Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
that hung over the Skedans site that day, it was the warmth and genuine hospitality of the couple that held the logging concession. They invited me in for dinner and sent me on my way with fresh homemade bread, still hot from the oven. But paddling south to my rendezvous with Glenn at Vertical Point, I was saddened to see in the distance the massive clear-cut scars and associated landslides on Talunkwan Island. Little could I have known what a rallying point this mangled island would become in my future endeavours.
We found ourselves stormbound on Vertical Point the next morning. A roaring southeaster had turned Hecate Strait into a fury of white froth and mountainous waves. Glenn and I hunkered down and battened the hatches in a small cabin built on the Point by Benita Sanders, an acclaimed artist residing in Queen Charlotte City. Pots of wild mint tea and a few select books from Benita’s little library helped ease the slow passage of the day.
Though the wind had abated the following morning, the seas were anything but calm. Glenn felt confident that the worst of the storm was over and that we should push on. A certain lady friend he was anxious to see again at his Burnaby Narrows cabin may well have been clouding his judgment. We paddled out of the protected little cove fronting Benita’s cabin and were engulfed by the sea.
The swells were enormous, but at least they weren’t breaking. Only on the crests of the waves could Glenn and I see each other, though we were never more than fifty metres apart in our separate kayaks. Dropping back into the wave trough after topping each crest was like being consumed, swallowed up by the sea. Huge walls of steel-grey water obscured any hint of land. It was as if the leaden sky itself had fallen and sunk into the sea, still writhing in the depths from the wrath of the storm. Humbling as the experience was, it was also exhilarating.
Entering the sheltered, calm waters of Klue Passage and the serenity of Tanu Island after the harrowing high seas was to know the true meaning of salvation. Could there be a more serene setting in the world than the moss-hushed silence of Tanu? Tanu in Haida translates to “where the eel grass grows,” and this ancient village site not only supported an amazing diversity of marine life, it once rivalled any culture in the world for artistic expression. Pole carvers from Tanu were sought after up and down the coast for their brilliant designs and masterful carvings. One Tanu pole is the subject of a painting by Emily Carr titled Weeping Woman of Tanu (1928) and depicts the tale of Frog Woman shedding tears that turned into frogs after the brutal burning of her children. Today, the pole has been cut into sections and is displayed in the glass rotunda of the Royal BC Museum, but the spirit of what the master carver captured is still very much a part of Tanu.
I spent hours wandering among the massive longhouse ruins being reclaimed by the forest. A few superbly crafted corner posts still stood, but the roofs of the longhouses had long ago collapsed. Beams smothered in a dozen species of moss spanned the ground pits, some of which were twenty-five metres across. It must have been a Herculean endeavour to construct one of these massive multiple family dwellings. I knew from my anthropology courses that eight or more nuclear families of the same clan all lived under the same roof, and forty to fifty people would have resided in the largest of these houses. Living within the clan house brought with it a strict social code based on rank. The clan chief resided along the back wall farthest from the entranceway, which was often a carved tunnel-like passage through the bottom carved figure of the house’s frontal pole. Only one person at a time could enter through this portal and they had to bend over to do so. This allowed the house to be easily defended, even by women and children, as intruders could be clubbed in the back of the head one at a time as they entered. It is said the Haida positioned their slaves closest to the entranceway to further foil attack. The cry of a stabbed slave at night was all the security alarm system a household needed. Then again, if the slave was from a neighbouring tribe and recognized common language in the attackers, he might become a liability more than an asset.
Everyone cooked on a central hearth in the middle and lowest level of the two- to three-tiered floor and found some semblance of privacy along the upper sleeping levels where bent cedar storage boxes and blankets divided the room into private quarters. The Haida longhouse was seen as a living being as well as a container of souls; it had skin (the planks forming the walls) and bones (the rafters and central supports). The heart was the central hearth and a mouth for exhalation was symbolized by the smoke hole. Two distinctive styles to Haida longhouses distinguished them from all others on the Northwest Coast—the two-beamed and the classic six-beamed. These houses displayed great architectural ingenuity designed to meet specific and demanding environmental conditions. Perched atop excavated house pits, the Haida longhouse was amazingly roomy inside while keeping a low profile outside, a necessary condition for the gale-force winds and the occasional tsunamis they were subjected to. To protect against frequent violent earthquakes the Haida, like the Japanese, designed their homes to have no inflexible parts. Every piece of the structure had free movement within the grooves and notches that held it all together. A house could also be easily dismantled and moved to another location, yet another way of coping with changing food supply or security needs. To better cope with enemy raids and warfare, the houses were often so close together that one could not easily walk between them. This fortress effect required defence only on the farthest flanks to prevent war parties arriving by canoes from sneaking behind.
We left the ruins of Tanu to slowly work their way back into the earth and paddled into the most spectacular coastal wilderness I had ever seen. All the way down Darwin Sound and into Juan Perez Sound I couldn’t help but marvel at the astonishing density of eagle nests, the profusion of seabirds, falcons and marine mammals, and the stunning biodiversity of the tidal zone. The forest itself was the greatest feature, a wonderfully untouched ecosystem with age classes of trees ranging from a few months to several thousand years old. The ancient cedars, with their multiple dead tops bleached a lustrous silver grey, spoke of the antiquity of these post-ice age forests. Like the greying hairs of an old wise one, they spoke to the need for reverence and respect, something noticeably lacking in Northwest Coast forestry practices.
It took nearly a week to reach Burnaby Narrows and the small community of back-to-the-landers who resided there. Glenn’s dovetail-notched log cabin stood boldly on a high gravel bench just above all but the highest of tides. Only a few times a year did he have to move all of his belongings and himself to the upper loft while the tide inundated the house, he told me.
It is the rush of tides between Juan Perez Sound in the north and Skincuttle Inlet in the south that has always made Burnaby Narrows a choice place to live. As the tide ebbs, the Narrows present one of the richest and most spectacular life zones on the Pacific coast when thousands of miniature geysers squirt skyward as butter clams, little necks, geoducks, horse clams and cockles expel water from their siphons. At low tide the seabed becomes a kaleidoscope of colour with bat stars in every hue of the rainbow, sun stars in lavender and red, bright-red blood stars, and ochre, orange and purple pisaster starfish. Along the shoreline of the Narrows one can see evidence of thousands of years of Haida occupation represented by deep shell middens. The only trace of the village that once occupied this important site are these shell disposal sites and a small grove of crabapple trees growing in a clearing not far from Glenn’s cabin.
A great party was thrown at the cabin for our arrival and it was there I met Axel Waldhouse, an Eastern European immigrant to Canada who wanted to join me on my kayak journey south to Ninstints, a village on remote S’Gang Gwaay Llanagaay (Red Cod Island). It is the most intact ancient village on the entire Northwest Coast and I very much wanted to go there.
It was a wild and somewhat harrowing experience to paddle around the southern end of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago several days later and out to the exposed west coast with the highest recorded winds and wave action in all of Canada. Every feature of the landscape here reflected the fury of this coast: the wild, wind-sculptured trees, the flotsam and jetsam hurled deep into the forest and the splash zone of the rocky shore, void of vegetation ten to twenty metres above the tidal level. What people would have chosen this small, storm-lashed fortress for their home, we wondered as we paddled the huge Pacific swells toward the isolated island.
Axel and I were less than a kilometre from the island and lost in our own thoughts when something huge surfaced behind us as we paddled. A great black island of flesh rose from the depths, exhaled with a blast of air that showered us in a fine mist, and then rolled