the trip to haida gwaii

Oh so very many years ago...

I met a man at the end of a pier in Port Clements, B.C., Canada, on the islands we have the audacity to call the Queen Charlottes. Their real name is Haida Gwaii. Masset Inlet lapped at the great pilings of this spectacular pier the loggers use to transfer their product onto ships. It was Victoria Day weekend and all was still. A goofy raven came out there with me, like he did everywhere else I went on those islands. I don't know if it was always the same one, or just that the goofy ravens of Haida Gwaii were intrigued with me. Good company. The sky hung on us in that important way it does so far north. Pregnant swells of cloud, whales basking above us in sunlit krill, let beams through across the water onto a forested island, light fingers of wisdom pointing to truth, an Ultimate Tour Guide clueing us in. Majesty was everywhere, and we felt ourselves to be in church. This man on the end of the pier was crying. He was Irish. God, yes, Irish, lilting exclamations of awe breathing out his wet face.

It was the porcelain face, the faint blue of veins, the rose-flushed cheeks, the dark eyes and hair, curly and looking vaguely damp. He had a medium to small build, wearing a leather jacket, jeans and biker boots. His name was Jaime, and he said he was from North Vancouver, but he even sounded straight from Ireland. I never saw a man wear his genes so completely. They filled the air. It was like coming into James Joyce's parlor in many ways, meeting Jaime. We were on a timber loading dock in the middle of the Haida Nation, the lands where always a raven plays near, and literary genius was making a pocket in this cosmos before my eyes. Tears came from him as I've only seen them come from loggers. Tears of verity, tears with no vestige of affectation or device --> truth on the face of man.

He'd been sitting there in pain and insobriety for a while. I'd seen him go from my seat at a view table in the pub on the shore. His buddy had pointed him out to me, and told me that he might get fired soon for being more a moody poet than a faithful logger. He was very worried about his pal. So, when I'd walked out to meet this doomed poet, I'd been expecting something else. I expected petulance, that sort of teenage anger that comes on so many men who are about to lose their jobs. Instead, I walked the long pier into the aforementioned majesty, and one tear-drenched man accepted my approach as naturally as his next breath. He was with the ghosts, and I belonged.

It was very nearly his thirty-seventh birthday, and he was mourning his dead twin sister who'd died of a drug overdose at this time two years before. We talked of beauty and of pain, the kind that renders even the-white-man as natural as the-red, the kind known mostly only by the dead. Haida Gwaii held us, kissed us, did not suffer us like the tread of so many other strangers. The-white-man does belong to nature; it's never been so plain. It is only the realization of spirit that holds us away. All the filthy wasting we do is but the product of our own denial of our deepest nature --> our truest selves.

Truth burned like a stopped comet on the end of that pier. No small talk issued from it. I started talking to Jaime's pain, respecting it, welcoming it --> to his surprise. It was not a look of shock, but rather it was a slight widening of his eyes, a smiling that in no way clashed with his grief, nor mine. I was speaking in his language. I spoke what he had already written in his little pocket journal, the faithful link with his talent that even went with him to work. He kept bringing it out and pointing to its crumpled scrawls. Jaime and I spoke in the strange syntax of spirit, in parts of sentences, in evocative lilts, in the hum --> not conversational English. No. We spoke poetry --> not James Joyce's, not logger doggerel --> pure Haida, pure human. We belong together in a way that is like no other. We had never laid eyes on each other before and we met without the slightest edge of alienation. Since then, I have learned why some walk in me where others seem utterly unequipped to go, and why I feel alien in those others. Now I know why I have always been aware of so much more in the people I meet than they would have another know, than they know themselves much of the time. Now I know why "crazy" people reach for me, why I've always been able to talk with the insane. Jaime was about my last encounter before I knew. Jaime is my brother and so was Vincent Van Gogh. I was just about to find out what I should have known long ago.

