by Tim Cahill
The great cedar poles were silver-gray, and the faces carved into them—the bears and eagles and ravens and killer whales—grimaced in decay. They stared out to sea with rotting, ruined eyes.
The Haida caretaker was named Wanagun; his wife was Dja Da Unn Koo Uss, who invited us to call her Bernice. Wanagun wore gray jeans, a red sweatshirt, and sunglasses. He walked us among the poles, answering our eager questions. The totemic animals, for instance, weren’t gods or demons. The poles were built fronting long wooden houses, now gone, and the carved animals represented family crests, like a European coat of arms.
Every Haida, Wanagun explained, was either a member of the Raven family or the Eagle family. There was no family intramarriage: Ravens married Eagles; Eagles married Ravens. The children joined the mother’s family.
Wanagun was a Raven, and he had married Bernice, an Eagle, here, at Ninstints, in the space between the largest eagle totem and the largest raven.
That was after Wanagun, along with others, had removed over forty large spruce trees from the area. The spruce were choking out the totems, colonizing them with saplings. Wanagun figured that with the spruce gone, the totems caught more sun and wind, whose drying effects might preserve them, give them twenty more years of life.
Most of the poles, Wanagun said, were actually headstones, funerary poles. There were great men of the olden times still “buried” in the small carved boxes at the top. He pointed out a pole that had fallen and was propped up at about a 45-degree angle. The coffin lid had broken open. We could just barely make out the white rounded shape of a skull protruding from the dirt and the grasses that grew inside.
Wanagun, an articulate and informed man, was a storyteller. He told us about how the long wooden houses could only be entered by a single oval doorway. “You had to put one arm through, and then your head,” he explained. And once the villagers had killed a number of enemies simply by clubbing them over the head as they entered the longhouses. “The dead people thought they were going to a party,” Wanagun said. And then he laughed: “Hee-hee.”
And when new poles were put up in front of the homes of important families, slaves were sometimes stuffed in the hole first and crushed to death with several tons of magnificently carved cedar. “When they tried to get out,” Wanagun said, “we poked them with sharp sticks. Hee-hee.”
And then there was a story about a massacre. The only survivor was a Haida boy so young that he couldn’t say which coastal tribe had attacked the village. So the Haida had simply paddled up and down the coast from Alaska to Vancouver killing everyone, hee-hee. Even today, Wanagun said, some coastal chiefs refuse to meet with the killer Haida.
Another party of visitors arrived on a chartered boat, and Wanagun met them at the shore. We decided to take a walk.
Our party moved silently through mist, with the poles towering overhead. We followed a trail to the west through a tunnel of giant spruce. The ground was a series of mossy hummocks.
The trail led through old growth forest and emptied out onto a gravel-and-cobblestone beach. The ocean was misty gray, and we could see no other islands in the distance. Sea grass at the edge of the beach was covered over in dew, and we kicked holes in the mist as we walked. The trail rose through a stand of spruce, including a few giant cedars, then wound its way through a narrow rock canyon whose walls were covered over in lichen and moss.
The walls rose above us sixty and eighty feet, and they led us, willy-nilly, into a dead end, a great rounded horseshoe of stone. We found ourselves staring into two caves at the base of the rock wall. Both were shaped like an upside-down V. The rock walls on either side were festooned with woody roots snaking down from the spruce that grew at the lip of the cliffs, eighty feet above. These immense roots wound down over the irregularities of the rocks like great woody snakes, some of them as big around as a fifty-five-gallon drum.
There was a rope stretched across the mouth of the caves. We knew from Wanagun that the main cave “was where we used to burn our bodies.” I hadn’t been there to hear that particular statement, though I suspect it might be more accurately transcribed as “burn our bodies, hee-hee.”
It was dark in the shadows of the rock walls, and the lazy, drifting mist took on a greenish hint of the forest above. We stood at the rope, and the quality of the light changed as a drizzling rain began to fall. I flicked on a flashlight and directed the beam into the maw of the central cave. There was a momentary backscatter of light, silver bright in the gently falling rain, and then we could see into the cave, which had been blackened by the smoke of innumerable fires. There were ashes scattered across the floor.
