Flight Instinct
the sky walks with me
silvering wet sand. My feet
splash through cloud puddles
When I was a girl in Trinidad, I learned to draw seabirds with two simple curved lines—a loose m. The curves adorned my childscapes: cloudless sky, turquoise water and sandy beach marked only by a perfect line of footprints. The footprints were copied from countless postcard images selling the allure of solitude. Seabirds took the idea a little further, soaring away from Earth—free.
As a young teen at school in England, I was well versed in the notion of solitude. The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights—I read them all, picturing lonely moors as I looked out over farm fields from the windows of my grandmother’s large, empty house. In choir, I sang a musical arrangement of “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Wordsworth’s daffodil poem, in which he rhapsodizes over “the bliss of solitude.” Later still, I discovered Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a writer whose lyrical flow of words was often inspired by being “alone with the vast tribunal that is the stormy sky.” Saint-Exupéry’s love for the sky was infectious. But only now, as an adult, have I comprehended the depth of his experiences. Immersed as I was in youth and swept by his obvious passion, I never fully understood that his carefully constructed teachings were learned through harsh experience. I adored his classic children’s novella The Little Prince, but I perceived it solely as a thing of beauty, not as I see it now: a cautionary tale.
I’m standing on the suspension bridge platform. Below me, Lynn Canyon is a veritable snake pit, seething with November floodwater. A continuous wall of white-brown froth charges over the lip of the cliff and explodes downward into the mess of the canyon. The sheer rock walls transmit the energy upward, causing the bridge cables to swing, creak, vibrate. Every year there are deaths here—girls and boys of summer, jumping from the cliffs into drought-stricken, too-shallow pools, or being held underwater by the downward force of the currents. I understand the thrill, but I also see the way peer pressure changes the equation. I’m eighteen and I’m on my daily mountain-bike commute to Capilano University in North Vancouver. It’s early in the morning and there’s no one around to peer pressure me, so I do it myself. It’s taken months for me to gain confidence at this. But now I pull the bike between my legs and point it at the narrow bridge. Who needs coffee, when they can have a shot of adrenaline? If the bike throws me, I might tumble over the safety cables, into the canyon. If. I breathe the word “go” and swoop across the narrow swaying bridge, picking up speed on the descent and slowing again as I near the platform on the far side.
Propelled by exhilaration, I fly up the trail, even though my tires are bogged down on the steep wet path. Cedar and hemlock trees block out the already dim light of the shortening days. By December, I will be using a headlamp to get through the forest in the mornings. In January, who knows what I’ll be doing? That’s when my practicum work placement is due to start. And so far I’ve failed to arrange anything. I’ve chosen the field of nature interpretation, but my foreign student visa prohibits me from working for money. It’s complicated, stressful. Somewhere in the tangle lies the viability of a life in Canada. I emerge from the darkness onto the Seymour Demonstration Forest road. From here, it’s all downhill. But instead of coasting, I urge the bike onward. Today is the day I find out if Pacific Rim National Park will accept me as an international student volunteer. If they do, my practicum dilemma will be over. I fly downhill into the campus, screeching to a halt at our department’s small free-standing building, where my friends are gathered. “Joey!” calls Kristy—a laughing, white-blonde girl, possibly the friendliest person I’ve ever met. The way she greets people, you’d think she hasn’t seen them since last year. Her vivacity is infectious. I smile back and greet my friends.
Pacific Rim National Park. I can’t believe my luck! I’ve been longing to find a way back to the west coast of Vancouver Island ever since a two-week kayaking trip in Kyuquot Sound when I was seventeen. The trip was life altering, causing me to abandon my reluctant plan to study English literature at Birmingham University. On our logging-road route back to civilization after the trip, I stood outside a diner in a tiny town called White River and swore—with the absolute conviction of youth—that I would never darken the doors of an office block, or windowless workspace. My transition to a career in Outdoor Recreation may have seemed sudden to some, but right then outside that diner, in air thick with french fry grease, it made perfect sense to me.