We talked of the desire to be dead, about living in pain so acute death seems absolutely happy to compare, and how gorgeous it is at this edge. We agreed our suffering had only made the beauty more intense, more worth the death wish. We talked about the crowds denying themselves this knowledge, its light, all the drunken souls clambering in the logger hang-out behind us on the shore: men living one long bruise from an eternal beating --> drowning it in booze <-- men who face the spirit daily and must chop it down.

Western Man's raised a drunk millennium, a prison of alcohol soluble bars. We get pop therapies for it instead of the kind of love that can heal it, the kind of love that respects the pain. We're so convinced to survive we must ignore spirit, even when we talk about God. How could we have created such a beastly lie? Credentialed morons march us back into the ranks from our drunken hiding places, instead of giving the love that strips us down and shows us, in all our terror, our actual life. There is a good, and gorgeous, place for us alive. You must see how stunning it is, here, on the end of the pier of pain, aloft probable suicide, to be just a misbalance away from death, before you know what you have to know to be a good organism on Haida Gwaii, on Earth.

Haida Gwaii --> aka the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia, Canada, claimed from its inhabitants as if moon soil with no human there to dispute it <-- is the place where ancient raven plucked the first men from a giant clam shell at Rose Spit, the very northeastern-most tip of the upside-down tear-shaped island chain. I know there are all kinds of other stories --> like Adam and Eve, and like how we grew from apes, and like how maidens flew from the Pleiades to breed with humans and gave them sentience <-- but the awful truth seems to be that a jet black trickster got pretty bored with the primal balance on the Pacific Rim, and opened a giant clam shell with strange contents, like the proverbial can of worms. Raven is the bringer of magic, the messenger of the void, the presence of the Great Mystery, the patron of smoke signals, the go-between of the Ancients, the very reason we are here, and my nanny in extremis, it seems.

So the Haida were the first humans and they lived lives of plenitude for thousands of years before the-white-man showed up. We gave them smallpox and shrunk their nation from ten thousand to barely six hundred with one cruel swipe. We've given their great cedar forests punk haircuts with many cruel swipes. They can barely hold their culture, huddled in Masset and Skidegate bands all too near the Canadians' pubs and the currency of rape. Still, they don't refute us; we refute ourselves in our blind march to a pillaged globe. It's not our skin color, or even our culture, that separates us. It is but our lost contact with our own true lives at fault. "What do you call the world?" Right about herein lies the culprit. Do you call a tree lumber?

I'd been on a long test drive out of my confused misery, screaming my lover's name involuntarily, gasping in tears and snot, days of moving, moving, moving, going in and going north. Have you ever gone on a drive into yourself, past all the fear and horror and manners and psychic paralysis of being a person? I'd sped through the Pacific Northwest in a trajectory that cut the miles like dreams do sleep, like Orca does his cold waters. On a pilgrimage --> going to God <-- right through this screaming mess I had made of myself, and into the infinity all around zero. There were forests around me, rock and roll racing up the Olympic Peninsula against some loggers in a snappy red Toyota truck, and forests within me were scaring me, wrenching me, making me cry. No unscathed expanses of old growth like when I was a child. My heart could only dance in little groves some wealthy patron or other had saved for all time. The rest was visibly maimed spirit home. From the redwood, through the doug fir, to the cedar, and back again, horror nearly ruined every step. They don't even hide the cuts from the highways anymore.

Now they erect proud signs that taint the readers' minds with hyperbole about Forest Management --> an oxymoron! <-- and grim statistics: "Clearcut, 1968; Replanted, 1970; Weeded, 1978; Next Harvest, 2020". Just about the time all these weak little whiskers get back to treedom: time for a new shave. This sign tactic began on the Olympic Peninsula and continued on through B.C. They got really audacious with them on Haida Gwaii. They used lofty terms about sainted logging corporations preserving trees for recreation and managing others for timber. This ought to work very nicely right up to the time when there's not one stick left but possibly the ones saved by those private patrons. Then the tourists will have to shrug and go away.

