”Tales From The Underbrush” documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that experienced them.
The artist proposes to post monthly herein a chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry continues the tale.
THE GOLDEN MILE
“Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.”
Johann Friedrich von Schiller
Fog and mist have the seemingly miraculous ability to transform reality into surrealism and the finite into the infinite. That which is seen can quickly disappear, its recall the test of a doubting mind. That which is anchored becomes wandering, elusive in the swirling veils and curtains of nature’s windblown gauze. While obfuscation, double talk, bureaucratese, jargon and just plain perjury form the pejorative fog of politics, and man’s inhumanity the fog of war, that which is nature’s fog when far removed from civilization can breed both awe and fearful wonder in a world of deadened sound and blurred reality. The human condition shrinks, diminutive and inconspicuous in a larger, shifting, natural universe of mist and cloud, and for stirred imaginations, the myths and history of a place that define its passage in time can be resurrected and relived within the clarity of undaunted fantasy. All of this has led to terms such as “mystery” or “mysterious” being often applied to settings such as the fog banks of Newfoundland, the mist laden mountainous regions of tropical Asia and the Andes, the shrouded Scottish Highlands…………….and the Haida Gwaii.
As Canada’s most isolated landmass, the Haida Gwaii (“islands of the people”), formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands and still often geographically referred to as such, is a scimitar-shaped archipelago of over 200 islands, large and small, totaling over 10,000 square kilometres in area and with some 5,000 kilometres of shoreline. Lying an average of 100 kilometres off the northwest shore of British Columbia, the archipelago from its broader northern extent only 50 km. from the Alaska Panhandle, ranges 300 km. to the south before pinching out into the sea. A submerged mountain chain formed from tectonic mountain-building processes, the Haida Gwaii’s geology, climate and nutrient-rich waters have provided distinctive natural and human ecologies that make it one of the most unique environments in the world. While the climate of Haida Gwaii is a temperate one, including long summer days with plenty of sunlight, it is the more sombre fall and winter months of shorter, gloomier, rain-soaked days that provide the mystic atmosphere that underlies and helps drive this tale.
Haida Gwaii is perched on the very edge of Canada’s Pacific continental shelf, separated from the mainland by the Hecate Strait, a storm-racked treacherous body of shallow ocean that before the last glacial period was largely above sea level and formed a land bridge to the continental landmass. Scant kilometres to the west of the archipelago, the continental shelf dramatically falls away to the immense depths of the Pacific Ocean. That point of departure marks the location of the Queen Charlotte Fault, in the broad sense an extension of California’s San Andreas Fault. Forming the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, the Queen Charlotte Fault runs underwater along the full western extent of the Haida Gwaii, and in 1949 was the epicenter of one of the world’s largest earthquakes, registering 8.1 on the Richter Scale.
But it is within the context of harvesting one of the most important natural resources of the Haida Gwaii that this tale is based. It was during a particularly vicious downturn in mining exploration activities that I found myself working as the general manager of a small British Columbia forestry company. Bolstered more recently by tourism, Haida Gwaii’s local economy has traditionally been heavily dependent upon the forest industry, located primarily on the east and west sides of Graham Island, with a smaller portion on northwest Moresby Island, both islands being the largest in the archipelago. My employer, under a small business license, had recently made a successful bid to log a small tract of forest on Moresby Island. It was in this regard that I found myself on Haida Gwaii on a day in late November, having arrived at the Sandspit airport in a journey from Vancouver to check on the company’s harvesting project.
Overnighting at a motel beside the airport and with a magnificent breakfast of fresh halibut in my belly, I set out early next morning for the logging operation, a journey involving some twenty minutes by car to a landing west of Sandspit where an hour’s trip in a motor boat then took me to another landing in the north central part of Moresby Island. The last leg of the trip in involved another hour in a pick-up truck as it wended its way slowly westward along a rugged logging road to the license tract.
