Delivered By The Sea..

[ElSuperGecko]

They wanted to judge me.  And for what?  Cutting down one tree, a single tree, when an ecological and environmental holocaust was being committed every single day, all the way along the Pacific North West from Oregon to Anchorage.  They wanted to lynch me, but I had my own judgement and they'd hear it before I was through.

I wrote and sent my letters, and I timed my departure.  Map, compass and kayak.  The locals thought I was out of my mind, but I knew the only thing I could rely on was myself.  I wasn't about to put myself in their hands.  I set off along the coast, with the plan to cross the Hecate Strait and meet my accusers face to face.  But they named the Strait after a witch for a reason.

The wind howled and the waves rose.  I was swept out to sea - soon BC was fading from view, and the daylight was fading as well.  I wasn't a stranger to the cold, but the water was beyond freezing and I had to fight with every ounce of my will just to keep myself upright, to stay afloat.

I don't know how long I battled.  I don't remember how many times I thought I was done.  Muscle memory kept me paddling, but my mind was straining and I could no longer trust my senses.  Despite the relentless gale, the sky was clear, full of stars and strange, racing colours.  The waves refracted them like a prism.

I awoke face down on sand and rocks, frozen almost to the bone.  The wind had died somewhere in the night, and now all was still.  I could hear crows circling above me, anticipating their next meal.  And where there's crows, there's land.

Slowly, I pushed myself onto my elbows and looked around.  The remains of my kayak bobbed gently against some rocks at the edge of the ice, some thirty yards away.  My pack - ruined - and my hatchet were lying next to me, and my canteen was still around my neck.  I couldn't have washed up this high above the waterline, could I?  My tools certainly couldn't.  Did I drag myself out of the water?  Did I crawl here?  Some base instinct, to survive?  I couldn't remember anything, just those damn lights.  A hallucination, brought on by exhaustion.

The canteen still had a few drops of water left.  I drained it, then fumbled inside my frozen coat.  My judgement, in it's waterproof plastic sleeve, was still just about intact.  I stuffed it into the remains of my pack, then pushed it away.  Meaningless now.  I needed a fire.  Somewhere to shelter.  More water.

My hand closed around the handle of my hatchet.  First things first.

[ElSuperGecko]

You don't know what you've got, until it's gone.

It's ironic.  I'd spent the last few years of my life trying to tell the world at large this very thing, only to be met with indifference at best and blank incomprehension at worst.  It seemed to me that the more educated the listener - or the more money they earned - the less inclined they were to pay attention and when they did, the more the response tended to see-saw towards the latter.

Sometimes people won't listen to the truth.  Sometimes they need to be pushed towards it.  That's why I did what I did, after all.  I'm still haunted by the vision of gold on green.

And now, now I find myself trapped in this frozen limbo, where everything seems to be gone.

The first night was the worst.  I was barely conscious when I dragged myself up from the beach, and it was only seeing the lighthouse that saved me.  There was an old pot stove inside, and I managed to start a fire before I passed out again.  I woke a few hours later, shivering and hungry, but alive.  Like most of the buildings I would discover later, the lighthouse appeared long abandoned, and had already been looted and ransacked.  I considered myself fortunate it had been unlocked.  There was a radio and computer inside, but no power to operate either.  The phone line was also down.  Even the flashlight I found in a drawer was dead.  The only saving grace was the bed, some scraps of food an a old parka to replace my own ruined waterproof.

I rested there for two days, but I knew I couldn't stay forever.  The days were cold but clear, and the position of the sun and the view my location afforded helped me gauge my surroundings.  From the top of the lighthouse I could see a highway following the shore from north to south.  A trawler had run aground and lay tilted on it's side a little further north along the coast, and beyond it what seemed to be a fenced-off dockyard or whaling station.  To the west, I could make out the remains of a small church nestled among the trees, overlooking the road.  But no sign of any activity, no other people.

I decided to make my way to the dockyard while the weather held.  I had questions, and maybe I could find some answers there.

[AdamvR]

Love it!