They'll take their rolling condominium caravans someplace else, scratch the Pacific Northwest off their itineraries, not even stop to wonder, to mourn, take in what the Haida have known throughout time --> man must live in balance with environment. I try to picture a bald Pacific Northwest, a naked Inside Passage, a ferry trip through mounds of dirt. Will Orca still breach? Will anything be alive? No one seems to get that a forest cannot come back from being over-cut. They think trees simply grow when you plant them. They don't understand how the water leaves, how the rain blows away, how the soil changes, and how things just will not thrive anymore once we've tipped the balance and cut too much. These signs play on this nearly universal ignorance.

Jaime and I cry comfortably with molten eyes at the end of our pier at the border of truth. I mention these punk haircuts, dotting even this spectacular vista, and he leaps to incant the Company Line, the same one immortalized on their sick signs. It is met with a stare from me, a stare that melts his words into a guilty little vapor as if he'd just passed wind. He sinks back into the truth, turns his porcelain hands upward in an attitude reserved for religious sculptures, and I see him at the turning point, the spot where we go back to our programs from our visits with zero. I mention about how I bet some redwoods from my home would like to move to Haida Gwaii, how I feel they'd take to it in these majestic mists, the same kind that once held Northern California too. Or, maybe, if things get too bad, I could pack up a bunch of saplings and bring them with me to wherever I go to live away from it all. I'd be dead before one was big enough to call a tree. Jaime's about ready to go back to the pub, and I am on my way with my mascot goofy raven.

I go to write a poem to my lover, a logger as human as I am, a poem that is too close to sex to share with anyone else, but a Haida man comes over to me with a thrust-out hand, "Let me read it." I had to comply. He read it, read the voice of the one who is the most me, the me never born, and never will die, and said, in Haida tones, "I think I like the man who is your lover." Then hummed to me of how we are here to break the negative cycles. It is a fact the truth is out there for us only when first we have it in here. He spoke of his life, not at all unlike the long bruise of the-white-man's drunk millennium, and how an awakening had come; how he stopped batting his children into line, started living with them as equals; how he worked long nights on a book about how Haida can return and evolve at the same time, about how Haida can assimilate Western culture and turn it Haida instead of wrong. Ambitious. Pure. He spoke to me, freckled white woman with only some invisible indian blood, as if I am Haida, as if I'm his sister, which is absolutely right: Haida feel. He knew before me, from my poem, that I am Haida, and my lover is Haida. A raven played near.

He made me think of all the blending of Haida with the-white-man I'd seen and felt on my way to this place, not all of it bad. I remembered a conversation I'd been in back down on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It took place at dinner in a Tofino restaurant with a couple of sometime-loggers and sometime-fishermen and sometime-anything-that-makes-money all-around-great guys --> a big strapping white man and a big strapping Haida who were best buddies. I was saying how I was glad the indians on Mears Island had not let the loggers touch their gorgeous trees, how it made such an excellent view. Frowns crossed their faces. "You're not one of them bloody shrubs, are you?" Huh? I did not understand. Turns out, a "shrub" is what these Canadians call a tree hugger; one of the march of PC ninnies who never manage to do anything but make the problem worse. The types who debauch their lives to earn their pay --> oh, let's see, by hanging up a homeless and deranged war vet's paperwork for VA benefits for six winter weeks, having opted to handle a paying customer, or, and this really is good, by swearing this crystal banishes arthritis forever, just rub your third eye with it till your pain subsides <-- but think loggers ought to starve while we figure out how to save trees. A shrub blows up logging roads, puts hundreds of men into the welfare system who had rather feed their families. "No. No. No. I love loggers. The man I love more than anything on earth is a logger. I just love the trees. I mean, don't tell me you don't know big trees, those beautiful big trees have souls?" Neither could tell me he didn't know that. Big Lunk Canadian and Big Lunk Haida both got very quiet on that one. They both kept a reverence where their frowns had just passed. They saw me, they saw the woman on the other side of screams. The hum.