At school I most enjoy the outdoor skills programs, love the earth sciences—ecology, geology, climatology—and yawn a little over topics such as special event planning and business management. It is my inspiring science teacher who has arranged for me to study west coast natural history and nature interpretation at the Wickaninnish Interpretive Centre, in the Long Beach unit of the park. The Centre is fifteen kilometres from Ucluelet, not an impossible biking distance despite the steep hills involved. As it is winter, I will have the beach, and the Centre, mostly to myself. The Pacific might not be turquoise at this latitude, but that line of postcard-perfect footprints will lead to me.
It’s the beginning of a new year; I’m peering through misted-up bus windows at the dark, rain-wet road unspooling through the endless forest. My stuffed-full expedition backpack and beloved mountain bike wait for me under the bus like loyal talismans. I’ve shared many adventures with both of them and I know they make good companions. Eventually, a strand of roadside buildings appears, loosely strung from one end of the town to the other. The bus makes several stops, dropping off bundles of newspapers. There is no bus station and it takes me a while to realize when it’s time to get out.
My first night, I roam the eightplex compound where I’ve been assigned free housing. It’s mid-winter and no one else is living here. The units sit dark and empty like so many caves, waiting to be filled by summer-season staff. Something about the emptiness makes me shiver. Perhaps it’s the echo. The compound is recessed from the road in a treed area, set around a central parking lot. On one side of my unit, a tangle of trees and undergrowth is within touching distance; on the other, security lights from the parking area flood the small kitchen window. Turn one way and the forest welcomes me; turn the other way and I might be in jail.
I wake to a neighbourhood cat, curled on a round cushion of dense orange moss in a tree outside my window. The cushion is a perfect fit and provides the cat with a lookout spot, fifteen feet above the forest floor. I imagine the cat’s body heat and rumbling purr being absorbed by the moss. I warm my hands on a mug of tea and take in the slow spotlight of its swivelling gaze, the ginger paws pressed against its heart. The warmth and contentment of the cat seem like a good omen, facing me in the right direction.
Ucluelet is a company town in thrall to MacMillan Bloedel, the multinational company dominating the coastal logging industry. There is a visible pickup-truck fraternity, and company loyalty is fierce. Environmentalists are a direct threat. M&B, as they are known, have carried out the clear-cutting of Mount Ozzard, which rises up on the north side of the Ucluelet Harbour, and which Ucluelet townsfolk look at daily as part of their view, low cloud permitting. If I, or M&B, were to become skilled at reading tea leaves, we might foresee the demise of M&B in three years’ time, during the Clayoquot Sound protests of 1993. But I’m brand new on the coast—a greenhorn. And as a bike-riding, backpack-toting student, working at the park—as far as the fraternity is concerned, I have Environmentalist written all over me.
My place of work, the Wickaninnish Centre, doesn’t disappoint. It’s situated on a rocky point with the beach wrapped around it and the high tide sweeping against its foundations. I imagine the rumble of Pacific storms, my face pressed against wave-dashed windows. There is even an ocean observation room upstairs, with cushioned window seats for just that purpose. The main part of the building—a dim, barn-like space—is painted with a massive mural of the gloomy offshore depths, dominated by a large humpback whale. I am to share an office with the soft-spoken woman who will oversee my learning when she is not in the field or away at meetings. My desk faces the wall, but a small window on my right looks out onto the log-strewn terminus of Wickaninnish Beach. That first lunch break, my supervisor and I walk the beach to the sand dunes, where she shows me a uniquely shifting world, set back from the high-tide zone, dotted with small islands of stunted trees. The following day we walk over to South Beach, where Pacific swells crash onto rocky stacks, exploding into white foam. Every few seconds the beach changes colour, from frothy white to steel grey, as heavy waves pound the dark sand, rushing up the steep incline before being sucked back into the roiling mess of the bay. A mist hangs over the stacks, like the ghosts of so many waves. I breathe in the spray, exhilaration flooding my lungs. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.
In my practicum days, there is no email, no Internet. Social media is not simply a screen away. I connect with my family in England only by international mail. Calling my friends in Vancouver will require a visit to the bank for the pound-weight of quarters I’ll need to feed the pay phone. At the eightplex, if I want to connect with other people, I’ll have to go into town and introduce myself—label and all.
