SEA-SIGHT: DAY SIXTEEN
northward the vancouver island coastline in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
just over halfway along, and we’ve breached the section of coastline largely impassable for its fragmentary, scattered nature. from above you can see how the water strews these disparate, geometric islands like playthings. one imagines the breaking apart of the whole, how a passage forward through the interminable tunnels of time means a continual giving in, giving away.
we are driving all the way west again, to a diminutive village called gold river, once prosperous for industry and now largely a gateway for hikers to set off on the nootka trail. arrival sets us at the stoic facades of mountains, rendered watercolour by the various interruptions of light and distance. deep in these stray pockets of the earth we are living with a tranquil confrère of the wilder seas, ringed in at all its multiplying sides (can water have sides?), she merely glints passing silver, a winking knowing at her wilder capacities. from here the mountains look impassable, as the lonely individual perspective dilutes all the distinctions of range into the single sheet of seeing. yet a small boat screams across the fabric, and, dragging its white tail through some odd illusion, disappears. I want to spin, looking at this place, to let the eye scan horizontal, dizzy as cursive, around and around until the peaks scratch at the skies in furious motif, and the water melts into the brightness of blue.
I am cross-legged on the dock with a custom dream of questions. (liberty / and love, not truth) it strikes me that I am perhaps meant to write the history of these places, to place into my humble verse the massive totems of fact, to trace in concrete language the unfurl of the past as it alters form and becomes the future. this impulse to iterate the unimaginable seems easier here, where there rests something immune to change. by this I mean what I always mean, the shape of these things here, reflecting in themselves, without memory—the fingertip edges dipping into the water. bright, marshy green-growths draped like velvet upon it. the deafening shrill of summer heat, record-breaking this year.
the impossible feat of going on further west repeatedly stems us, so we head inland for the night. the startling insistence of the high temperatures scratch at us, the car moving through it like a stone, so we stop at the first creek we see—a shallow, delicate thing pouring its crystal over the round pebbles and through the intrepid firs. I lie in the shallow glitter of its edges, watching the candy-coloured sky and feeling the glacial streaks comb against my back like baptism. something heavenly in its streak, evidenced too, by the thin squares of light that fracture into waltz.
we settle at a nondescript fishing town called campbell river for the night—the cheapest motel booked online at the last minute, which turns out to be a sweet ramshackle of a lodge, riverside and overgrown with clovers, the doors barely closing all the way and the setting sun buttering the meandering water-flow. L and I lay in the long grasses, the lingering gold light with us. she speaks about rivers, of vietnam, and I’m reminded of all the mystical values these bodies of waters gain, as they move and take unknown shapes inside of us. I, too, grew up with the wandering thought of rivers inside me, its sacred sand-silt waters in occasional delight or rage. by it we knew the limits of our world, the sprawl of our home in its shape, at once intimate and out of touch.