Two big stupid interracial bodhisattvas took scrupulous care of me, watched me like I was the last ancestor, the hope of their lives, during the days' wait before the ferry would arrive up in Port Hardy. Family more real than legal: seems like the whole Northwest knew me before I did. Humans switch into heroes quick as they encounter the true. Loving Lummox Heroes fed me gourmet straight from the sea, found me my own bed, walked me out long beaches rolling in a planet's worth of tears. They let me cry. They sat with me, guarding the formless freckled reality too far out of sync with The Rules to view the bald eagles, watching from the treetops, as birds. For free, with no motive, expecting not one thing in return, incarnate solidarity, 100% pure compassion, every cell devoted only to truth. My best reasons to live.

The Haida author waited for me to remember, then took hold of me again, now reminding me of the glowing half-Haida boy named Raven I'd met on the Inside Passage ferry. He'd been tall. His Haida cheeks were as rosy as Jaime's Irish ones. He looked just as pure. Purity does nah-hot depend on your bloodlines. This is something the Haida author was making me see. You can be Haida, pure human, without a drop of indian blood. It seems that most of the natives of this continent agree that you don't have to be a particular race to be pure human. Almost all of the native cultures of the Western Hemisphere share an ancient legend that a pale human would appear to become their brother. A pale human did appear, but the brother part has been real sketchy: Cortez, Custer, Andrew Smug-Double-Dealing-Sissy-Creep Jackson. When the-white-man showed up, all the tribes of the Western Hemisphere thought the prophesy of the Pale Brother had come true. Well, no one said it would happen right away. That the-red-man has been willing, against staggering odds, to treat certain whites as full brothers seems nothing short of miraculous, or ridiculous, to the contemporary American mind --> depending on our temperament. On Haida Gwaii, it became very plain to me, very real and true. It is no miracle. It's certainly not ridiculous. It's dodo truth. It comes to us only where being intersects with dying, the spirit place, where you stand with the paths to good and evil clearly marked in front of you, and the way to death on all sides. You are Haida there, and you can choose. Those who live in it know. Those who do not are killing our planet.

So the Haida author repeated to me that we live to break the negative cycles; no one is guiltless; Haida have been as negative as anyone else. I'd seen the pubs filled with lightless natives. I knew he did not lie. All humans, all of us, yuppies, loggers, shrubs, Haida must step out of this cycle that spins ever away from nature. He asked me, did I see? Yes! I'll be a logger-loving, tree-hugging dodo who is touched by pure humans... hell, I'll risk becoming dinner before I back down from this sight.

The Marxist struggle has reached another springtime in the Pacific Northwest. Black buds open for loggers and fishermen now, their misery about to come to full bloom, just as in the bitter springs past for steelworkers, miners, farmers, indians. Giant conglomerates of greed suck down our resources, leaving empty husks of verdant habitats and men. Spiders sucking the life out of terrified butterflies in their webs. How cruel the filaments of the, false, economy of cash, making us suffer and strive to earn the very stuff that saps our world of all its life. How could we stop this arachnoid economy? How could we stop the Oligarchy, if you don't mind the term, take the profit out of rape, stop the pillage of our resources, reunite the Haida Spirit of man, turn Red and Pale into the brothers foretold?

It is in this pain, the love burning in our chests to match it, that we realize the beauty of life, the grace of death, get a hot heart-full of the hum of truth. We realize our mistake. We called this into being, perpetrating our fictions, and got called accordingly --> sucking in hard on plastic death. At the end of this pier, we're stripped of pretension. We finally want, really want brotherhood with each other, all living things. Finally, no fiction makes do in our stead. Finally, the answer: what we've called spirit, waved off as some fine fairytale, is, in point of absolute truth, us. The actuality we've fictionalized into hell.

I spent five days on Haida Gwaii, where you can believe a raven plucked the first humans from a clam. In spite of the ugly naked swaths of clearcut all around, magic yet prevails. Whales play in its waters. Silken black bears roam its forests. Bald eagles are always in sight. The Ancients sing on Haida Gwaii. I was humming with visions of the vast forests that used to be. I had my very own guardian raven, flipping twigs and poking beaks in puddles, humming with the Ancients to the ocean we could see from between the trees. Coast redwood and giant sequoia covered most of California behind us. No checkerboards of anemic tree farms, made all the punier by contrast with the few fir saved in the national park, mutilated the Olympic Peninsula. All the islands of the Pacific Northwest were yet pristine, bulged with cedar, shore to shore. This song precedes everything we've done. In it there are no multi-millionaires, no Suits in Gucci shoes, no fucking dollar-signs-for-eyes assessing stately spirits that have stood for thousands of years, seeing only their profit, not reality, not trees. "I call this lumber, darlin'."

