33. Bella Bella to Port Hardy

Now he’s juggling again. I’ve noticed that he is picking it up quicker than me. Now, I’m not one to compete against my son, of course not. But I think I’ll go juggle a little.
Taking stock. My body: O.K., I guess. Fit for 70. There’s been some repairs along the way, mostly successful. My mind: forgetful, a long-time problem though I still can remember what happened yesterday and where I’ve parked my bicycle. I can still solve problems by sleeping on them. I’m somewhere between a whining old fart and an Elder. Take your pick.
Right now the sun is drying out the sand, causing what looks like steam to float in above the broad sandy beach. It’s incredible.
My upbringing: I was fortunate to have been brought up in a downwardly mobile middle-class family. I got away early and became frugal.
My ancestors: Scottish on my mother’s side: Buchanan. It has been said that the Scots aren’t the brightest of peoples, but they suffer well. I have tried to live up to that high ideal.
My income: semi-retired. High by 3rd world standards, modest in the western world. Adequate, for sure. I’ve already got my stuff. I own an expensive rain jacket. No medicines, no debt.
Ugh. When I re-read that I realized: false pride. I have a lot of debts: to society, for the comforts I take for granted, and to the planet. For all the burgers I used to eat, all the flights, the old cars. Our society has a very heavy footprint and I’ve been right in there.
Now the important part: Friends and family. My best male friend has taught me a little about jazz and a lot about friendship. We have different tastes. The only boat he’d consider getting on would be a cruise ship. There are a few others. Some have shared my love of coastal cruising. Dan, who arrived as a young teen and hung around. Now he’s a doting dad of 2 young girls. Feathercraft couldn’t have been successful without him. Some of the people I worked with for many years, including a couple of great dads and a remarkable woman who fled Vietnam during the war, was rescued off an oil drilling platform and made a wonderful life for herself and her family in Canada. Martin, who likes to fly fish, Shiro, Tak and others over in Japan where I have a special connection. A couple of guys from kindergarten and elementary school who I cycle and drink beer with. Some good friends shared with Theresa. I’ve been lucky.
My sisters. Three close siblings of alcoholic parents. We helped each other through it and continue to support each other through our successes and disappointments. “Many a promising life has been ruined by a happy childhood” (Robertson Davies). One, a documentary film maker and chronicler of people’s lives, the other a teacher-librarian, dancer, author, mother. Called the Driven Sisters by one of their exs. They taught me how to live with women, and love them, if not to understand them. Respect.
My violin-playing seaman son, Evan: bigger, stronger, faster than his old man. As a paddling partner, what’s not to like? And he brings me tea.
And then there’s my amazing wife. I should be so lucky. Organizing principle, artist, sweetheart. For the first time in this trip, I shaved today, sweetie. Theresa: “I salute you”.
 

June 3, 2018
Last night we celebrated our birthdays. I had brought along some single malt scotch. Father and son, on a big beach. We got a little drunk.
After our first night here, I went out to see who our neighbors are. Tracks of mink and otter, as expected, but also three deer — 2 adults and a fawn, which hardly left any impression in the sand at all. The deer hadn’t hung around and grazed on seaweed as they sometimes like to do; they had marched right on by.
It occurred to me that you don’t see many deer on these beaches, and the probable reason. These beaches are clogged with piles of logs. Cattle gates are very effective barriers for hoofed animals. Deer can’t climb over logs. For mink and otters, it’s no problem. During past visits here we’ve also seen wolves, big healthy ones. This would be a dangerous place for deer. Perhaps if cornered they would have to swim for it. I was once startled to see a couple of deer arrive here in the surf and then hoof it into the forest where there are no logs. They knew exactly where to go. But that was a rare event.
How many salmon streams have these logs destroyed? I’ve been coming to this beach since the 1980’s and to me they have always been here. That’s my baseline. While it is true that trees near the shore do occasionally fall onto the beach and get carried away, most of this is from the logging industry of the past. I wonder what this place looked like before industrial logging began, and how the streams were pathways into the forest for fish and other animals.
 