Presently, the rain let up and we could see a bit more clearly. In the center of the opening was a large boulder, shaped a bit like a pyramid, and certain projections on the rock gave it the look of a face. The sun was higher now, the sky had cleared a bit, and shafts of sunlight poured down through the trees.
The face—we decided, from our position behind the rope—was natural, not man-made. Still, it bore an uncomfortable resemblance to tikis I’d seen in the gloomy banyan forests of the South Pacific. It was eerie, and just vaguely menacing.
“I thought they buried people in those boxes on the tops of the poles,” someone said.
A theory was advanced that the ancient Haida burned the bodies first, for sanitary purposes.
“Not enough poles to bury everyone,” I offered. “Ten thousand years of Haida occupation? The whole island would be nothing but a stand of funerary poles.”
The more satisfactory explanation was that ordinary people were cremated and that important people, chiefs, were buried on the funerary poles.
We contemplated these theories for a while, in the gloom, with the tree roots snaking down like giant arthritic hands and the stone face glaring out at us from the ashes.
This was just real damn spooky, and I’m obliged to report that we began throwing pinecones at one another; throwing pinecones and laughing out of sheer nervousness. Whistling past the graveyard.
This was wrong. We knew it. All at once we knew it. There was another long silence.
But maybe, I thought, it wasn’t entirely incorrect behavior. Perhaps we had absorbed a bit of the traditional Haida outlook on life. And death. Hee-hee.
I recalled a Haida story recounted in an ethnography written by John Swanton in 1909, a book Wanagun himself used as a reference. It was a story about a bunch of naughty dead people who resided in the funerary poles that fronted a certain village. The village of living people decided to spend a day and night hunting. Every living soul left on the trip, which left the dead free to frolic. Tired of their confinement in boxes at the top of the poles, the dead all came down into one of the longhouses to dance and sing and do whatever it is that skeletons do together when the living aren’t around to see. They had all night. The villagers wouldn’t be back until dawn.
As dawn approached, one of the honored dead stepped on a piece of salmon skin. It stuck to his bony foot. When he tried to pull it off, it stuck to his hand. A second corpse pulled the salmon skin off and, of course, it stuck to his hand. Time was running out for the dead. Dawn was fast approaching now, but no one could shake the flypaper salmon skin. The skeletons were flailing about in a mad dance of angry frustration, moving faster and even faster …
The story now shifts to the point of view of the village people returning home in the full light of dawn. They enter the longhouse to encounter an enormous pile of disjointed bones. One envisions them standing there, puzzled beyond earthly perception, thinking, Hee-hee?
It’s a traditional story, oft told in the olden days, and indicative of the Haida people’s sly sense of humor. The skeletons and the salmon skin: It’s the Keystone Kops, with corpses.
The Haida, I fervently hoped, might be inclined to forgive our brief bout of pinecone dodgeball. They might even have approved.
It was just after that visit that I was medevacked out. After a day of recuperation in a motel, I found myself well eno
ugh to work out of the one local bar in Queen Charlotte City. I met a young woman who dressed like a logger and talked like a hippie. She lived with her husband and child in a log cabin near Port Clemens, about an hour and a half’s drive north. She had no running water or electricity, but she pitied folks who had to live all packed together like ants in places like Prince Rupert. It was pouring down rain outside, and she’d just spent three hours hitchhiking into town. A touring ballet company was performing at the community hall.
“You spent three hours in the rain,” I asked, “for a ballet?”
“Probably three hours back as well,” she said.
A young man in a threadbare sweater told me that there was a cosmic fusion in process here on the island of Morocco. The Haida barmaid passed by and winked. She meant to say, “This is a local fellow and we tolerate him here.”
The young woman said she was in favor of calling the islands Haida Gwaii.
