Canoe Cedar

Canoe Cedar

Trying to beat the black-fathomed water’s afternoon chop, our group waterbugged the sea kayaks across Esperanza Inlet, a mile-wide fjord fingered into the remote serrated west coast of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. Flanked by misty, beetled summits shouldering an unbroken fleece of greenery that plunged straight to the tide line, we paddled a temperate coastal rain forest of coniferous trees, their canopies supporting wind-strewn worlds of lichens and mosses.

Landing at Nootka Island’s Garden Point, our destination for the day, we beachcombed while guides Georgia and Nick cooked dinner. Accompanied by my wife, Sally, and our tour companions Sarah and Isabelle, I threaded my way around sun-bleached driftwood logs the size of Corinthian columns and scattered like jackstraws at the high tide line. Fruit Loop-colored starfish clustered in basaltic tidal pools. A raven croaked high above. Loons quavered and dove for fish.

Then Isabelle started to pogo, pointing and exclaiming in her Zürich German accent—“A vhale! A vhale!” There it was, a half-mile out in the inlet, lifting deeply notched flukes and slapping them—Boom-phfff!—back down on the water. We caught a glimpse of a sluicing dorsal ridge before it disappeared around the next point. A migrating gray whale, we figured out later, sounding the waters.

Pitching camp, we placed our tent beneath the furrowed flutes of a coast Douglas-fir and beside a fallen western redcedar. Also known as canoe cedar—First Nations tribes created ornately carved seafaring canoes from whole trees—this species can remain on the forest floor for a century or more. This immense conifer was a study in deferred decay. Mounded with mosses and mini-thickets of salal bushes, it nursed a Christmas tree-sized Sitka spruce draped with beards of gray-green lichen.

Early the next morning before even a hint of dawn, I heard the whale spout—a leviathan’s matter-of-fact snort—as it cruised again through the inlet. In the dead air between the tent and the canoe cedar it sounded like it was right over my shoulder.

Midway through the trip, Georgia, a matter-of-fact English expat, asked us: “So—how are your dreams?” An old hand, she already knew the answer. “They’re more vivid, right?”

I wish I could say that I dreamt of Nuu-chah-nulth whaling parties paddling raven-prowed redcedar canoes out from Nootka Island to the Japan Current’s perpetual gyre, armed only with bone-tipped harpoons, sealskin floats, and a chanted whale song. But no, the dreams arrived in the usual mishmash of the mundane and the obscure.

These dreams had a thrumming, roiling quality driven by the all-encompassing immensity of land and sea. They rolled in like swells from a Pacific gale three days past. They bobbed and whirled like an old growth Douglas-fir log tumbling end over end in the open ocean. They plunged like a migrating gray whale sounding 12,000 miles from the Chukchi Sea to Baja California. Out here on the needle-dripped edge of the continent, where once grew innumerable groves of ancient canoe cedars, a deep, deep sense of time takes root.