SEA-SIGHT: DAY TWELVE
northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
we send the night back to the place it came, but it lingers in sparse shadows and rivulets of dimness. L and I make our way to botanical beach with the illusory palms of fog drawing its gestures over the sky, embalming everything in a thin sleet of obscurity. the sea here churns into a livid bath of textures and volumes, as if chasing the substances of its own being, as if unknowing as to what it should do with all these hands. the black stones that mosaic this ragged coast occasionally bore themselves from the flood, like evidences of wreckage. it is all so astoundingly otherworldly, as if we have unknowingly stumbled into some process of creation in its halfway—the uncertain point in which you are not sure if something is disappearing or reappearing, the hushed crowd of pines subsumed in mist, the land slick with water. what grows in between these gasps of pools is a world whose epochs are daily, as what these small swallows of land collects must always be given back.
we stand on stones that know nothing of history for they are history itself. the jagged aged black that folds to nothing but the unceasing pathways time burrows into its surface to make room for itself to go on. the small wild foliage is bent to submission but grows still, the shockingly florescent patches of grassy algae, the stubborn bushy tendrils of sorrel, horizontal landwork of spruce that does to the earth what it normally does to the skies.
and the sea is truly terrible. enthralled in its own violence, the cold unseeing depthless grey that courses with it the jade-green and heron-blue. slathering into pale-yellow foam that flirts up against the white stir it speaks with a million voices—L and I shout towards one another with the mere metres between us, and the fragments of sea that make it into the air merge with the words we speak to each other, consuming them in a great symphony. I know it is perhaps old and tiresome to speak to one’s tiny figure in the seamless infinite fabric of greater things, but to feel it, truly feel it, is a profundity that cannot be undermined with plenitude.
a force this great, one knows its arrival is from the other side of the world. (how does it start the sea has endless beginnings.)
after the temper we drive onwards the long, crescented roads towards port alberni, stopping midway at a sweet, wishbone-shaped cross of water called honeymoon bay to lower our warmed, sun-clouded bodies down to the freshwater. eating hot, stifled peanuts, I lose my head amidst the heat and the tangled words on the pages, and give up on reading for the moment, instead molding my skin against the commonly coloured pebbles, dressing my mind up in the ruffles of dazed, almost-sleep. the land holds us like the generous leaves of perennials, holds the few clinging specks of dew.
we stay the night in port alberni, a stunted, charmed town at the end of the alberni inlet, the longest inlet on the island at forty km, named after a spanish officer and originally the territory of the nuu-chah-nulth. these small communities on the island make their indiscrete shapes where the land allows: at the feet of mountains, at the ends of oceans. we watch the sun sleep slowly in to the ragged enormity of conifers on the peaks, casting us in its virtue of aged yellow, unripe peach yellow, and finally at its centre the cataclysmic yellow at the centre of hearths. something beautiful—behind us is the moon, clover white. both seem aligned in the invisible horizontal planes of the sky. they are speaking to one another. hung in the dusking pink of late sky, as her bolder counterpart bids her good night in a fleet of hurrying, acidic blush.