It’s January. I rise in darkness, hauling on cycling gear as the wind whips rain and tree branches against my bedroom wall. I clip a bike helmet over my rainproof hood and stash lunch and dry clothes in my backpack. The first few kilometres of the road are lit with street lights. Then the true darkness begins. The shoulder is narrow and several of the hills are long and steep. The road undulates and snakes, up and down, side to side. My light picks out the white line and I follow it, surprised when my front wheel drops into a deep pothole and slaps muddy water across my face. One hill in particular is long, the ascent sustained. I breathe hard, looking down at the asphalt, not up at the hilltop. It may be an optical illusion, but when I can’t see the incline, the biking seems easier.
A beam of light illuminates my way-finding and I’m distracted by the passage of a car. By the time I make out the park decal, it’s already passed me. Still… a fellow park worker! Solidarity surges through me. Then another car passes. And another. A stream, all with a single driver, all representing Environment Canada. They zoom by as if I’m invisible, their lights disappearing into the future, leaving me suddenly blind in the darkness. The feeling of solidarity wanes, but returns a few minutes later when another truck passes, this one full of workers. As it, too, disappears ahead of me, I realize that it is a crummy, the nickname given to the white, cube-shaped forest-worker transport vehicles. Environmentalists and loggers—everyone is going to work, bees to their prescribed flowers.
When I reach the Millstream subdivision, a glow lights the glimpse of inlet water. Behind me the grey dawn is striving for effect, throwing washes of shadow over the receding mountains. It’s a good place to pause, about a third of the way there, but the biggest of the hills has been conquered. Later, after fifty minutes of steady biking in light that ranges from dark to dim, I freewheel down a short, steep stretch of road to the Centre, where I wander through the cavernous dark space to my office. My supervisor sets me up with reading material and retreats to her computer, arranging her day before leaving for a meeting. At lunchtime, I walk the beach, marvelling at the onslaught of the weather, the relentless shoreward thrust of the ocean. And as the day comes to a close, I pull on my cycling gear and start the journey home, arriving—as I left—in darkness.
At the eightplex, with lights to banish the darkness, I prepare supper and read a book. There is no radio and no TV. I consider listening to music on my Walkman, but batteries are a luxury, so I set a limit. Side A or side B, not both. I choose Creedence Clearwater Revival for the sing-along value—a warm reminder of happy hiking trips. I wonder if the cat is still on his cushion of moss, but it’s too dark to tell. As my head touches the pillow I make a note of the deep, splashy pothole and remind myself to avoid it tomorrow.
As a child, I wandered the many empty rooms of my grandmother’s house when I was sent there for month-long holidays. Exploring the unpeopled, unlit Wickaninnish Centre doesn’t seem much different from those wanderings. Technically, I’m used to being by myself. Likewise, walking the beach alone doesn’t seem much different than walking the English countryside for hours when I was a teenager. The only challenge of my new situation seems to be the graveyard feel of the eightplex. There is an eeriness to the way the parking area lights flicker over my sleeping eyes and the tree branches brush against the walls of my room. As the weeks pass, these little things, combined with the never-ending storms and rain, begin to bother me. The lack of daylight—exacerbated by the relentless low-pressure systems and pouring rain—is a constant obstacle. There is something textural about the winter darkness in the rainforest, as if it is a living being—a power-hungry tyrant seeking to expand its empire. Even when the wind and the rain are absent, the darkness presses in on me, an unwanted, ever-present companion.
Two nights a week I have aerobics to look forward to. I’ve signed up for the social contact and struggle through the routines, never improving, hopelessly unable to mimic the instructor. But other than my supervisor, the leotarded ladies at aerobics vanish when the class is over. In Ucluelet, only the cashier at the Co-op calls me by my name. Her badge says Joanne, so I’d pointed out that we were almost name-sisters. Perhaps I should introduce myself to people more often. Weekends seem to last forever. I read books, play the flute, walk, ride my bike, stock up on groceries, read more books. Time takes on a warped quality, unpredictable in its speed of passage. Once or twice the cat returns to the cushion of moss, bringing its state of contentment with it. I imagine its smooth ginger head rubbing against my ankles, the arch of its back under my hand. I imagine having a warm companion as I read my book on the couch. Sometimes I open the door, to see if it is there. It never is. Instead, as isolation grows around me, I go more frequently to the cashier’s till at the Co-op for that one moment of recognition.
