The Trick is Not to Mind the Damp

February-March 1996

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Deborah Robbins

In August of 1995, I went with my husband, two friends, and two guides (who became friends) on a week-long sea kayaking trip off Vancouver and Nootka Islands in British Columbia. Henry and I had never attempted such an adventure before. I was a novice camper who'd never pitched a tent or slept in a sleeping bag, and Henry had only vague memories of his days as an Eagle Scout. Our kayaking experience was limited to one afternoon's lazy paddle on an estero in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

Nonetheless, we were lured into six days in the wilderness by our friends' rapturous account of their guided canoeing trip in Canada the year before, which they described as grueling but rewarding. Neither Deirdre nor Heather is what I would call the Outward Bound type. Henry and I figured that if our super-civilized friends could find happiness in the rugged outdoors, perhaps we could, too. And if joy eluded us, surely we could survive just about anything for a week. We comforted ourselves with visions of room service and hot showers at the Empress Hotel in Victoria at the conclusion of our trip. What we dreaded most (apart from rolling over in our kayaks and drowning miserably within sight of shore) was rain. We live in California, where rain is a strictly seasonal occurrence. We love the sun and, we've grown to need it; like California poppies, we tend to fold into ourselves under gray skies.

So I knew something unprecedented was happening to us on the thoroughly wet morning of our third day into this adventure. We were camped on a beach on Nootka Island. It had rained all night and rain was steadily coming down at mid-morning. I looked up from my exploration of a tide pool to see three of our group in their rain gear, sitting under a tarp precariously staked out over a camp fire, trees looming in the mist behind them. If I'd seen this picture in an outdoors magazine, I would have supposed those people to be miserable. That's when I had my epiphany. I was happy! The grins I saw on other faces confirmed what I was feeling. I was wet and happy, and I knew we'd soon have mugs of hot coffee and stacks of buckwheat pancakes to warm our insides. We'd learned to seize the moment, however soggy, and savour it.

It was just three days before that we had first put into the water near Zeballos, a tiny town at the end of a 20-mile-long logging road. We had worked doggedly to cram our four kayaks with so many dry bags of clothes and food and boxes of cooking utensils that it seemed impossible it could all fit. It was well past midday as we paddled down the Little Esperanza Inlet toward open ocean, with flotillas of jellyfish drifting past us. We called to each other from kayak to kayak for the first half hour, then settled to the task of keeping up with Sue and Sally, our guides.

Paddling wasn't difficult -- even clumsy swipes propelled us forward. But settling into the right groove proved elusive -- maybe ten minutes out of an hour I was just conscious of moving smoothly and seeing the water, shore, and mountains around me. The rest of the time my arms hurt, my hands threatened to cramp, and I had to concentrate to keep any rhythm going, Henry and I, in a double kayak roughly the size of a Buick Electra, soon abandoned efforts to paddle in synch. We settled instead for not splashing each other and making steady progress forward, regardless of how uncoordinated we looked. I tried to concentrate on adjusting my breathing to the stroke of my paddle and feeling my muscles respond to the influx of oxygen.

When we stopped for lunch after more than two hours, we had to pry our stiff fingers off the paddles. We wrapped our aching hands around sandwiches and sat on a beautiful rocky beach to eat them. A wooden loading ramp left by loggers was just right for sunbathing, and a glimmer of sun tempted us out of our windbreakers. Only smooth talking by Sue got us off that beach for the hour-long paddle to Garden Point, the destination she had in mind for our first night on Nootka Island. There, as Sue had promised, we found a gently sloping beach, groves of old growth trees, and views across the water of mountains encircled by clouds that lit up as the sun set. The sandbar beach swept in an arc to a forested outcropping that became an island with the incoming tide. The scale of the landscape and seascape was hard to grasp, but I didn't feel small there. I felt my own life intensely, aware of hot food in my bowl and then inside me, of being small and warm in our tent, of gratifying soreness in the muscles that had brought me here.

That was our first real day of sea kayaking in the wilderness. When we awoke the next day and found ourselves truly where we were, miles and miles by ocean from anywhere, delight slowly overtook us all. Everything we saw spoke to us of our place in the natural world. Before we left Garden Point, Sue showed us "nurse logs" in the forest around our campsite. Nurse logs are huge fallen trees that "sponsor" smaller plants and trees that grow, in turn, to be huge themselves. When we stopped on Rosa Island for lunch and scrambled through the spongy, thick growth to a shell beach, we spotted nurse logs everywhere. The forest was eloquent about its purpose -- to live and foster new life in a continuous cycle. Everything fell from shape and definition to contribute to new living shapes: the logic was stunning. For the first time, the notion of rotting away myself seemed almost tolerable. Maybe, I thought, I don't want to be cremated after all, but composted.

It was at Belmont Beach, our next campsite on Nootka Island, that we embraced dampness, and I had my epiphany. Yes, we were happy. But we weren't so easily led as we had been on our first paddling day. We staged a polite mutiny when Sue and Sally invited us to go paddling. Nothing, we said, would get us into the water that day -- especially when the sun broke through to bake our sore muscles. We were scattered along the beach after lunch, reading, chatting, and digesting when I looked up to see a large glossy black bear facing us from atop a driftwood log at the edge of the woods.

Now, we'd been keenly aware that we were not alone these two days. We'd seen bald eagles and otters and we'd talked of bears, deer, weasels, and whales. Just that morning, we had watched a lavender sunflower sea star almost three feet across in a sheltered alcove of our beach. A baby sea star of the same colour, with four arms, kept scuttling out of the way as the adult felt around with its fifteen arms for something edible. We knew we were sharing this particular bit of earth with many other creatures, all of them looking for food.

