse we’d found the day before. Although these islands are now wildly uninhabited, just two hundred years ago, some sixty thousand residents lived in tribal clusters along this sumptuous coast: Tlingits, Tsimshians, Haidas, Bella Bellas, Bella Coolas, Nootkas, Kwakiutls…The forests were once full of First Nations’ ceremonial longhouses, massive cedar structures that are almost entirely gone now. The Kitasoo are one of fourteen tribes of the Tsimshian people, who now inhabit, along with the Xai’xais people (of Heiltsuk ethnic affiliation), the village of Klemtu. The name Kitasoo derives from the Tshimshian word Gidestsu, from git- (people of) and disdzuu, which refers to a large, tiered house depression, like the ancient longhouse.
Unlike our forebears, these First People, who dug rows of tiered seating into the cool forest floor long before climate change and global warming, saw nature as a whole to which they belonged rather than an unlimited resource to tame. Their numbers however, were small, and their impact on the environment could be sustained. They must have come by cedar canoe, hauled those canoes up onto the beach, gathered in the longhouse. It would have been a hard, cold life with endless hours spent foraging, but nature for them meant both spirit and sustenance.
Later, as Jeff and I became more proficient sailors, we would make more trips to Klemtu and Tsimshian territory, also sailing across Hecate Strait to the islands of Haida Gwaii. We learned that the ancient longhouse had stood in the forest for maybe five hundred years and was central in Kitasoo/ Xai’xais history and stories. They weren’t always happy stories. In one, told to us by a shy fourteen-year-old girl in the Klemtu big house, the Haida came to the village of Klemtu, kidnapped the women and children while the men were out hunting, and made them slaves. The refrain of the story (which is also sung) was how, while traveling on the long canoe back to the islands of Haida Gwaii, the children were thirsty and there was no water.
We also learned that the longhouse had been the most sacred meeting place of all the tribal chiefs. During the almost seventy years that potlatch ceremonies were banned by the Canadian government, chiefs would meet there secretly in winter, making the arduous trek by canoe. One winter one of the canoes capsized and a chief was killed. Eventually, they stopped making the trip. It was too dangerous. Years later we retraced our journey, making it far enough north for a return visit. Scanning the shoreline through binoculars, I couldn’t find the entrance, even knowing where it was located. It didn’t matter. We couldn’t imagine going in. Seeing the ancient longhouse once had been a gift.
* * *
I was still reading Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Although Matthiessen wrote the book in the 1970s—detailing his Himalayan trek with wildlife biologist George Schaller to the remote Dolpo region of Nepal, where they hoped to glimpse the elusive snow leopard—the book’s spirit resonated here in the solitary reaches of the Great Bear, the planet’s last large expanse of coastal temperate rainforest. I’d always loved The Snow Leopard, the simplicity of it, with its biblical cadences, taut and spare sentences. Haunting clarity. Although Matthiessen was on a quest to glimpse a snow leopard, the book, to my mind, is mostly about getting lost, about extending the boundaries of oneself into unknown territory.
Now and then I set the book down and picked up the binoculars. I peered through them from the cockpit, scanned the shore. A beautiful brown-and-white osprey soared hunting for fish, salmon flung themselves at the rocks and lay there silvering in the sun, but the black bear didn’t come again. Jeff went fishing in the dinghy for sockeye, the loops lifting from his rod like a spell cast over the water.
Our boat sat alone in an ink-blue inlet on an uninhabited island. There were no other boats or people or roads for miles. I expanded this emptiness, thinking how to the west was the endless ocean, and then Japan. I felt a delicious surrender, lost to the world, as if we’d stripped away all the past trappings of our lives together, like shedding winter coats. All the being and doing and worrying and planning had evaporated, and I felt an expansive sense of calm. Even though I couldn’t see it, encircled as we were here by a protective rim of trees, I could feel the horizon.
Surrounded by this forest and these steep walls of glacier-carved granite, knowing that no other boats could enter until the next tide cycle, cut off from the outside world, I wanted to stay on Heron forever. Lulled by the breeze and the sun, I felt completely unfamiliar to myself, almost unreal, as if parts of me had dissolved, were dissolving. The Buddhist ideal that there is no real self seemed spot-on here. At the heart of my emerging understanding was the conviction that nature holds the secret to balance and unity, not outside us but inside us, no separation. There was solace here. The boys were in their brand-new lives, where they should be, and somehow Jeff and I had crossed a threshold of experience and exhaustion and were suspended in this new inner place.
The trick, I realized, lay in letting go. Though I dreaded the moment when both Sam and James would leave, I also saw how ready they were. For them, letting go of one family configuration meant making room to grab hold of an entire universe. I felt strangely light, as if I’d come to the end of something and passed through it. But I didn’t know what it was.
