SEA-SIGHT: DAY THIRTEEN
northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
breakfast is omelettes and toast made by the a sweet man that runs the bed & breakfast, and after L spends a not insignificant amount of time petting the tired old dog sleeping in the corner of the dining room, we pile our suitcases into the car, then ourselves, then onward. the road to the small seaside village of bamfield is unpaved, gravel for over sixty km, and we’ve been told by everyone who knows to go slow.
most of the travellers we’ve encountered thus far are hiking the west coast trail, originally founded with the intention to help shipwrecked sailors find their way towards somewhere. the west coast of vancouver island was a graveyard of immense quantities, in which the sea wears the shattered remnants of boats like a strand of jewels along its throat. only what is drowned is entirely consumed, for the water is an everywhere thing, endlessly dissipating. to know this is to find that the past and present delineate in an odd discrepancy of purposes, survival and amusement. now people travel from afar, and pay, to walk these same paths.
the drive in is as tedious as predicted, and we jostle along in slow a slow progress as the dust thrown into the air by more terrain-familiar vehicles shade the gasping foliage in a fine coating of celadon grey. each time the stony cloud spits out from tires spinning into the distance, the rich embroidery of waters and forests recede into the background, and it seems more and more so that we are traversing some sparse, post-apocalyptic land, and the sea simply a very beautiful idea.
but we do arrive. passing by the indigenous town of anacla, we bypass the unwelcoming signs of the closed camping grounds to arrive at the gorgeous, spare stretch of pachena bay. we arrive at low tide, and the wild sheet of sand shakes out before us, littered with what the sea spits out for later—toothpicks of drift wood, broken mollusc shells, and silken jade-olive strands of kelp. in this wide display we are alone, and the midday gloom cracks into a glowing strip of genoa blue. I have been waiting to see the outbounding sea, delimited into the invisibility of horizon, and here, between the two jaws of the bay, the water keeps going. great bushes of needlegrass and foxtail prod up in the medial space between sand and forest, and the small green-yellow specks of trefoil sprawl in varying direction. the largeness of it is without expression, or perhaps is beyond expression, with all these names we assign the living landscape, there is not one that can speak to the way they all exist together, united in the vision like this.
bamfield is a town of maybe two hundred, if that. divided into east and west by an inlet, we catch a water taxi to the far side, where the sea is, at once there and before us. the small boat, driven by a round, laughing woman named tish and a round, laughing dog named domino, crosses the stilled, jewel-blue waters with the ease of ritual. we walk the dirt path into the beach, and are rewarded with a near-tropical scene of soft, unspooling sand, and soft waters that curl up at the ends to meet our bodies. L and I stay in the sea perhaps longer than we should, until the feeling starts tingling away in our fingertips, and still we are reluctant to leave this secluded, paradisiacal glamour in this perfect rendition of summer. the poems I write clatter with the toss of the wind, the brief and occasional trick of the sun amidst the clouds.
our hair dries with the crunch of salt, and we walk up to the north end of the small peninsula to aguilar point, the evening light dulled behind cotton sheets. the small islands rise up in the distance like dark drawings of primeval creatures, their curved backs glancing out of the silvery sea-gleam. we eat summer rolls on the low, wet stones as the gradual territories of night approach. I am thinking about the bones of this world, what holds it together, between the integrity of this land in physicality, and the hanging metaphysical nature of our presences upon it, telling and enacting our separate stories. wind, water, stone, and the fact that each is another and no other.