We were not prepared to share our campsite with a bear, however, especially one who pawed open a kayak hatch cover not 50 yards away from us and made off with a bag of instant juice crystals. We broke camp swiftly and noisily, singing, banging pot lids, shouting out inanities to warn the bear that it wasn't wise to return yet. Although we were moving fast and purposefully, serious about getting off the island, I felt more thrilled than scared to have seen this beautiful creature -- glossy midnight black and fat, so imposing compared to the dusty beggar bears we knew from Yosemite and Sequoia. Sue said that it was lucky, actually, that the kayak cover had been open. Otherwise the bear might have damaged the boat and then we'd have had the problem of getting six people off the island in kayaks that seated four.

So it happened that we left Nootka Island and paddled through a sea of rolling swells to a much smaller unnamed island with a narrow swath of beach and an interior of tall pines and firs. In her quick reconnaissance of the island, Sue came upon a Nootka burial site, a cave just off the beach containing human bones and skulls lined up on planks from several wooden coffins. Sue told us that Nootka Indians traditionally build boxes for their dead and leave them and their most cherished possessions in a sheltered rock overhang looking out to sea. The site had either been desecrated by humans or tumbled by high tides. Once Sue had checked her chart to make sure this island wasn't off limits as a native reserve, we settled in.

Over the two days that we stayed on this nameless island, I came to feel a need to pay our respects to the native dead. Henry suggested we read them a poem, as this was an occasion that seemed to require eloquence. Mary Oliver's "I Found a Dead Fox" was the poem we chose, and reading it aloud brought us closer to our silent hosts.

We also developed a tender interest in the progress of a young eagle whose mother was teaching him to fly. We spotted the nest after breakfast our first morning there, alerted to this coming-of-age drama by the youngster's desperate high whistles as his mother coaxed him from tree to tree. By the time we left the island early the morning of the fifth day, he was sailing in short loops out over the water. He still sounded more like a piglet than an eagle. I'd have liked to stay an extra day to hear those squeals deepen into true eagle shriek as his confidence grew.

On our paddle to Garden Point, where we would camp again for our last night in the woods, we stopped on another tiny nameless island and scrambled after Sue up into old growth forest until we reached a narrow clearing at the edge of a promontory jutting out toward the sea. There Sue showed us the decomposing remnants of a canoe, carved from wood to commemorate a Nootka Indian who had been lost at sea. Pieces of another canoe lay nearby, both facing out to the open sea. The monument's very decay seemed an essential feature of its testament; never launched, the canoe was gradually surrendering its shape in the slow process of natural metamorphosis just as the drowned person would have if he had been resting here in a handmade box, and, perhaps, as memories of the lost person had been absorbed into tribal history.

On our paddle from the burial canoe island to Garden Point, we saw two (maybe more) porpoises. First I saw a dark fin shape disappearing into the waves some yards before us. Too thrilled to believe my eyes, I didn't sing out my discovery until we all saw the lovely arcs of their backs as they swam past us, showing us the mystery of shapely, solid life in that great formless mass of water.

As we made our camp that evening, I noticed how much I liked doing one simple thing at a time: tying covers down on kayak hatches, sliding the poles through the hooks of the tent and seeing the domed shape appear when we stuck the ends through the grommets on the ground, pouring water carefully from a large jug into my flask, cutting carrots so the pieces didn't fly off onto the ground.

Now that we were nearly at the end of our adventure, Sue and Sally permitted themselves to tell us just how pathetic we were as paddlers on our first day out. They'd had to dawdle about in their single kayaks while we heaved and wheezed through the water in our doubles, often outdistancing us despite their best efforts to creep along. They had nearly resigned themselves to a severely limited itinerary that first day, but we had surprised them by improving so much that we now made pretty good time.

We had a sublime morning, sunny and warm, for our triumphant recessional up Little Esperanza Inlet, a distance of about eight nautical miles. Our kayaks and hearts were light, our arms bulged with newly acquired muscles. Sue had rousted us early because higher winds were predicted, but miraculously it wasn't windy after all. We were on the water for only two hours, and could have made it quicker, too, but we stopped to admire the perfect reflection of forested mountains in the still water. When we encountered a flock of loons, Sue gave her loon call and got that thrilling laugh in response. She called again, but the flirtation had gone awry and the loons went silent.

Once back on Vancouver Island, at our original embarkation point, we changed into what passed for dry clothes down an embankment along the road--one of us had much modesty left -- and bid farewell to our kayaks. Then, rank as we all were, we nonetheless piled ourselves and our gear into the van and headed for a beer at the Zeballos Hotel. Best beer we'd ever had, we all agreed. And the bags of chips we had were crunchy, greasy heaven. I found I'd temporarily lost an important urban survival skill: the ability to screen out unwelcome sensory information. The TV over the bar was tuned to "Oprah," and the commercials were almost a physical assault. Pushed out the door by the racket, we took in big gulps of moist, earthy air, climbed into the van and drove back over the logging road and down the length of Vancouver Island to the city of Victoria.

Now that we're back to our climate-controlled lives, the beauty of our kayaking days seems more vivid even than when we were living them. The seashore world has seemed alien before, when I was distracted by my distaste for the wet and briny. But once I was wet and briny myself, and reconciled to that state, I became a denizen and explorer of that world. Now I know the difference between a sea star and a sea sunflower star. I know the call of a bald eagle. I've seen a coal-black shiny bear close enough to see her nose wrinkle as she caught the scent of our food. I've felt the quiet peace of spongy-floored old growth forests. And I've propelled myself in a small boat over ocean waters. The knowledge I brought back with me is that all these things delighted me, and the world in which such things occur with stunning amplitude and variety is vast enough to fill a whole human life with joy -- if I don't mind a little damp.

Deborah Robbins lives in California and took her Nootka Island trip with Gabriola Cycle & Kayak Ltd., 604-247-8277.