by Tony Taylor
3
Going Back in Time
When I first came to the small village of Lake Cowichan forty years ago, all the important business was done at the pub. I was at the peak of my physical prowess and with my climbing ability could have easily got a job as a high-rigger, but I didn’t want to cut down trees. The locals couldn’t understand this. Most of the men who lived in Lake Cowichan assumed the trees were there, given to them by this benign land, to be cut down. Or the trees were regarded as things that got in the way and had to be removed. The loggers looked at me with mistrust. They were not used to strangers, especially those who could be rivals. Because of their hazardous work these big men banded together and although they came originally from many different nations they regarded people from outside the valley as foreigners. And foreigners were not welcome.
Most of the loggers thought anyone who endured the tortuous road from Duncan was a fool or a tax collector, so they ignored him. If he stayed he was a problem and problems often led to fights. Every Friday night the population gathered at the Riverside Inn but, although I went there a few times, it was not really my style. I was always an outsider; even in my hard mountaineering days, when people wanted to join me, I often preferred to climb alone. I drank alcohol only occasionally and when I visited the inn I felt like a teetotaller in an unknown country. Someone mixed me a drink of God knows what and I downed it to avoid giving offence. The locals then decided I was no threat, and one logger helpfully found me a place to live at the end of a small creek. I was told it was ‘out of town’ and perhaps they thought it was where I belonged. It was on the lonely North Arm of the giant lake at the mouth of a small westward running stream. The cabin had everything I wanted: running water, a beach and a view. The isolation suited me. I didn’t want a social life: I just wanted to look at the granite, fish a little and write things down.
Gradually the local people accepted me and it was then that I learned I was living in the old Meade place and that the nearby stream was called Meade’s Creek. Robert Meade was an Irish remittance man and a bit of a legend around the lake even though he had been dead for years. He came to the then unnamed creek a long time ago and lived in the cabin ‘like a Salish from Duncan,’ the locals told me, and propped up his life with alcohol. It was not of course put quite like that by these hard-drinking loggers, but it was clear from their attitude that, although they also drank heavily, especially on Friday nights, they despised people who could not handle the stuff. They definitely did not consider themselves drunks. Who built the cabin, or when it was built, they did not know. They never mentioned Doctor Stoker, but later, when I learned about him, I realised the cabin could well have been on the same piece of land as the doctor’s house and the two men could have had some connection.
I asked other questions about my predecessor, but it was not even known if Meade fished or not. I felt it was almost certain he did. Later on, other sources confirmed that he spent most of his remittance on booze and that he was found dead in his blankets one snowy winter. Apparently no smoke had been seen coming from his cabin for over three weeks so a search party came from Marble Bay, on the South Arm, over the lower part of Bald Mountain and found him frozen stiff. He obviously came from a family with money for two Hardy rods (one for trout and the other for salmon as was the fashion in those days) and a top quality English double-barrelled shotgun were found on pegs on the wall. A half-filled bottle of the best Scotch whisky, that had failed to keep him warm, was sitting on the table next to his bed. The searchers buried him in his orchard. The stone paid for by someone in England is now gone, or more likely never erected, but I have no doubt something of him is still there. No one, even a dissolute remittance man, could live in such a beautiful place without leaving a lot of good behind.
When I came to the lonely cabin, back then, I was overwhelmed. The journey had been a long one. The narrow road twisted through the forest and it was dark because of the size of the trees. I was travelling through forests of some of the largest red cedars left on Earth. Near the lake, there was a wooden bridge over the creek, and a narrow trail led to a small open meadow with fruit trees. A family of raccoons was feeding on the fallen fruit and a black-tailed deer buck bounded away into the forest. The cabin had its back to the orchard and faced the lake. The large door at the front, big enough to drag a boat inside for the winter, had three steps. There was a bit of grass, some drift logs and then the beach. A huge bigleaf maple overhung the cabin and a giant cedar leaned out across the lake. The water was a steely blue, but it was changing colour fast because the sun was starting to go down. I watched the first of many sunsets. They continued to enthral me because no two were ever the same. I could not believe I had been so lucky to find such a beautiful place.
Inside there was a largish living room, a kitchen and a small bedroom at the back. A narrow staircase led to a simple loft. It is so many years now since I first went to live in the old place but I can still smell the cedar, hear the waves and feel the warmth of the afternoon sun. The lake stretched endlessly to the west and, although I had a small wood-and-canvas canoe and constantly explored and fished the lake and the rivers that entered it, I never reached the end. I could have done perhaps, but I remembered that a man’s reach should not exceed his grasp, so I always kept something in reserve.
The area was still wilderness; I was just another pioneer, even though old Meade was before me and before him there was possibly some wandering Iroquois trapper. The Iroquois, the most travelled of all the eastern tribes, went everywhere in Canada getting fur for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The important thing was that we all came and went without leaving much mark on the land.
My time at Meade’s cabin was very different from my time working in Australia. In Australia I walked for many kilometres to find unweathered rock so I could examine the minerals. I was forced to use explosives to get ‘fresh’ material, but here on this great Canadian batholith unweathered rock was everywhere and the land was so rich. Why, I wanted to know, was the acid granite of this great batholith so fertile whereas the almost identical granite in Australia needed so much help in getting things to grow?