June 4, 2018
This trip has helped me put things in perspective, timewise. A recent World Wildlife Fund study indicated that by about 2050, due to acidification and rising ocean temperatures, all coral will be gone. That’s 25% of all animal life in the seas. A lot of the shellfish that you find along this coast will be corroded away too. In just over 30 years from now. 33 years ago, I was walking up those stairs on Egg Island that are now falling down. During the same time it took those stairs to deteriorate, corals will have corroded away. It’s too late to change that. With the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere and oceans, and global emissions still rising, those extinctions are already baked in. By then I’ll probably be long gone. I’m not sure I would want to still be here. Despite this, we are still hunting for more oil, gas and coal and still burning increasing amounts of it. It’s appalling.
The other thing of note is how lucky I am to have time and space to be stressed out about this. If you have to worry about what to eat next, or have a job, kids and a mortgage to pay, you really don’t have a lot of energy left over to think about the planet and future generations of people and other critters.
 

June 5, 2018 Shelter Bay 50.977, -127.46
Many years ago I read some works by a teacher and intellectual working out of Cuernavaca, Mexico. Ivan Illich wrote an interesting analogy about research and development. (I’m pretty sure I’ve got this right; we’ve been far off the grid on this trip). He said that it is like digging a hole. At first when things look promising there’s a lot of activity. Then maybe the mother lode is hit, and even more people join in excitedly. Great things are mined. But as they dig deeper there becomes less and less to find. Some people leave to start a hole elsewhere. The exodus increases the farther down they go until finally, at the bottom of the hole remain the experts. This is where the oil and gas people are starting to find themselves now. The coal experts are already there, looking up from the bottom of their hole. Sure, some of these people have, with great expense and manipulation of the media, managed to gain control of the White House and other seats of power, but theirs is a desperate, rear-guard action. Their time is almost up. How long it takes before they are forced out will have a direct effect on how much damage they inflict on our planet.
Coming in here was so easy. No ocean swell, no surf. We didn’t have to time wave sets, brace, and then jump out and grab our boats. We just stepped out. We are holed up here because the forecast on the VHF indicated a trough approaches with 35 to 40 knot winds.
There is a great camp in the forest. Just before you come in there is a sign: Caution-Cougar in Area. Below the heading sensible advice is given by the BC Conservation Officer Service about not running away, standing tall, defending yourself. The sign is old, probably from last summer, but I found some fresh tracks in the mud close by. These were from a bear, as it turned out, because it romped around beside our camp the next day.
 