[ElSuperGecko]

I'd worked outdoors my entire life, routinely exploring old-growth temperate rainforest up and down the British Columbia coast.  I'm more at home in the wilderness as I am anywhere else in the world.  But this island - Great Bear Island from what I've learned, though the name isn't familiar - feels completely alien to me.  The terrain, the weather, the wildlife, nothing here makes sense.

As I had feared, the whaling station was long abandoned.  Just a mess of broken containers, rusting machinery, empty cargo crates and old bones.  No power here either, which made exploration tricky to say the least.  A cluster of pre-fab trailers surrounded the exterior, filled with broken bunks and rotting refuse.  The scattered newspapers I found were decades old.  I did find an old torn map however, which pointed me in the direction of a couple of small coastal settlements to the south.  I salvaged what small comforts I could.

The highway was in rough shape as well.  Cracked, uneven and broken in places, covered in patches of ice, snow, fallen timber and rockslides.  It clearly hadn't been used in years.  The bridge to the north had collapsed entirely into the coastal estuary.  I passed a number of stranded vehicles as I doubled back.  What could cause people to abandon their possessions like this?  What kind of catastrophe, natural or otherwise, had ravaged this place?

I thought of the last Pacific island I'd visited, only a few short weeks ago.  The island where I should be now, standing trial for what they had designated "criminal mischief".  They couldn't even decide on a name for what I'd done, let alone decide if I'd broken a law or not.  It's no wonder they failed to understand the meaning, the purpose behind my actions.  I wondered what they thought of my disappearance.  Did they think I ran?

I had never ran from anything in my life.  I wanted to tell my side of the story.

A mournful howl brought be back to my present, much more pressing predicament.  It simply shouldn't be this cold out here, not at this longitude, not even at this time of the year.  I'd departed from Prince Rupert.  There's no way the storm had swept me that far north.

I paused for a moment by the chapel, leaning on a crumbling wall, quietly watching as several dark shapes stalked across the coastal ice in the distance.  Exposure and starvation clearly weren't the only dangers to be found here.  I needed to stay on the move.

Edited September 27 by ElSuperGecko

[ElSuperGecko]

I'd half convinced myself that I was already dead.  That somewhere, during that gale-force crossing, my kayak had capsized, and I was just another soul lost at sea in the frigid waters of the Strait.  Certainly between the exhaustion, the hunger and the ever-present cold, I'd felt little more than a soul-weary numbness ever since I'd washed ashore.

That detached feeling of being lost, being stuck between worlds persisted as I made my way along the coastal road.  Along with an ever-increasing number of rusting vehicles, I soon passed by boarded-up homesteads, burnt-out cottages and broken fishing huts, all without ever seeing any sign of another living soul.  The howling never seemed to be too far behind though, and the sound became all the more menacing as the fog rolled in.

It wasn't until I made it to the 'Quosnet Gas Station' that I finally managed to convince myself I was still alive.  A dead man wouldn't be so eager to wolf down a can of dog food with the relish I mustered, or be so happy to find a pair of clean, dry socks. A dead man also wouldn't be so startled to see the frozen body, curled up behind the counter on the concrete floor.

But even with this new-found clarity, I still couldn't shake the feeling I was somehow reliving scenes from my former life.  The switchback trail leading up into the forested hillside was made for hauling timber.  There was a log sort floating out in the bay, near the edge of town.  I knew it was only a matter of time before I ran into a clearcut.  I'd stayed in similar communities, seen similar scenes so many times before - Bowron River, Nitinat, Quatsino Sound and of course, on Haida Gwaii.

Despite these unwelcome, painful reminders, I lingered there for a time.  The days were spent meticulously combing the few intact buildings for any sign of activity or life (I found neither), the nights were spent huddled up in front of a fire, assessing what little salvage I had managed to discover.  The garage yielded up a rusty old oil lantern that produced a comforting yellow flame.  The grand old house on the overlook, a hunting knife.  Some tinned food, a few matches.

But no power.  No phones.  No choice but to press on.