I decided to start my examination of the granite in Canada by climbing the nearest mountain. Between the two arms, at the eastern end of the lake is the peninsula of Bald Mountain. The part of the mountain seen from the village was covered in trees, but the western cliffs were far too steep for trees to grow so, from the west, the mountain rose out of the lake as a bald mass of this acid rock.
I thought I would make my ascent the easy way first. Immediately to the left, or south, of the cabin, a trail crossed the creek and led to Marble Bay. A branch of this trail went to the right and led to the top of the mountain. It turned into a surprisingly good road, although I couldn’t imagine why; clearly it hadn’t been used for years. After a short time on this wider trail I realised it must have been made during the war, for the mountain summit was an excellent place to view the west.
I was about halfway up when I saw what I thought was a bear coming towards me in the middle of the road. It was not large and it seemed to walk with an exaggerated swagger. It snarled at me, and it was the wickedest snarl I had ever imagined. At that moment I realised two things: it was not going to get off the road for me, and it wasn’t a bear. It was a wolverine. The rolling, swaggering, pirate-like gait should have told me that immediately; but it was the first wolverine I had ever seen. I had finally met the dreaded carcajou, or glutton, the scourge of the north, hated by many and so fierce even grizzlies gave it room. I was carrying a small carbine, more as a companion than anything else, so I could have shot it easily. But I didn’t need its fine hide with its frost-resisting fur. I already had a good down jacket for winter, so I got off the road. It growled as it passed, gave me the most poisonous look I had ever seen and continued on its way.
Found right the way across the northern hemisphere, these creatures of legend we call wolverines have always been rare and are lonely, bad-tempered an
imals. They combine the abilities of the skunk and the bear (in fact, skunk-bear is an alternative name) and they always drive all other animals away from their kill. Powerfully built, they have been known to kill moose, bears and cougars, but they seem to be smart enough never to tangle with men. Perhaps this is because we also have been smart enough to never get in the way of their dinner. Wolverine territories cover hundreds of square kilometres. They are great travellers; they follow roughly circular routes that take several weeks. When they kill something as large as a caribou or elk they stay with it until they have eaten every scrap. That is why they are also called gluttons.
At the top of the mountain was a lookout tower, a kind of cabin attached to the top of four tall trees. A series of ladders led to a trapdoor in the floor and from inside the building I could see for miles, the whole length of the lake and beyond it towards the ocean. The steepness of the rock didn’t encourage growth and it was easy to see why the locals called it Bald Mountain. It was an honest name.
I spent some time at the top of the tower feeling something like an eagle. For a moment, I had the impression that I was gliding above the Earth and it was a very satisfying feeling. Anthropomorphism is usually not very smart, but to feel like another living being for a moment or two is not a bad idea. I thought back to the wolverine. I didn’t know why at the time, but instinctively I had done the right thing by letting it pass. I think I knew to step out of the body of a man for a few seconds. It is good sometimes not to be too human.
I woke the next morning still thinking about the wolverine. Wolverines are fine mountaineers, capable of traversing precipices, and they are probably the only animal that can catch and quickly kill the tough American mountain goats. These shaggy looking members of the antelope family are related to chamois and are not really goats. They cling to very steep rockfaces with their special sucker-like hooves, and the males fight by sticking their small sharp horns into each other. Accustomed to bleeding puncture wounds, they continue walking and eating after fighting, or even after being shot; they seem to be impossible to kill with bullets. Young goats are good to eat but hunters don’t bother them much, because even if a hunter manages to kill a goat he has to be a skilled rock climber in order to retrieve it. Possibly my wolverine had been checking the rockier part of the mountain hoping for goats.
I never heard a native name for Bald Mountain, but I am fairly certain it must have one because it was known to the Nitinat. These intrepid west coast people I met in my later exploring. They, I believe, were the original inhabitants of the whole of this ancient eastward flowing river system. However, they told me they never travelled inland. They said the wild mountainous and forested country to the east was mesachie. This word meaning evil came from the Chinook jargon language, a pidgin mix of English and French created more than a century earlier and used by Catholic priests trying to introduce Christianity in the area.
What was clear to me, when I eventually met the Nitinat, was that they still lived in tune with nature. They connected the area to the east with a giant earthquake that had reversed much of the drainage a few hundred years earlier and enabled the Cowichan River to ‘capture’ the westward flowing water of the lake. Perhaps the earthquake is what they were referring to when they said the east was evil.
The white man’s modern maps name a lesser peak to the south as Mesachie. My theory is the newcomers got it mixed up and the Nitinat were too polite to contradict them. This much smaller mountain is beside a small but very deep lake.
The coastal tribes also used the word skookum a lot to describe the place; this is the Chinook word used to describe anything that is big and strong. These natives chose to live by the skookum-chuck which supplied almost everything they needed. As chuck is water skookum-chuck means of course the powerful sea. Their view may have changed now, but at the time I knew them it was this: when everything that is needed is either in the sea or on one’s doorstep, why bother to go inland?