A mildly intoxicated white carpenter sat down and demanded to know “whoever said the Haida had no sense of humor?”
I told him that no one had ever said that, as far as I knew. And then the carpenter told me a story.
It seems that several years ago, one of the greatest of all Haida artists carved a magnificent canoe, to be displayed in a great museum. The canoe was very big, and it was covered over in exquisitely carved totemic symbols: the raven and the eagle and beaver and bear and killer whale.
The canoe had to be lowered onto its stand with a large crane, and the young operator, a white man, worked hard, arranging everything just so, because the Haida artist had a specific idea of exactly where this monumental work of art should be, how it should be placed. Important stuff, the crane operator decided, and imagined there might be some religious symbolism at work that he didn’t understand. The artist would look away, ponder some internal problem, then gesture minimally: Turn it just a bit to the east. They worked together in this way for hours.
Later, when the work was done, and the canoe finally placed to the artist’s satisfaction, the young crane operator was invited to have a drink with the Haida carver. They spoke for some time. The artist was, as many Haida are, politically active. He was angry at the United States at the moment: Some decision by the president of that country that would, indirectly, affect the artist and the forest that he loved.
Finally, the crane operator asked the question that had been burning inside of him for the last few hours. The artist should forgive him, he said, but he saw very little difference in the various placements of the canoe. Why had it been set just so on its stand?
“On the canoe,” the carver explained, “there is a bear.”
“I saw it,” the crane operator said.
“Look closely,” the artist said. “The bear’s asshole?”
“Yeah?”
“It points toward the White House.”
I hobbled back to my motel room, appreciating the Queen Charlotte Islands in general and the Haida people—hee-hee—in particular. My companions had another three days of kayaking left, and me, I had a long, lonely wait, and a bunch of packaged soup to eat. It had cost a fortune to be airlifted out of the place of wonder, and that alone, I suppose, qualifies my fall as a pretty good out-of-pocket adventure.
The Tsunami Rangers
Ugly shoulder pads.
Eric Soares was putting them on over standard cold-water kayaking gear: a wet-suit bottom and a thick nylon-pile paddling sweater under a dry suit top. The pads had come out of the box white—they were standard hockey-style shoulder pads—but Soares had painted them a gray-black to blend in against the surging sea and soaring rock of the Northern California Pacific headlands. White pads were just a lot of trouble. They stood out. Coast Guard patrols spotted them in that area where the sea batters the land. It is reasonable to assume—as the Coast Guard does—that a man paddling a small kayak through fifty-foot spumes of spray exploding off immovable rock is a man about to die.
So Soares camouflaged the pads to prevent rescue attempts.
He wanted to put himself in precisely those areas where small boats disintegrate, where men are picked up by the sea and hurled into jagged rocks, where bad timing and inferior equipment are worth a man’s life.
Best to be prepared in such an environment.
In addition to the shoulder pads, Soares wore a motocross chest-and-back protector made from foam and plastic, a hockey helmet, a motorcyclist’s face mask, a football receiver’s gloves, elbow pads, and knee pads. He looked like something out of an Australian postapocalyptic road movie: Wave Warrior; Robo Kayaker.
There was a distant winter storm pushing 12-foot waves into Rodeo Beach, on the Marin headlands, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. A man in an ordinary kayak had attempted the surf just five minutes ago. His boat suffered several hundred dollars’ worth of damage when the first wave fell on it. It had lasted thirty seconds.
Soares’s boat was a specially designed kayak, the Tsunami X-1 “Rocket Boat.” Made of Kevlar, the same lightweight laminate used as armor in tanks, the boat was literally bullet-proof.
Soares settled into the X-1, buckled his seat belt, and began paddling out into the great, pounding Pacific Ocean. He was about to demonstrate the Wave Warrior’s first skill: breaking the wave barrier.
The waves came in sets, five or six 8-footers followed by one great hulking 12-footer rolling in like a dream of death. Soares waited for the big one, the monster, and when he made his move, he had just four seconds to hit it right.