* * *
We ate lunch in the cockpit, tearing into the pink flesh of fresh Dungeness crab, which we’d pulled into the boat that morning. It was delicious, made even more so because we’d caught the crabs ourselves. I stirred together a sauce: mayo, lemon, mustard. Sliced up a green apple. We crunched the pink claws with our teeth, sucked the sweet flesh from them. Everything tasted clean and fresh and had the subtle flavor of something that had just come hours ago from the sea.
No boats came in on the afternoon slack. We still had all Kent Inlet, this whole private realm of water, rock, trees, and sky, completely to ourselves—and would for the next twelve hours! The late-afternoon light bounced off the water, a sparkling indigo blue. We dinghied out in our muck boots and shorts and sprawled bare legged on flat barnacled rocks in the warm sun near a stream tumbling into the far side of the inlet, watching for spirit bears since here on Princess Royal Island we were finally in range of the rare places they inhabit. We sat and watched for a long time. We were so used to the quiet now, to one another’s presence when the only other sound was a whispering breeze, that we could have just stayed indefinitely. After all, we had nowhere else to be. It was a lovely feeling, the stripping away of everything external. But sitting on barnacles hurts. After a while we looked at each other and grimaced. We were beyond language now, beyond words. So we both stood up at the exact same time.
* * *
By the time we got back to the b
oat at five o’clock, it was seventy degrees and the sun was shining, almost bikini weather. This kind of warmth, in the far northern reaches of the BC coast, was ridiculous, unheard-of! I couldn’t believe our luck. Were the spirits taking pity on us? Trying, in no uncertain terms, to tell us something? We both stripped down to shorts and T-shirts. After days of wearing the same layers—jeans and thick socks and plaid-flannel shirts and fleece pullovers—the warm rays of late-afternoon sun felt delicious on bare skin. Jeff went back out to check the traps.
I decided it was time for naked cocktails. I popped my head out the cockpit and peered at my husband of twenty-five years speeding across the water in his old T-shirt and ripped khaki shorts and neoprene boots and sinewy brown legs. Then I peeled off my shorts and climbed back up on deck wearing only a blue-and-white-striped French cotton T-shirt with a tease of laces down the back. Settling into one of two low-slung wooden folding chairs on the stern deck, toes tapping on Heron’s sun-warmed teak, I sat and waited, scissoring my thighs open and closed, like a bird’s wings.
“You’re not wearing anything under that!” Jeff said when he got back to the boat and, standing on the swim deck, found himself eye-level with my legs scissoring slowly open and shut, open and shut.
“Do you like it?” I smiled.
“I love it!” My husband grinned. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
And that is how we found ourselves sipping rum and tonics, reclined on Heron, outside on a rare late-summer afternoon that felt like the sunniest day that ever was in the wilds of Canada.
“When was the last time we did it outside? Do you even remember?” I asked.
“Sometime in the eighties?” Jeff mused, laughing.
And so I took my husband by the hand and pushed him to the far side of the cockpit. “Sit down,” I commanded. He obeyed for once, like an eager dog that suddenly remembers he might get a treat. I stood there for a moment, savoring the power surge I felt. Then I leaned forward and tugged off his boots and wool socks, one by one. And because we’re such neat freaks on the boat, I didn’t fling them over my shoulder, but lined them up side by side and tucked each sock into its boot. Next I unclasped his belt and tugged off his frayed khaki shorts.
And then, because this was where we had come after so many years, our desire still stretching before us but into what felt like a new kind of time, we took our time mapping this moment on one another’s bodies. It was indescribably lovely: just being naked together outside, two souls that knew each other so well, but were surprised at the newness of finding ourselves here, playing outside on a Wednesday or maybe Thursday afternoon.
We switched places. Jeff knelt before me, and I closed my eyes. I felt everything, the sigh of the wind through the trees, the patter of the waterfall, the brush of breeze on my thighs, the warmth of the sun radiating up and down and then suddenly exploding like a star. I knelt before him, and he leaned back and gripped the stainless bars of the bimini while I watched him, his eyes closed: all of him fifty-eight years old and still crazy-sexy, although he didn’t always think so—especially after the prostate cancer surgery, which for men, I think, is like losing themselves at first. Still, he’s funny, and comfortable with himself, which is the sexiest thing you can ever be. I thought about making love to Jeff, his hips arrowing into me. Then I eased myself down on him and wrapped my legs around him, pulling him all the way up to my heart.
PRINCESS ROYAL ISLAND—AT LAST
Princess Royal Island loomed and vanished in the grays. To the west was the gaping expanse of the wild North Pacific; to the east an infinity of mountains. Here the Great Bear Rainforest felt like a world unto itself, completely cut off from the rest of North America by the Coast Mountains, whose jagged peaks gleam with snow, even in summer and fall.
I scanned the banks for bears. Nothing. We were finally here, circumnavigating Princess Royal Island, and in the neighborhood of Ursus americanus kermodei, the spirit bear! I leaned past the windscreen and gulped in big breaths of fresh, chilly, salty air.
