Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
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in later years. If there is any lesson to be learned surviving deadly illness, it is to never take life for granted … to cherish each day as a miracle, a gift. That’s why I don’t work on my birthday.
El Salvador proved to be my nemesis and turnaround point. It had taken me six months to get that far, my health was poor, and the Amazon still seemed as distant as ever. So with no real feeling of failure, I started the long journey back north, little aware of the changes that lay ahead.
I was travelling through the Sonora Desert of Mexico, just a few days south of the Texas border, when I was dropped off by my ride in an unusually rough-looking cow town. My driver had cautioned me about the dangers of this region: “Muy peligroso, señor—muchos banditos aqui!” I promptly headed out of the dangerous bandit town to spend a somewhat safer night along a quiet desert road. It was growing dark and I had hiked far, but I could still hear the drunken revelry and occasional gunshot from the cantinas even when the town was becoming little more than lantern light on the horizon.
Exhausted, I left the roadway and searched the surrounding desert for a place to set out my bedroll under the spectacular star-studded sky. The ground was strewn with rocks, boulders and prickly pear cactus pads, so it took some time to find a clear space to bed down. At long last I discovered a soft patch of earth, just the right size, beside a large saguaro cactus. Must be a bedding site for wild burros, I reasoned as I stretched out a horsehair rope around the perimeter of my sleeping area to deter prowling rattlesnakes. The rope was a gift from a Yaqui Indian elder I’d met a few days earlier. “A rattler will never cross the scent of a horse,” he assured me. The old man befriended me because he could see that, like him, I enjoyed sleeping alone out in the desert. It struck me that he might be a mystic or shaman of some sort.
I was asleep almost from the moment I lay on my back with my head below the trunk and beautiful branching arms of the saguaro. I may have slept only a few minutes or an hour, I’ll never know, before I awoke frozen in terror. Sweat was pouring from every pore of my body, my jaw was locked open and my eyes stared skyward in an unblinking gaze. I was sure my heart would seize up too. I’d never known such total terror in my life because I had no way of understanding the source. I lay there awake all night, unable to move a muscle, wet my parched tongue or scarcely blink my desert-dust dry eyes, but grasping fully the meaning of horror.
The stars slowly worked their arced path across the black velvet sky, and a large desert owl, not too distant, hooted throughout the night. Only with the first light of dawn was I able to close my parched mouth and painfully dry eyes. It was not until the first ray of sun slowly worked its way down the cactus and touched my face that I found I could move my neck. As I did so, I turned and saw that the woody base of the saguaro had been carved flat with a knife and inscribed with the name and date of a burial. Whoever’s grave I’d spent the night lying atop had an insanely powerful spirit, and I started to see things differently after that.
The rest of my return journey north was uneventful by comparison. I did spend a memorable week with a Navajo family in their Monument Valley hogan, a traditional Navajo hut of logs and earth, where I was inspired by their octagonal log architecture and closeness to the earth, but for the most part I was just wed to the road. I had grown so weary of lugging the damned kayak around for six months that when I got to British Columbia I decided to start paddling back to Alaska. I thumbed a ride to Prince Rupert, deciding that would be a safe and suitable location from which to work my way back through the Inside Passage waters.
It was raining in Prince Rupert. It almost always rains in Rupert, that soft but seemingly endless drip that descends in a fine mist for days. The sky was leaden and my energy low by the time I’d dragged all my gear and grub down to the dockside. Like the old Otis Redding song, I found myself, quite literally, “sittin’ on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away” when a Mama Cass-type character came strolling down the plank way. She was dressed in light cotton, a full-length floral printed dress, and she flowed down the dock like she was not of this earth. Ignoring me altogether, she stopped at the end of the pier and stood there staring at the ominous western sky. After about fifteen to twenty minutes of this strangely frozen pose, I couldn’t help but ask her if she was okay. I had once worked backstage at a Jefferson Airplane rock concert at Michigan State University where blotter acid was handed out freely to all stagehands, so I knew the stone-dead look of an overdose. No, she wasn’t tripping, she assured me, just “cloud busting.” She carried on with her self-appointed task while I remained respectfully silent.
“What are you here for?” she asked after a while, without looking away from a brightening spot in the sky.
“Setting off to kayak home to Alaska,” I responded.
“Cool,” she said, “but aren’t you going to kayak across to the Queen Charlotte Islands first?”
“Where’s that?”
“Out there where I’m busting that hole in the sky.”
Sure enough, a patch of blue was opening in the west. I grew excited. “How do you get there?” I asked.
“Paddle, if you want,” she said, “but it’s a long way out and Hecate Strait kicks up pretty fast. There’s a freighter that takes a few passengers. It’s leaving from the pier here this evening.”
“Thanks for the tip, sister,” I said and set off to inquire about ticketing.
“The name’s Stormy,” she called after me.
I stopped dead in my tracks. “You mean like Stormy in Ken Kesey’s gang?” I was stunned. Was this one of Ken Kesey’s bus-riding beatniks, one of the infamous “Merry Pranksters” immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? But she didn’t answer. Stormy was too busy admiring her handiwork, the clouds parting like great curtains of satin in the west. I went to book passage for the opening.
Chapter II
The Eagle’s Gift
I wanted to leave Haida Gwaii from the moment I arrived. The Northland Navigation freighter pulled into the Masset dock near midnight and disembarked its half-dozen passengers amid a crowd of curious onlookers. The twice-weekly arrival appeared to be the biggest event in town, but the mood was surprisingly sombre given how few of those gathered at the dockside were actually sober.
I strolled up the pier past a series of faceless aluminum-sided buildings that lined the length of Main Street, an absurdly wide boulevard void of any shade trees, shrubs or flowers. The town, from this vantage point, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fabled Misty Isles I’d been envisioning during my passage. The road ended abruptly—as if ordered to “halt!”—at a Canadian Forces military base, CFS Masset. I stopped under a lamppost to dig through my wallet in hopes of finding enough money to book passage back to the mainland on the return sailing. I was short; I would have to paddle.
Resigned to my misfortune, I returned down Main Street and tried to view the village from a more positive angle. The military makeover was sadly apparent, but a few turn-of-the-century wood-frame houses and some well-kept gardens were nestled in here and there among the hideous to hint of the charms of an earlier era.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Masset was once destined to be a hub of the Pacific Northwest. In the heady days before World War I, British railroad magnate Charles Hays conceived of a plan to make Prince Rupert Canada’s principal Pacific port and the terminus of his Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Vancouver would have been little more than a backwater, while Masset was expected to become an agricultural breadbasket to feed Prince Rupert’s great metropolis, envisioned at fifty thousand. The vast lowland bog from Masset to Tlell was parcelled out for settlement and some hardy pioneers dug drainage ditches by hand to try farming the muskeg. It never worked, and Hays’s dream died a sudden death too when the visionary went down on the Titanic in 1912. My own spirits, this June night sixty years later, had sunk almost as low.
I was dog-tired after disembarking the ship, but I still had the kayak bags to deal with. I stashed them beside a road embankment near the BC Hydro office