There was an offshore wind and it pushed against the oncoming wave, holding it upright, giving it a terrifying verticality. Soares, paddling hard, could feel the wind at his back driving him forward. The wave began to curl over at the top. Soares was pushing into the base of the wave, where the wind compressed against vertical water, and the sound was a rising howl. Propelled by his own power and the wind, Soares and the X-1 were hurled up the wall of water.
Too little momentum here, and everything goes cartwheeling over backward. And, oh, that moment when inertia dies and the boat begins its slow topsy tilt: the sensation like a sudden punch to the stomach, the knowledge of impending and total chaos …
… but the inertia was there. The wave itself was pulling shore-side water to its crest—there was a strange growl in the belly of the wave, a deep sucking howl, as of a waterfall running in reverse—and Soares was riding the power of all this upwelling water. He was “going up the falls,” but the wave had already formed a tube that curled over his head. It was a ceiling of moving water suspended by its own momentum for the barest instant.
And there it was: Soares could see a thin spot, very bright, at the place where the wave had begun to curl. The lip of the wave was only a foot thick, and Soares aimed the bow of his kayak into it, straight up into the sun, so that he “punched through the light,” through the very wave itself. The X-1 burst onto the other side of the wave, which moved out from under the boat so that Soares and his boat hung motionless ten feet in the air. Below him was a rainbow falling with the spray that the wind had driven back off the crest of the wave. There was a silence, and then—kaboom—like nearby thunder, the wave broke. And Soares rode a rainbow to the surface of the sea.
“You have to break the wave barrier in order to get out into the rock gardens,” Soares told me. Which is to say you need to be very skillful in order to be able to get out through the surf and into those areas where a kayaker risks being crushed by water against rock.
Dr. Eric Soares is an associate professor at the California State University in Hayward, where he teaches marketing research, among other subjects. He is also a Tsunami Ranger. The Rangers are a club of about a dozen men and women who avidly don Wave Warrior gear and paddle out in bullet-proof kayaks to battle the Pacific Ocean at the point of its fullest fury.
It would seem to be a double life. On the one hand, Soares is writing a book entitled Cost-Effective Marketing Research, aimed at corporate marketing departments and entrepreneurs. “The premise of t
he book,” Soares explains, “is that every company needs marketing research: I try to tell them how they can get relevant research at a price they can afford.” The book is full of marketing pros and cons, ideas about controlled experimentation, random populations, control groups, and valid measuring instruments. These concepts, among others, are the meat of his university lectures. They are also the essence of his small marketing-consultation business.
On the other hand, the forty-something professor writes about his kayaking avocation in such publications as Paddlers’ News Bulletin, wherein he sounds anything but professorial: “ … you had to make a lot of ninja strokes to stay in the safety zone, or blow it and get creamed.”
The way Soares sees it, his life fits together quite neatly, “sorta.” He grew up on a cattle ranch near Redding, California, where he recalls making the business of irrigation an adventure. “I’d have to open the flumes at the main canal,” he said. Then he was supposed to walk along the bank and open the rest of the flumes that diverted the water onto the ranch. Soares found it faster and more exciting to get right in the irrigation ditches and ride the floodwaters down to the next flume.
He had learned to swim at five. “I loved ice cream, and one day my dad spent a few hours tossing coins into the deep end of the local pool. I learned to open my eyes under water, hold my breath, and I got a lot of ice cream later. I guess I associated certain capitalistic impulses with some amount of risk from an early age.”
Those capitalistic impulses drove Soares into the study of business and economics. His natural affinity for water kept him on the rivers—swimming, canoeing and, later, kayaking. In 1980, Soares found himself at the University of California in Santa Barbara studying for his Ph.D. He owned a kayak, but there were no rivers nearby—just the ocean, the pounding waves, and a lot of surfers. So Eric Soares, incipient Ph.D., took his kayak out into the ocean and learned the local surf dialect: He went far rad with the thumpers and dumpers when things got gnarly.