Retracing my way back at the end of a long day in miserable conditions of chill, drizzle, fog and overall wet that can leave one feeling like an stale-dated prune, I was half asleep with fatigue and boredom while being pitched about in the pickup truck as it lurched along the narrow, rocky, pot-holed dirt logging road on the journey back out to the boat that in turn would transport me to the last of the three leg return trip to Sandspit. I was only vaguely aware of the immediacy of the forest on each side of the road as scrub growth and tree branches continuously brushed both sides of the vehicle, reflecting the narrowness of the road. The western part of the Haida Gwaii where the majority of logging has traditionally taken place, is in the fall and winter a veritable rain forest, reflecting the mountainous terrain that defines that part of the archipelago and that confronts the almost continuous rain-laden weather systems incoming from the Pacific Ocean during that time of year.
Despite their above ground expression, rainforests have always been to me places of the underworld, environments that can drive the imagination to excessive boundaries within which reside otherworldly creatures, forms and dimensions. While this state of mind might appear to reflect a return to childhood fairy tales and fears, I put it down more to the fact that I have at times a larger degree of fanciful mental wanderings than an adult perhaps should have. Thus, the darkness of a rainforest becomes a mystic backdrop for a decaying stage of the living now dead, but from which new life is nourished and springs forth to form a fresh troupe of shadowy, timbered, living statues with moss laden, twisted limbs outstretched above a dense chorus of dancing, writhing vines and tangled scrub growth. Of this chorus, it is as though the entire forest’s root system has decided to reverse its subterranean wanderings and instead seek refuge above ground, climbing skyward like a nether horde seeking freedom. Within this drama lurk the unknown and occult amongst the dank, dripping silence; obscure creatures and forms become dimensions of the imagination, appearing and disappearing as wind, light, shadow and perspective provide constant change to that which appears to be but then is not, nor perhaps ever was but might become.
It was within this drifting subconscious frame of mind that suddenly and with heart-stopping immediacy, from a hidden perch in the forest on one side of the road a startling apparition launched itself in our path and not twenty feet in front of the truck. From its large, feathered torso an enormous spread of wings extended, barely clearing the bush on each side of the narrow path. The breadth of its span had to be close to eight feet if not actually there. With giant wings seeming to not so much beat as lazily pulsate in deep, rhythmic and seemingly languorous cycles, what now was readily seen to be a large bird maintained a steady and leisurely pace at an eye level altitude in front of us, neither exceeding our pace nor falling back any closer. Had it been a ground-based animal, a beautifully graceful, unhurried lope would have described its progress. The road being narrow and with dense bush on either side, there was no readily apparent exit point for the bird back into the forest other than a climb to altitude which the bird seemed not disposed to do for whatever reason. Perhaps it had a plan! This strange procession continued for some time, the bird maintaining a steady and unhurried pace in front of us, its wing rhythms seemingly insufficient for it to remain airborne. In the midst of this surrealistic scene, it occurred to me that this majestic creature was not so much being followed by our vehicle as it was leading us through its environment, like a guide through a foreign land. Through the rain-soaked, wiper blurred windshield, I was still able to make out, like a royal crown and necklace, the striking golden crown and nape of the bird’s plumage.
Suddenly, around a bend in the road, the forest opened slightly on one side and with a graceful bank the bird disappeared back into the bush. For some strange reason that I cannot explain, upon first sighting this master avian, I had checked the truck’s odometer. Now, the bird having disappeared into the forest once more, I checked the odometer once again and found to my utter amazement that the bird and ourselves had together constituted a parade over a distance of more than a mile along the road! I also discovered that I was completely breathless, my pulse racing and in a rare occasion, beyond words. From my imagined nether world had emerged a real life apparition, merciless and savage as a bird of prey but in this particular situation stately, unafraid and supremely confident of being the titleholder to the environment it occupied. I had witnessed one of the most majestic acts of flying that I had ever seen, one that as a pilot of earthly machines, made me feel incredibly inadequate by comparison. I had also met, up close and personal, a mesmerizing and beautiful golden eagle.
“It is in rhythm that design and life meet.”
Philip Rawson
“Grace is savage and must be savage in order to be perfect.”
Charles A. Stoddard
Copyright © 2010 Ian de W. Semple
