SEA-SIGHT: DAY SEVENTEEN
northward the vancouver island coastline in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
cubes of honeydew and cantaloupe, yellow-desert of our little car caked in dust, highway nineteen, and over a thousand kilometres on the odometer. at the small divot of the island’s shattered wield is a tiny cluster of buildings called fair harbour. from there I am hoping to reach kyuquot, unincorporated territory at the western edge. having made several phone calls to the harbour with not much optimism, we head there anyway.
I head into the small shop heading the dock when we arrive, and the woman says that there are boats going to kyuquot, but not many, and not at the moment. the coastal inlets cross their innumerable arms, a complex congregation of water-occurrences, land-occurrences. we wait around for some time while she makes phone calls to boating locals on our behalf. after a string of unsuccessful calls, I retreat to a carved out campground to carve out some primary evidence of a poem from this pleat of mountains.
I’ve largely proceeded along this journey with this immense, breathlessly hopefulness that if I were meant to see something, I would see it. if there was a place that held in its tumbling presence a poem, I would be able to be there. that there was enough of the world as material, that it—like poems—does not come into the realm of noticing vision if the sublimities within were not accessible. to put oneself at the edges of fate. it is a tenet to which all artists (those who pull things from nothing!) must subscribe. the smudge of a presence upon the infinite canvas.
so it is that leo shows up, a brightly smiling, round vision of a man, hurt in one eye. he’ll take us there, he says, to open waters. where there is nothing between the shore and the horizon, I say. yes, he says, nothing between the shore and the horizon.
the wide planks of the boat exhilarates with its splitting of the sea, as we carve wide swathes in the abstract figures that denote here to there. L and I stand at the head and the wind pulls at us, fluttering. the sage jade of sea, the islands which divulge their hallucinatory largesse. all at once is the secret cleanness of having come somewhere untouched, these coarse blocks of land which know age as this slow, mediative thing. tattered feel of freedom which stands taunt like a flag, an impossibly simple joy.
leo drags the boat to a gradual hum, and points out the division of kyuquot’s duality. that’s our land, he says, gesturing to the right. then, pointing at the left, that’s walters island. on the far side there’s a beach, I’ll drop you off there. then he paints this staggered coastline with a vision of his life—the building that had been a school, the hospital, the houses, his shop. was this place very different before? I ask. yes, he says. the sustaining fishing habits and industry here has largely faltered, leaving many of its residents jobless. the otters ate everything, he tells us with a reluctant grin. now, various outside entities own sporadic parcels on this land, including the small parcels of summer homes on walters, the docks of which leo lets us down.
the single path that cuts through the balmy greenery of the island is laughingly narrow, patted in dirt and submerged in wildflowers, irrationally growing ferns, and the cushiony sponge of forest detritus. the few houses betray the evidence of children, and abandoned structures gape in the late afternoon, scrawled with the snarl of careless drawings. we eat hurriedly at the only restaurant (a luxury of four menu items and open until seven) before navigating our forested way to the sea on the other side. cross left at the fork when you hit a fallen tree as tall as you, a man tells me. after a wind of a few simple minutes we come to the shore, a incredibly lovely standstill of shard-stone, trembling waters, and a horizon that pieces itself together through a morse code of diligent rocks. attached to a bowing fir is a driftwood swing. happily I lose time here, throwing the precious minutes into the gasping reservoir, and measuring the black ink against the black earth.
leo comes and finds us so he can take us back to the harbour before dark; there are no places to stay the night (the only two temporary lodgings being condemned for some unknown reason). we pile into a smaller speedboat, and I sit beside leo to listen. kyuquot, as he explains to us, means place of many winds in his language. his eyes know these islands with expert discern, and he relays their names to us, this impossible knowledge of what looks to me like identical risings of forest. it’s all home to him. there’s a beaming pride in him as he tells us about the journeys he takes on his boats, the people he has met as navigator of these seas. the sense of being, as the breath of a small wind that ruffles the pages of another’s life… I am thinking about this as I listen to leo, who is probably now, as you read this, coursing through the constellation of kyuquot sound, bird-like boat with white wings. the silhouette of land stark in the knowledge of the mind, which stitches the body to the place in an unmistakable sense of belonging. this coastline dense with claims of ownership, and us in the small grace of a metal boat in the aftermath of so many shifting cruelties.
he drops us off at the harbour, just as a young man comes half-running along the hill. uncle, he calls out, can I get a ride? between the ideals of wildness and homeland there is a contract of impossible postulations—one cannot sense the sensitivities of transition, from one to the other. the simple weaponization of possession and its incremental brutalities. time doesn’t pass. time builds, jake skeets said. these worlds built with time and language are an act against conquest. I have never called this place home, but my story rests upon this surface. the poet does everything within her power to give meaning to the word here.
the drive to zeballos, a small lakeside town in rugged disarray. we take some canned cocktails lakeside to watch the mountainous blue quiet cohere in the yellow consciousness of the night. lending the small muddles of painting to the landscape. the night, palpable, falls right into one’s open hands.