June 7, 2018
Our only equipment failure was something I’ve always trusted to be most dependable. My deck compass didn’t actually break, its dome just fogged up inside so I couldn’t read it. Consequently, we overshot our planned campsite by a couple of nautical miles and decided, what the hell, we’ll go on to Hardy.
Our day was long and hard. Forecast was for 15 to 25 knot headwinds. It didn’t seem much in the morning, so we left. At first the winds were at the low end of the forecast, but they picked up. The last 8 or 9 were at the high end. 9 1/2 hours against headwinds, just 17 miles. Crawling or not making headway at all.
Towards the end I was wondering if I was doing serious damage to this old body, but all will recover. I started thinking about LeBron James. What strength, what skill, what determination to shepherd a mediocre team all the way to the NBA finals. There are lots of people doing amazing things, but he’s doing it on prime-time TV with millions looking on. “Look, he blocks a shot, runs end to end, bulldozes through the entire Golden State team, leaps right over Curry and throws it down.”
Meanwhile I pull on one side, pull on the other side, arms burning, pull, pull, get the job done. It’s hardly comparable and not at all significant, but it was fun thinking about.
Once we rounded Duval Point and were in sight of the pink hotel above the bus station that we thought we would be staying at, it was the thought of a warm shower, pub food and a bed that lured both of us to harbour.
The hotel turned out to be closed (it’s Hardy, after all) but there was another close by that was open. We were the only guests. We were on record as having stayed there 9 years ago. I hadn’t remembered this, but Evan did. Now this bus will take us all the way back to Victoria in the same time it took us to travel 17 nm. The driver, who seems like a terrific guy, just came on the intercom. The toilet is not functioning on this bus, he explained, “But don’t worry, this is northern Vancouver Island, there are lots of rocks and bushes to crouch behind.” (Note: sadly this bus service has since been discontinued. How are the locals going to get around?)
Early this morning I was walking around in front of our hotel with some of our leftover food in a bag carried over my shoulder. I met a guy on an electric cart. He asked me what I was doing, and I said that I was trying to get rid of some food and wondered if there was a food bank or somewhere I could ditch it. He said that I’d come to the right place, that he was on disability pension and was having a hard time making ends meet. I was planning on saving some of the freeze-dried rations, but decided, what the hell, I won’t miss them. I gave him everything, but the cabbage and he gave me his story.
Wayne, 62, was healthy until 4 years ago. He contracted a rare form of a disease called Sapho from a virus, which ate away at his spinal column. He said for a while he was a quadriplegic. He was treated with drugs including Vancomycin (which I thought was a last resort antibiotic — does it work against viruses, or maybe the virus also inhibits the immune system causing infection?)
After treatment he moved up here away from friends and family in the Cowichan-Comox area because, he said, it was quiet here. This surprised me considering we were having to shout over the music blaring from his cart. He could stand but not move much and his legs were like toothpicks. He was friendly, though, and appeared happy. It’s amazing how resilient a lot of people are.
When I went back to the hotel, I found the main door was locked and nobody around. (It’s Hardy, after all). I had to throw what was left of our cabbage against our window to raise Evan from his bed.
This has been a wonderful trip shared with Evan. Besides the bear we saw many sea otters, seals, a few whales, lots of eagles, ravens, other birds and determined growths of plants and trees. But there was also a shadow. It’s as if a shroud from Mordor has passed over the land. That shroud is the knowledge that the land and sea are in great danger and that future generations will be living in a world far less diverse and abundant. Corals, shellfish, and pteropods will be gone and so will many species of fish. It’s too late to change that. My generation will be vilified. We should have known better and done more. Sometimes I cry. Still, we have to do what we can to minimize the damage. If we change our ways some good can come out of all this.
There is a woman from Ontario on this bus who is studying to become an oceanographer. She’s on the fish boats. It’s her job to record catches, how they are caught, when and where. She has been living out of her backpack since January. She is young, has an open mind, is idealistic and likes adventure. She said that of the 30 who started her recent class, after their first fishing tour only 2 remained. Some get seasick; some don’t like the fishermen who, she says, are always grouchy unless they’ve just hauled in a good tote of fish. She seems fine with all that.
 

June 10, 2018 Back at home
The news: Golden State swept Cleveland in 4; Pope Francis lectured some oil execs and government people about energy, fossils and climate change (I doubt the faithful were listening); and the Government of Canada has formally committed to buying the Trans Mountain Pipeline for $4.5 billion plus be on the hook for construction costs of anywhere from

$7.4 billion to $12 billion.
For crass political reasons our PM is doubling down with our tax money on expanding by 60% the dirtiest and one of the most expensive oil plays on the planet and exposing our coast to potentially devastating oil pollution while signs everywhere point to the deepening climate crisis we are facing. Meanwhile some advanced countries, such as Germany, Scandinavia, New Zealand and Iceland are rapidly weaning themselves from fossils and are pointing a way to the future.
Imagine that if, instead of spending $12 billion on an unnecessary pipeline (most of the bitumen will still go to U.S. refineries) we invested in wind, solar and hydro power and built a smart grid of long-distance transmission lines to carry power across Canada and into the U.S. Canada has all the resources but lacks the vision to become a clean energy superpower. Do we have the capacity to create such a vision?