Without social contact, I have only my imagination for company. I’m reading Anna Karenina and my mind is papered with the complex twists and turns of the plot. My thoughts become demanding, crying out for resolution. They mingle with casual observations that come about as I navigate my surroundings—the raven on my morning doorstep, would Anna consider it an omen? Should I? On lunchtime walks, I often find myself seated on a log, unable to continue walking because I need to finish thinking.
I’m riding to work. I’ve navigated the pothole and tackled the steepest hill in record time. The Parks Canada vehicles have passed me, one by one, their sightless occupants reminding me of people in dreams, the ones you need help from but who can’t seem to hear you. I stop for the sunrise at Millstream, gold on grey. The crummy passes me, late, I think to myself.
But as it passes something moves in the window of the rear door. It is a hand. Someone is waving at me. The moment is so brief, I could be mistaken. The hand forms an image in my mind’s eye, surrounded by the negative space of the window. Pale hand, dark window. The centreline of the road is transposed onto the image, like the lifeline of the hand. My heart is in that hand. Lines of the heart, lines in the land, centre lines, railway lines, Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, omens, omens, a raven knifing overhead, black and fast. At the turnoff to Wickaninnish Road, a red-tailed hawk plummets from a tree into the grassy verge, startling me. I stop my bicycle and watch the scimitar beak stabbing and plucking at a small furred mouse or vole. I marvel at the ruffled plumage of the bird, its disregard of me, its bloodlust. Hunger.
It’s lunchtime. I’m walking the beach alone, as usual. I sit on a log, wishing Anna Karenina could choose a better way, gazing at the sand, not really seeing it. Then a picture forms, bright and vivid, of a cut running lengthwise along the artery of a pale bare wrist. It is about two inches long, deeply incised and freshly done. Bright drops of blood bubble to the edges, ready to spring from the wound. The cut isn’t real. I know that. But the wrist is. I recognize it. It’s mine.
I leap up and look around to see if anyone else is on the beach. Even the sight of another person might help dispel the picture. But the beach is empty. I walk back to work, hoping my supervisor will be in the office. Once I see that she is at her desk, I take up my pen and continue the illustration of a Brandt’s cormorant I’m working on. It doesn’t matter that there is quietness, what matters is her presence. I quickly forget the wrist image and wrap up the day with the drawing accomplished.
That night, however, I’m just getting into bed when the image recurs. It’s just as vivid and my throat tightens. I try to shrug it off, but somehow it persists, lingering the way a bad dream can linger even after waking. I divert myself by reading, but I’m still reading at three in the morning, reluctant to turn off the light. The next day I ride my bike to work in a state of wide-awake tiredness. The image presents itself several times that day. Always, I push it away.
Not only does the wrist image recur with increasing frequency, it interrupts my thoughts. No longer can I follow a thought to completion. My mind is peppered with this ghoulish message. Why? I like my life. I don’t want to cut my wrist and I don’t want anyone else to, either. I don’t want to think about the image, but I constantly find myself doing so. I want to sleep at night, but I’m unable to let go, scared of what the image might do to me while I’m sleeping. The storms continue; the rain seldom lets up. I walk around the empty Wickaninnish Centre during the day and I pace the empty eightplex at night. Some mornings I shake with exhaustion. I begin to “miss” sections of my bicycle commute. I suddenly wonder how I’ve come to reach the junction, or the turnoff. I have no memory of long stretches of the journey.
One day at work, I see The Wrist more times than I can count. My weary eyelids close—blink—and there is the image. I wonder if it’s now burned into my retinas, like the sun when I’ve seen it with my naked eyes. To distract myself I walk around the Centre, faster and faster, until I’m almost jogging. The jogging helps, but as soon as I slow down—blink—there’s The Wrist, superimposed upon the gloomy depths of the deep-sea mural. Blink—there it is hovering in front of the life-sized Nuu-chah-nulth whaling canoe. No matter where I go, the image comes with me. My lunch goes uneaten. I barely drink water. I flee home on my bike, cycling faster than ever before, trying to out-race myself. At home I collapse, the image flickering through my brain like a shorting-out fluorescent tube.
