A narrow and dangerous place

When I was eighteen and full of terrors, one evening the wilderness said it was coming for me.

It was a grey day in December a little before three in the afternoon when my partner and I tied up our fishboat to the wharf on Savary Island. Winter days were so short it’d be dark in another hour. We lugged the groceries and the cat in his wicker carrier up to our log cabin. My partner started a blaze in the fireplace. It’s a guy thing, I was quite capable.

We couldn’t anchor in front of Savary, it was too exposed, so my partner took our 32-foot troller back to Finn Cove north of Powell River where we usually moored it. In the morning he’d row the two miles home. What we were calling home was actually was my partner’s parents summer place, old and cozy but ours for the winter.

After my partner left, I put our food away into cupboards with latches and blue metal containers with lids. Hip-high, they looked like they were from the 1900s. If you left food out on the counter, in minutes you’d turn around to find dark pellets of mouse poop in it. A tiny kerosene fridge lived out on the deck.

Once I had everything away and had stoked my fire, I headed down to the white sand beach; the light was fading fast. The beach smelled of seaweed and wood smoke. I perched on the driest-looking log I could find and luxuriated in the peace.

I loved looking out at the water, feeling knots I hadn’t known I had, start to loosen and dissolve. I could just make out fish ducks, surf scoters I learned later they were called. Black with red bills, dozens of them, murmuring softly. Overhead, a gull threw out the hook of its cry and wheeled away. It was magic.

In the dimness behind the Ragged Islands a couple of miles away, I could barely make out the tall snow-capped mountains of the Coast Range. Further north, up Desolation Sound, were the Unwin Mountains with Cortez Island a long low line against the sky.

I sat there until I became chilled, then stood and stretched, loaded my left arm with pieces of driftwood, locked my right arm on top of the wood and turned from the long lick of silver ocean, which still held some light. Looking away from the water, I saw afternoon had slid into evening, though by the clock it was still early. I crossed the road and started up the stairs to our cabin.

The hill behind it was black, as were the trees. I didn’t know the names of cedar, fir or hemlock then, all I knew is they were evergreens and now, suddenly, the whole forest was ready to pounce.

I stopped. Looked up. What was I afraid of? Not animals. Not people; at the time, we were the only ones on the island. This was a presence. It leaned out from the hillside and laughed at me. Tiny me, powerless me. Whatever this was, it was huge and it did not mean me well.

In the single season we’d been commercial fishing, I’d come to understand that storms blew up out of nowhere. Fishboats went down. Tugs sank. Canoes spilled people into cold ocean where they died. In one winter storm, just after we bought the boat, I thought we were going to die. At the time, it was just like, Oh, okay, we’re going to drown. There was nothing more I could do. We were getting hammered trying to reach harbour and there comes a point where it’s touch and go if the boat makes it. The boat had no marine radio and it was decades before cell phones.

I had never been afraid of the bush. Now, however, I was as petrified as if a wave of being freaked out had crashed over me, fear harsh as choking on salt water.

 In the Indigenous world-view, powerful beings lived in the forest. I could picture very clearly the magnificent carved Hamatsa masks I’d seen, the cannibals, and D’Zunuk’wa, the wild woman of the woods. Clutching my firewood, I understood for the first time how this coast was about terror as much as beauty. Indigenous people knew that. People went into the forest and didn’t come out.

Wikipedia Commons, Dzunuk'wa, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Leoboudy

Beauty and terror. They were settling over me like a weighted net and my heart was racing.

I could hardly breathe.

Snap out of it, I told myself. What are you afraid of? A bear? But I knew was the wild itself that had me vibrating, every nerve on hyper-alert.

I started up the stairs to the unlit cabin. The word panic comes from the Greek god Pan. In Greek legend, mortals who encountered him would run away, shrieking, their terror absolute and unreasoning. I had never understood panic before but naming it didn’t make me feel any better. I was panting as hard if I’d been running.

I forced myself to stay with routine and stacked my wood gently on the covered porch to dry.

Inside the house didn’t feel any better than outside. To keep myself from spinning right out, I built up the fire and lit the oil lamps on the wall, the big one on the mantel piece and the one in the kitchen. My jitters, like a big toothy mouth, were clamped tightly onto me. I needed to talk myself down, but how?

A cup of tea, my usual soother-downer? My stomach was clenched too hard.

Perhaps it would be less awful outside? I went onto the back verandah. Breathed gulps of damp air. No, this wasn’t better. I looked at the dim sheen of lamplight from the kitchen on the leathery salal leaves and remembered my ginger cat, who’d disappeared into the bush the minute we flipped the lid on his carrier. I called him, and for once, he came.

We went inside together and sitting on the sofa, we huddled up to the fireplace with the cat on my lap. I took comfort from stroking his soft fur. After a bit, the cat mouthed my hand, meaning Once more pat and I’ll bite, and jumped off.

I thought, I want voices. I turned on our battery-operated radio and switched it from the weather frequency to a talk show on CBC. The voices pushed the feeling of balefulness to arm’s length. Very gradually, as I listened, it seemed like the presence slid away. After maybe an hour, the cabin started to feel all right.

What had happened?

I gave the cat his supper and rummaged around for something easy for myself. I’d open a canned steak and kidney pie and bake it. That would help. The steak and kidney pie had puff pastry on top, it’d rise and get golden and taste rich. Even the smell would hold me in the ordinary world. I had passed through a narrow and dangerous place. Finally I’d bobbed to the surface where I could breathe, but from now on I would be aware there were unseen energies on this coast, times and places where a person must move carefully.

Have you ever had that feeling of being in a narrow and dangerous place with some energy that didn’t mean you well?

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