Princess Royal Island is the largest island on the north coast of British Columbia, but its western shore was flatter than I’d imagined: low dusky hills, forested at the line just above where they met a thin, driftwood-strewn shore. Jeff and I took turns peering through the binoculars at the long string of rocky beaches—each a tumble of boulders rounded by centuries of storms off the Pacific, piles of driftwood, and ancient tree trunks worn silver. Above them gnarled red cedar, straggly spruce, and windblown hemlock grew straight up from the rock.
The sea beneath us was deep: eight hundred to a thousand feet. A red-and-black tug towing a container barge passed midmorning; otherwise, there were no vessels. Once home to a tiny mining outpost and small cannery, Princess Royal is now entirely uninhabited, and except for patches on its north end where clear-cutters once worked, the island feels forgotten, untouched, pristine. The nearest communities are the remote outposts of Klemtu to the south and Hartley Bay to the north. In one day’s sail we were a century away.
We motored on, and I continued to scan the shore, looking for spirit bears. But every “bear” I thought I saw turned out to be a bone-white tree trunk…or a big white rock. Small things are hard to find in big country. Even something as dazzling as a white bear is easy to miss in wilderness this immense. You can spend days and weeks, months even, exploring remote places and not see much of anything wild. Will the spirit bear guide, Marven Robinson, even remember we’re coming? I wondered.
As Jeff and I navigated these uncharted waters—still getting used to the way life felt without the boys in our midst and trying to learn to sail Mighty Heron alone together—we’d seized upon the spirit bear (for me) and the ancient longhouse (for Jeff) as beacons to point ourselves and the boat toward. Without kids, friends, and family—without the structure of jobs out here—we needed a new kind of goal. For us it became about trying to see something meaningful and beautiful. And the farther we ventured during that trip-of-a-lifetime summer, the more grateful we grew for these rare wonders of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Kermode bears and silent longhouses, and all the other wild creatures we came to know along the way—humpback whales, fin whales, and orca whales; mysterious coastal wolves and curious sea otters; bald eagles and ravens and great blue herons with their stoic patience and capacious wings; pairs of pigeon guillemots with their bright red feet; schools of salmon jumping and big flocks of brilliant white terns floating, their wings flashing across the sea. All these things, plus giant kelp that grew an astonishing two feet a day, and some of the world’s biggest cedar trees, and entire universes of lichen and moss, thrived in our own stunningly wild and extremely hard to reach backyard—and all were remarkable. The farther we went the greater the distance grew between where we hoped we were going and all we’d left behind. And the sighting of these incredible places, along with the wolf, the whales, the wilderness, to my mind became centered on that one white bear.
A holdover from the last ice age, this subspecies of black bear inhabits only Princess Royal Island and a few surrounding islands and areas on the mainland. Its coat ranges from creamy white to a marmalade-caramel, but the bear is not an albino. Rather, scientists think this white phase of the black bear results from occasional manifestations of a double recessive gene and that it has an evolutionary advantage. (Providing camouflage against a cloudy sky when the bear pursues fish during late summer and fall salmon runs.) In the past decade the spirit bear has become a sort of “poster bear,” a symbol for saving the world’s last expanse of coastal temperate rainforest from logging and supertankers.
I thought about how time had dissolved while I watched that black bear from the kayak at the head of Kent Inlet. The past and the future, and all the weight bears carry—the weight of wilderness and wildness—had compressed into one clear, infinite moment. Everything else had fallen away, blown like scattering leaves.
* * *
In Whale Channel, a stretch of silver-gray water between Princess Royal and Gil
Island, we were suddenly surrounded by whales. Humpbacks all around! I scribbled in my sailing journal. We were both riveted by the massive shapes sliding up from the depths. They were so majestic, so other: the initial mist-drift of their spout, the slow-motion arch of each black back emerging from the water, and finally, the flip of the fluke, as individual as a fingerprint and graceful as a flag, before disappearing below.
But soon after this thrilling display, we reached the opening to Wright Sound, a complex starfish-shaped body of water that leads into six different channels, each stretching into a maze of intricate forested waterways. There was finally enough wind to put the sails up.
We raised the mainsail easily and flew over the late-afternoon seas on a beam reach. It was blowing fifteen to twenty knots, a strong northwesterly, serious business on a sled the size of Heron, her navy hull heeled over in the sparkling chop. Up went the small staysail. Easy. But when it was time to unfurl the big jib, Jeff was impatient and then furious when I hesitated—momentarily unsure about which line was the jib-furling line.
“Figure it out! You put it up!” he shouted.
Granted, I should have had it down by then. It was our second month on Heron, after all, but there was so little wind in these waters that we’d put up the jib only four or five times before, and the boys had been aboard on most of those occasions. Sam had been in charge of the jib furler. I stared at the web of lines and blocks and cleat—and froze.
“What do you need to do?” snapped Skipper Jeff, a rage brewing. “Figure it out!”
“I am!” I say.
“Well then, do it!”
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