Unable to eat, or sleep, I go to the Co-op and exchange precious bills for a stack of quarters. There’s a tinkling waterfall of sound as the coins pour into the pay phone and I call Kristy. “Joey!” she exclaims in her always-happy voice, “your ears must be burning! There’s a gang of us here and we were just wondering how things are going for you?” She clamps a hand over the receiver and yells, “Guess what, you guys—it’s Joanna!!” A distant chorus of shouts reaches my ears, variations on the theme of Hi, how’re you doing? My legs begin to tremble and I slide down the wall, laughing and shaking. Dimly, I realize that I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed. The phone is passed from person to person. I talk and laugh and talk some more, using up every last quarter. In all that time I never once see The Wrist. A welcome breeze blows through me. “Can I come and visit you next weekend?” I blurt as I’m saying goodbye. “For sure!” says Kristy, her voice distorted by the beep as the money runs out. I sit on the floor, holding the receiver as if it’s a new talisman in my life. What would Anna Karenina think of that?
It’s ridiculous, of course. I can’t afford the bus fare. But my flight instinct has kicked in. I request time off, borrow money and leave on a Friday, arriving in North Vancouver late that night. Warmth and noise radiate from my friend’s small ground-floor apartment, which is packed with familiar faces. I dive into the melee, whooping as I hug one friend after another. Even the music blaring from a ghetto blaster is something to celebrate. My life has been so quiet! I down a can of beer in three gulps and feel the alcohol run through me. In this moment, I am invulnerable. The Wrist can’t find me here. I could be dreaming, but I don’t care. I waltz into the living room and begin a charade. Comedy. The role of me at aerobics classes.
That Sunday I make my way back to the coast, not knowing what I will face on my return. I know only one thing: if I can’t live by myself, life is going to be messy. Whatever my situation, I’ll have to get on with it. In fact, the week after I return, a park employee arrives for the season, moving into the unit next to mine. The following week I’m invited to Friday night volleyball in Tofino—fun games followed by a visit to the pub. My days no longer begin and end in darkness. At work, interpreters arrive, abuzz with stories of how they’ve spent their winters. And that’s how I realize that winter is over. The daylight has returned, changing everything.
Studies involving isolation and solitary confinement show that sleep disruptions and hallucinations are common. Often the participants become so distressed they cannot continue with the study and ask to be released. Prisoners are not so lucky. Such conditions are more extreme than mine were. And yet the lack of daylight and human connection obviously took their toll on me. Only much later did I begin to see things from a distance. I pieced together the days and the nights, wondered how many times a day I may have spoken, or been spoken to, considered the absence of pets or family members. I factored in the weather, the darkness, the silence, the echoing eightplex.
At the time, though, I didn’t think about what had happened. The experience was either present, or absent. And once it was absent, I forgot it. Like the seabirds of my childhood, my life arrowed off to more and more remote locations. A lack of housing in Tofino was responsible for the collection of islands and floathouses I later came to call home, and my profession as a kayak guide led me often into wilderness. But as a one-time lesson in life—a teachable moment to prepare me for my future—my brush with isolation showed me what a trap it could be.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that the only true form of wealth was “that of human contact.” He learned about isolation and survival after crashing his radio-less plane in the Sahara Desert in 1935. I didn’t have to crash a plane to put myself in his shoes, but nowadays when I read The Little Prince, I see one man’s elegy to loneliness. And like the Little Prince wondering about his rose, I’ve tried to go back in time to find the girl I was then, reaching for her in the grey light of my inner eye. But in my meditations she eludes me. There is the soft white glow of bone and two dark eyes. Never a face, never a voice, never a thought. I’ve seen a capsule of roots, grown dense over the years, and once a glimpse of limbs, bunched and muscular, springing away from me. For all my inner exploration, what sticks with me is a white bird, exploding out and away from the cage of roots, later lodging in my third eye, where the fluttering wings still fan my thoughts.