As for me: I wanted to know why this land was so rich. I knew from my experience in Australia that soils derived from granite were so acidic that very little could actually be grown in them. However, in this new land there was scarcely any room to move in some places. The bush was thick with countless different types of berries all of which seemed to be good to eat. In other places the trees were so big one could walk for hours on the clear forest floor, as there was not enough light for the smaller bushes to grow. The forests were full of game—deer and elk—and many large predators like wolves, lynx, cougars and bears. Most impressive of all, the rivers were full of fish, including six species of salmon and several different kinds of char and trout. It was like Paradise. Why was this land so bountiful when the chemical composition of the granite on the west coast of Canada was virtually the same as the granite in Australia?
Food was everywhere in the great forest and most local people regarded it as everlasting. At the same time logging was booming, and it was clear in many parts of the valley things were beginning to change. It was also obvious that the ongoing destruction of this great natural beauty was unsustainable.
The men who understood the situation best were the fallers—the men who cut the trees. I remember talking to Swanson the giant Swede who cut down the biggest trees of all. He was lifting the back of my truck out of the ditch it had slid into moments before. He told me sometimes he couldn’t bear to think about the way he earned his living and I was staggered to see a tear appear in the corner of his eye. But then he shrugged his huge shoulders and said that every time a logger made a mistake and was killed, two more jumped up to take his place. He would have to go on because he had a family to feed.
I had never seen such trees. It was not only the greatest stand of red cedar anywhere, but there were also belts of giant Douglas firs and huge spruce trees just to the west. These different biomes all ran in a north-westerly direction roughly parallel to the west coast. I learned that the biomass on the batholith was the largest on Earth, ten times the mass of the Amazon rainforest. It seemed strange at first but then I remembered from my earlier training that although tropical biomasses have more species evolving—places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon are incredibly rich in numbers of species—they do not have the mass. Huge masses of life are commoner in colder places like the Grand Banks in the Atlantic and here on the Coast Range Batholith.
The trees, of course, appeared to form the largest part of the mass. I measured a freshly cut spruce log soon after I arrived. The lower part of the tree was too big to move. It was seven metres in diameter, the size of one end of a singles tennis court or a third of the length of a cricket pitch. Trees like that store more carbon than thousands of modern consumers could release in a lifetime. Douglas firs are equally huge; one of these can provide enough wood to build more than a hundred houses.
The destruction that was happening in this one small valley was feeding a boom in construction in California. This state, with a population twice that of Australia and much greater than that of Canada, was using everything that the northern part of the great batholith could supply. Politicians, of course, thought this was wonderful for the economy of the province but, like all their kind, they were selling our assets without any thought of the future. The Americans were buying the beautiful Canadian trees for the same price as people paid for newsprint elsewhere. The economy seemed insane to me, for I believed having a simple thing like a knife in one’s pocket was far more valuable than money.
Perhaps the largest part of the batholith’s great biomass came in from the ‘salt-chuck’, the Pacific Ocean, every year. Flowing off the great batholith are thousands of rivers, so many in fact that the top layer of the ocean in that part of the world is fresh enough to drink. You have to go down twenty metres in some places to find the salt.
Moving into this fresh water in the ocean were countless billions of salmon smelling their way home from places as far away as the sea around Japan. A fish’s brain is Y-shaped with the tiny thinking part at the junction
of the Y and two huge O-shaped olfactory organs at the end of the two arms which are directly connected to the nostrils. Using this unique smelling apparatus, the salmon does a complex chemical analysis of the free molecules in fresh water and detects the drops that have come from its home river. They then smell their way back to the very pool in which they were born. The fish fertilise and bury their eggs in the same gravel they hatched in, and then they die. The Pacific salmon is the only creature that does this. Biologists consider this method of reproduction much more advanced and efficient than the repeated spawning of its ancestor the steelhead and its cousin the Atlantic salmon.
From the beginning of my sojourn in Meade’s cabin I sensed there was some connection between this process and the immensity and the fertility of the great Canadian forests, but it took me a long time, and a lot of fishing, before I began to understand what was going on.
The Nitinat and other original inhabitants of the British Columbia coast, impressed by the size of everything, called it the Great Land. They came from Asia thousands of years earlier and would never have seen so many huge trees, large animals, like the coastal brown bears that stand about two and a half metres tall, and such huge runs of giant fish. When they named it they meant the whole coastal strip of the great batholith, but today the Americans have stolen the name and use it to describe just the part in Alaska.
It was the waters of the Cowichan, more than any of the rivers I had ever fished, or the mountains I had climbed, that helped show me the way. A great forest always does that. It becomes clear to all who enter it that nature knows best. I had landed in another world and I no longer had access to the latest tools of a university laboratory. It was difficult to get any of the measurements I thought of as facts. In wild places it always is like that. No person who lives in the bush for any length of time bothers to measure the amount of carbon locked up in a tree. They either admire it or chop it down. Yet men who work with their hands are not ignorant fools. The two years I spent on the Cowichan in the great forest of the west showed me that the loggers were honest and thoughtful men. The people with power who paid them, and lived far away, were the real villains. They were the men who blurred the truth. Most of the time what loggers said was closer to reality.