SEA-SIGHT: DAY EIGHTEEN
northward the vancouver island coastline in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry\
after the monotony of yellow-golden foods we’re thrilled by the mediocre salads we have in port mcneill for breakfast, heaped high with the depressive mass-produced green of domestic lettuce. it’s about a two hour drive to port alice, a nowhere-town in the long, sparsely stranded necklace of nowhere towns we’ve populated. the remote and sentimental nature of the island rurality translates into a simple desire, beautiful for its bareness. springsteen playing, dirt-streaked windows, and a salt locked into the crevices of our bodies. all the world, it seems, in waiting.
in zeballos, the innkeeper had told L that port alice had once been so polluted by the paper mill operating there that boats had to wade through waist-high growths of flotsam across the water. yet when we arrive there is no such evidence of that time, which has receded now only into story. the town is eerily empty, and L and I have no luck finding a place to stay the night. we drive westward, stopping briefly at the bare-boned, concentrated force of the now derelict mill. the deep, rusting knots of steel shells, strange blossoming punctures between fabric-like walls and tanks, the dystopic discard of something enduring torn apart and drained of its previous rage. its reference to the past of labour seems melancholy now. the work that I’ve come to do, faced with the labour which manifests here in its desperate shell, seems vulgar. restless.
we turn back; having nowhere to sleep for the night, we say in port alice and wait for a call from the various bed and breakfasts we reached out to. on the side of the highway is concealed the light oasis of a tender sea. we take the intricate, unstructured path down to the rocks, and wade in.
the ocean tamed to bathwater, opalescent with sun and coerced in this secret consciousness of hills. it’s an absurd happiness to set one’s body floating in the well, with the blue that has no questions above and the blue of impossible, fragmented mysteries below. answers to the what-does-it-all-mean comes in these simple, discreet ways, wherein the mind feels infinite in this intersection of being all at once in the body, and also privy to something utterly sacred, numinous. though nothing much has happened; we are simply swimming, a seemingly meaningless digression off the road of all days to come. but I see in its far-off awayness the holding-close of this exact moment. that time itself will hold this day in complete suspension. to use as the earth uses rain.
after hours we head back to the only grocery store in the town’s centre, with plans to just pack a bunch of groceries in the trunk and sleep on the beach. but a rapid silence has swallowed the place, the insides of all the houses dim. after another couple of hours with no progress and no people around to speak of, we realise—power outage.
so we head to the next destination, port hardy, early. a slightly bigger town, we’re somewhat assured that amenities would be available. but the lack of power has clotted the whole island, and when we finally persuade ourselves up the seemingly haunted staircase in the contorted dark of the motel, we’re starving and poor with options.
I have a joint in my bag, and we get high and giggle and eat canned corn and watch the sun resplendently puts itself to rest in the salish sea, with no concern about its suddenly precious position as the only appearance of light. this unceasing rhythm of an indifferent earth. in my deep, speculating sleep I do not dream, as if the living day had already been beyond the borders of imagining, its tangible music, its dazzling sensualities, its enduring realness under the vague frequency of memory.