* * * * * * *

The guitar plays like your love talk, straight off the face of your heart! Can you hear this road, the fog banks, the bear paws and the slish of the sea on these diamond eyes? Do you see my roar of love in the North? Do you know I am you; that I don't fit in this skin? You are the whole word that sends prison from the face of Endurance. Powerful medicine, your name murmurs in the natives all around me. I scream it out my moon roof to the sky, but I'm afraid to utter it to humans --> like it might pour out all your magic and you'll be gone <-- so the Haida say it for me; give it to my ears. Every face is your face. It's all I can see. Good Christ! I know this jewel net. You are Indra now.

I can't live without you. You're my home planet. Aaack! This skin! I hate my skin. It's wrong! You are true. You are the only kiss I never questioned, and it's still kissing. You'd said, "99. You're pretty." That was all she wrote. You came in my eyes on those words, and never left. I am by a stream on a high mountain valley in a booming summer storm, not startled by decimating amazement, such size. I stop being me at all. I am the thunder --> serene --> oblivious to my own safety, my own life. That's what told me I'm pretty. That's what entered my eyes. Your voice. I'm not qualified to talk about Ordinary now, and I can't say your name to any human but you. I am you.

* * * * * * *

The Ancients talked about seeing with ears and hearing with eyes. Sounds like a lot of hocus-pocus before it happens. It happens. In true life it happens. True life is "like this." Walks in and never leaves. I have experienced true life. Each of us can, but few of us do. Once you know, nothing matters as much to you ever again, nothing. How could it? It all stopped being delineated into falsehood by self-serving views. You don't ever forget true life, nor would you stop it even if you could.

* * * * * * *

I had been trapped like a moth at a street lamp in British Columbia, dipped down into Washington once to wait for some mail, some money, but I'd had a statue to visit. A great cedar carving of raven with his clam shell, little round butts of men huddled therein, stood there, frozen millennia, humans' first moments, on the magical arc of Rose Spit. Terrified heathens, we quaked in our shell, waiting for the big bad bird to go away. We ran onto the wind-whipped beach, crazed in fear and the flood of freedom, fornicating wildly with the anemones on the rocks, breeding up a batch of Haida. Sealing my fate.

I'd driven out Canadian highways, silver ribbons 'round a giant green gift, watching rivers bulging out their banks race me, waterfalls pounding into them from the clouds. I'd learned new meaning in the concepts of thick, of plenty, of silence, and of tears. Mists, libraries of the Ancients, hung everywhere in the glistening air, and all of it worked on the trees like my lover's breath on my hair. The love I felt can't be said, can't communicate with the most exact description of the beauty there, and I've got to say it or it's the end of the world. I have to tell the truth of this love. It lives beyond, behind, before, despite killing pain. It meets killing pain pound for pound, and goes beginningless, limitless besides.

Still, I did not have this clearly wired-in at the time. I was very busy hoping for something to make of it, some bit of acceptable something to replace this killing true. I just could not trade in this true, no matter how much pain it meant. I was out of my mind, no beauty to call me back from this one, I would have to be made to know. Choking in continuous waves of pain, a naked woman being stabbed till not one particle of flesh is left big enough to slice, punctuating it all with yells of love, its exact name, at each new sight, I knew not the way to stop my next mistake. I swung from soft adagio to ripping crescendo of love-aching eons racing rivers out my heart, a symphony of the spheres playing in me. It had gotten so I could not see, could not quit the sharp jerks, could not get my ears to stop whirring like a high-pitched motor in a power plant.

The ancients called this world "Endurance".

We were put here to break the negative cycles. It was time to go.