Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
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swell, I shot through the passage into a perfectly calm harbour where a dozen salmon trawlers were tied up at a floating dock. The place was called Seven Mile and it was a harbour day, with the entire fleet sitting out the storm. All eyes turned on me in astonishment as I paddled my seventeen-foot canvas kayak in out of the storm. “It’s a good thing the Lord looks after fools,” was the only comment I elicited from a fleet of fishermen looking down on their first kayak sighting in these waters.
The next day dawned bright and cheery, and if the sea wasn’t exactly calm, neither was it life-threatening. I set out at dawn and paddled westward along with the trawlers. Virago Sound acts like a great funnel, drawing boats into Naden Harbour, another important Haida heritage site. Sitting on the western point of land that constricts the passage to Naden Harbour is the strategically positioned but serene setting of Kung. The ancient village site of Kung gave me the feeling of coming in out of the storm; it probably gave its ancient inhabitants the same sense of security.
The following day I pressed westward and camped at Pillar Bay, where a stunning conglomerate of rock pillar stands proud of the water a hundred metres offshore at high tide. Some say a shaman’s bones rest atop the thirty-five-metre pillar. It would certainly take superhuman powers to place a corpse or the bones of the deceased there.
Working my way up the east coast of Langara Island, I kept a close eye on the weather and the southernmost of the Alaskan islands, barely visible across the sixty-kilometre expanse of Dixon Entrance. A lighthouse stood on Langara Point and another across the entrance at Cape Muzon, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. My plan, which seems absurd in retrospect, was to depart Langara Point at first light, paddle all day and through the night using both light stations as beacons to guide me in the dark. I had calculated that I could paddle thirty kilometres a day, meaning I should be able to reach Alaskan shores by dawn the next morning. What I had not accounted for was fog that, more often than not, obscures both light beacons, currents running east and west through the passage—which can pull a kayak completely off course—and the prevailing southeasterly wind. The wind in particular would prove my nemesis.
The Haida, I learned later, never set off for Alaska from Langara Island, but from Tow Hill on North Beach so that if the prevailing wind, a southeaster, came up, they still had a chance of reaching Dall Island in Alaska before being blown out into the open Pacific. My route would likely have put me in Korea.
I felt a bit anxious about my uncertain adventure when I pushed off from a beach on Langara in my kayak, but I was well rested and well stocked with bannock, dried fruit, nuts and adequate fresh water. The swells rolling in off the Pacific were on average two to three metres, but the surface waters were calm, at least until midday. Langara Island was growing distant behind me when the wind came up on the turn of the tide. The eastwardly flooding tide now encountered strong resistance from the southeast wind and the seas built up alarmingly fast. Learmonth Bank, a submerged shoal that would be a substantial-sized island if sea levels dropped a few metres, was directly on my course and the tide was ripping dangerously over it. With the wind stiffening, I had to make a decision as if my life depended upon it—and it did! After a blast of wind and a breaking wave spun my kayak around, I got the message. Years later, Haida elders would tell me that 180-degree kayak spin had nothing to do with weather. “You were sent back to us,” they insisted.
It was well after dark when I found myself wearily trying to work my way through huge breakers rolling over the reefs on the west side of Langara Island. At least I was in the lee of the southeasterly storm, and I could smell the reassuring aroma of land. The flood tide drew me into Parry Passage, where I searched the dark shores in vain for somewhere to land my craft. It was well past midnight when a glowing white beach of crushed clamshells appeared like a ghostly apparition in the dark and I was finally able to pull ashore. I had been cramped in the kayak for eighteen hours, using a bailer for a toilet and drawing my strength from adrenalin more than food. Now my body wanted to collapse, and it did. Too exhausted to pitch my tent, I cuddled up in a dry spot under an old cedar log lying under a grove of young spruce trees. All night long I wrestled with demonic dreams, sea monsters in wild waves and wrens singing for lost souls beneath weathered totem poles.
It was nearly noon before I awoke the next day and wiped the sleep from my eyes, only to wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming. The huge ovoid eyes, flared nostrils and thick lips of a Haida totem pole stared back at me from my place of slumber. Later, I would learn I had inadvertently landed at Yaku, another abandoned Haida village site, and had unknowingly slept under a collapsed totem pole.
I was famished and almost instinctively headed for the tidal zone for food. Thousands of tiny clam geysers spouting from the tidal flats suggested at least one good reason why this village was located here. I was so absorbed in digging for butter clams and littlenecks that I failed to notice a dozen kids sneaking up behind me. Suddenly I was surrounded by the twenty-four muddy gumboots and wet sneakers of a gaggle of Haida teenagers. “What are you doing?” they asked as they looked down at me.
“Digging clams,” I answered matter-of-factly. “What are you guys up to?”
“Watching you,” came the cheeky but very Haida reply.
The Haida youth were all from Old Massett and were working on an archaeological dig at nearby Kiusta Village, another ancient Haida habitation site. One of the boys, Lawrence Jones, in the spirit of Haida hospitality, invited me over to their camp for lunch. I jumped at the invitation; the clams could wait. It was a simple meal of soup and salmon sandwiches, but it seemed like a feast to my famished body. I was so delighted to be safe and in the company of people again that I offered to wash all of the camp dishes. This made me instantly popular with the kids on chore duty and provided a casual opportunity to visit with Nick and Trisha Gessler, the archaeologists overseeing the excavation.
When Nick learned that I had studied anthropology at Michigan State University, he told me they were short staffed and could employ me temporarily while I awaited calmer weather to make the crossing to Alaska. In retrospect, I think he was merely trying to save my life from another foolish attempt at crossing Dixon Entrance. I accepted the generous offer, moved my kayak and camp to Kiusta, and started working on the dig. Kiusta had been the site of the earliest contact with Europeans and the first foreign trade on Haida Gwaii; it offered great promise of significant archaeological finds and insights into that era.
Nearly every day after work hours, Nick and Trisha would encourage me to hike the Kiusta trail that led to a beach on the west coast. I had seen and camped on so many beautiful beaches from Alaska to Honduras over the past eight months that I was in no rush to do so. It was more than a week before I followed their advice.
The kilometre-long trail through pristine rainforest was enchanting, but Lepas Bay itself was more breathtaking than any bay I had ever beheld. A crescent-moon-shaped bay of fine ivory sand framed two lovely offshore islands, one a grassy seabird colony, the other cloaked in old-growth forest. A creek divided the beach and bordered a great rocky outcrop that cut off the northwestern edge of the bay at high tide. For some inexplicable reason I found myself drawn in that more difficult direction.
After climbing the cliffs above the crashing waves, I headed to the far western end of the bay. Dramatic sea stacks adorned in bonsai-like conifers, lush salal, ferns, red columbine, bluebells and yellow cinquefoils rose from the white sands as bold and beautiful as the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The waters on this end of the bay reflected the jade green of the surrounding forest with sky blue in the shallows gradually deepening to the dark cobalt of the open sea. Eagles nested on the westernmost point, deer grazed peacefully in a meadow of beach grass and a family of otters frolicked over the rocks. All my childhood drawings suddenly came alive in this place. I was home.
A strange compulsion had come over me; I had to do something here. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but hours later when I returned to Kiusta I found myself as bewildered as the Gesslers with my words: “I don’t think I’m going to work on the archaeological dig anymore, but could I please borrow a hammer, a saw and a handful of nails? I’m going to build a log cabin on Lepas Bay.”
Towering above the beach, this is one of several dramatic sea