SEA-SIGHT: DAY FOURTEEN
northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
we wake up in the flurry of mid-travel impetuosity, and take once again to the gravel road out of bamfield. (yesterday someone had said that the road would be fixed up soon, but I get the feeling that this is one of those places where the same piece of news hangs around for years and years, oddly defiant of time.) L and I eat eggs on english muffins and dwell on the sweet, unostentatious charm of this place—its fat, happy dogs and sun-bronzed people who drift to their dockside homes in speedboats.
once we get on the highway the road is blocked due to blasting. in a long dangling thread of cars over this curlicue mountain highway, we spread a blanket on the side of the highway with our respective reading materials. a mother with her toddlers look for salmonberries, a young surf couple smokes cigarettes in the long grass, some pull out camp chairs and doze in the afternoon glare, and the toasty green scent of summer foliage hangs over all of us like a canopy, enfolding us in its fruit-and-stone perfume. these moments come when many people, moving in the same direction, are all forced to stop and stay in the median, waiting territories awhile, and in them you can see their variant natures, wary patience to a simmering glower. strangers thrown into containment, sharing a cautious, distant affinity.
by the time we get to ucluelet it is already late in the afternoon, so we head to the amphitrite lighthouse at the coastal south end of the wild pacific trail, to work our way (against the rules) northward. the sea meets our arrival in a slate-grey veneer, laced at its edges with the tippings of fog, and the sky a questioning colour of mild, cotton-stifled blue. the rocks are the now-familiar salt-sheening basalt, tangled with the many brown hands of kelp. I love the waters like this, how it stands to fill the air, thrashing the whitewashed day. we stay on the path a little while before wandering down to step amongst the torn edges. the forms of pines are mutating into nothing as the mist falls and consumes. certain scenes fall into the ways of still life, wherein the blurring static of action ceases, and you are left awhile with the stirring portrait of the landscape at its deepest point of thinking. one thinks of painters with their sea-facing easel, the canvas delicate with possibility. it is the mind that holds the ever-transforming vision of things motionless for a duration, just long enough to capture something of its essence. the sea does not still for any force, and that is what makes it such a wonder to draw. she has already evaded you, so you must study your feeling of it, the sense of you alone, and in this way, when you paint the sea, you are painting yourself. (cézanne: painting from nature is not copying the object. it is realizing one’s sensations.)
the sun carves a single blue eye in the obscuration. it shines down at us in minor key. a pinpoint.
all along the pathway the sea stays the same, so one sees its character only in contrast with the land, its triangulations and formations initiating the sea’s certain, mercurial moods. the walk dips vertically so sometimes we are close enough to hear the sea’s whisper as a roar, and sometimes its roar as a whisper. the salt-rich soil sustains its greenery well so there is plenty of it, and as our footsteps trace the cursive way I feel as though we are moving in tides and waves, as certain forces have always intended.
the fog drenches heavier and heavier in a stunning melange of trascolora and storm-passage. I read its gentility as a sign of good faith that we are one with its magic, and not a victim of it. when one faces the sea there is always an out there. and it is that somber place that pulls out of you the most ancient and trembling fears. it is good to have both feet in this fecund ground, and to be looking outwards, at out there.
L has a pure, ringing love for the living marine creatures she sees in the pools that the rocks have collected. I like being in the presence of wonder, even when I don’t share it. wonder in itself is the most poetic feeling. we find many moonsnail shells (some gleaming oily rainbows, some faded in windy lilac) and soft, marble-white tops, and place them on a large rock surface where the many before us placed their little discoveries. even an anonymous evidence of presence is still something that the world carries, and this is one of the many ways we have found to stay alive.
a quick dinner and a check-in later, we head out to watch the sunset at the uncomfortably unpoetically named big beach. the town is settled in its warm, marine musk and remains quiet as we walk through it. though on many of the coastlines we have walked, we’ve been alone, we find ourselves in sparse but notably more company as the fire in the sky recedes in a trail of wispy and wavering phrase, coral and pear and cornflower colour. a private resort, built at the end of a bluff, breaks the scene and intercepts the sun at its setting point, but the sky is open and awash with its hues. I step to the very end of the stones to write, and a sudden wave slams against the rocks and coats me in its spray, the eager good morning of a child. stunned a moment, I feel the salt makes its way to my hair and skin, taking refuge in the warmness of my body.
I suddenly catch a glimpse of the moon on our walk back, nearly full, a gleaming white disc hung very low. this beauty, I can see how we revere it so, because it calmly disdains / to destroy us.
