The Haida Gwaii Detour

1. Ghosts

1. Ghosts

This is more than a ghost story — but spirits do walk among these pages.

Ethan, your reluctant hero,1 once asked me, “How could anyone breathing or otherwise qualified sit anywhere but on the spiritual fence? Faith? I have faith the sun will come up every day in the east, because I’ve seen it. I have faith politicians, priests, and generals will enslave us for the same reasons. Do our chains rattle when we try to think freely? But I still wait to see a man walk on water or escape the grave. So what, exactly, is the message?”

Here, without the benefit of any backstory, and although you have yet to travel a single mile with Ethan, your narrator begs your indulgence. I have to interrupt the lineal flow of this story to relate the event of Ethan’s first spiritual experience on the islands. He says such awakenings are common in Haida Gwaii and that each is important, unique, and intense, although his first visitor freaked him … right … out. Ethan sent me these pages, confident of the content. “The sentiments are precise,” he said, but he apologized for the language and tone; he was alone and in his new trailer. These are Ethan’s original words ...

I love a storm, but for three successive days it has been the same, and this last day is too much. Each bleak dawn, witch Hecate’s2 disheartening landscape of boiling, grey-green turmoil and cascading rushes of white foam has materialized. Her voice is deep and leviathan below a piercing treble wail as she shoves logs, rocks, and wavy, textured sand runnels across the closed coast highway. White-capped combers stampede along the miles of beachhead before the gale, like an endless herd of monstrous beasts. Seashell spume streams inland, raking the flooded pastures with persistent yet chaotic wind. I have become too cautious to venture far from home, and no one has visited for days.

But this night! Another sleepless, starless, moonless eternity, the perfect canvas for Hecate’s outrageous brushstrokes. An avenging demon empowered by the darkness, she is relentless, driving forth waves of torrential rain; she wars across all the islands, but it feels like She discharges the brunt of her fury on our secluded community. The first intimations she had awakened came as whispers, but now she screams with violent hysterics, pummelling the exposed sides of my flimsy shelter. Here, atop the dune, spruce and cottonwood trees have twisted amongst themselves, bent low before her will, and flailed for days and nights to all points of the compass, but still she bares her teeth in wrath.

Since the disappointment of dusk fell away to night, I have had to grip my table twice with both hands to remain in my chair. I am tormented and exhausted to the bone. Dangerous gusts, her most powerful overtures yet, rock my trailer on its foundation and threaten to roll it over the bank, toward the river. The curvature of the sand dune and the backstop of trees on the far bank create a powerful swirl, a flanking vanguard that complicates the already potent maelstrom advancing with even greater force, fuelled by the incoming tide. I curse my affinity for Edgar Allen Poe’s vivid imagination. Surely this is the kind of withering tempest at the ends of the earth (or after nightfall) worthy of his notice.

I can discern her subtle changes, as if I am in the state of mind manifest during an evolving tragedy when the action turns to slow motion. I calm my nerves when the main strength of the wind lifts above my trailer and is aimed away from me for brief periods before she slams me again. Her thunder produces explosive echoes, a cacophony that arrives from distant miles. When this happens, and it seems to develop in cycles, the incessant treetop swordplay awakens my senses. Broken limbs torn from trees crash to the ground, and some hit my trailer; the interjections rise pointillist above the witch’s shriek, as if someone — or something — is drumming on my walls. I feel as if I am a recluse, that I suffer malarial hallucinations in one of Poe’s otherwise abandoned slaver mansions, startled awake by each bang of an unsecured shutter.

But the strains of this lonely night have developed a different tenor; an eerie, heavy melody plays a melancholy, withering dirge on the strings of my soul. In the cracked mirror, my Duchamp3 cheeks are hollow and my eyes sunken and withdrawn; my shoulders are uncollected. I will myself to seek equilibrium. As though unbalanced on an event horizon, I struggle against imagined gravitational forces. I rely on the tenuous logic (but with diminished resolve) that the trailer has so far withstood the storm’s worst.

Mentally, I have succumbed to distraction, although I still attend to, or rather fidget over my modest collection of letters and poems. Sitting at the small table at the windward end of the trailer, I am distressed that my windows leak. Again, I need to wring out the towels sopping up the water. My back is bent; I hover over my powder-blue portable typewriter and watch keys at my fingertips snap at the near-empty wash of white paper. I squint at the few inadequate words through the Pantone light thrown by the kerosene lantern. The coals in the small wood stove are turning to grey ash, but I am reluctant to stir outside to fetch more firewood. Instead, I covet my tepid mug of tea, fortified by the sweetness of Canadian whiskey and hoping for sleep.

Mine is the only light visible through the thickness of the storm, and though it is adequate to cast a weak illumination through the windows, it fails to penetrate the gloom of the black hole at the far end of the hallway. Always there, the open bedroom door menaces my musings. I fight my imagination until the persecution reaches a critical level. I am compelled, then, to break from my writer’s trance, gaze past the page, and focus on the storm.

Outside, an unexpected movement catches my eye. I stare at the window and see a contorted, shadowy face pushed up against the glass and then watch it fade back into the night.

I shiver; the hair is prickly on the back of my neck. An irrational terror paralyzes me, as if I am locked in a medieval torture device.

The indistinct face was inhuman.

I stare for some seconds, I’m unsure for how long, to give the uninvited visitor time to depart. When I can move one hand, fortune smiles on me; my slick palm and fingers still grip my tepid mug of tea mixed with whiskey. I gulp the rest, keeping my eyes on the windows. Despite the earthy reassurance of the strong drink, my forehead is wet with sweat and my shirt clammy. The fire in my belly makes me braver. I will have more courage, I decide, after I pour another whisky, then I will chase away mischievous neighbours — from any dimension — who play country tricks on me. I suppress my shock with numb logic and another gulp of whiskey before I gather the fortitude to investigate.

I retrieve my weighty flashlight from a kitchen drawer, but it fails after a brief flicker from the worn-out batteries. I improvise and second its functionality as a weapon. Steeled by another gulp of whiskey from the bottle and armed with my improvised club, I shoulder the outside door open wide. In return, the gale gives epic voice, barring my exit. I reel backwards, thrown almost off my feet. The force pushes the frame off its levelling cedar blocks and heels the trailer over to a dangerous angle but fails again to roll it completely over. I lunge for the table. I regain my balance and secure the wood stove until the extreme force relents and the floor assumes a more or less even keel. Unanchored now, it and the walls toss in every aspect as if they are loose, canvas sails. It occurs to me, as these moments of adrenal-charged clarity can appear during times of heightened anxiety, that my door opens to the west. How, I wonder, could such a strong wind prevail from the direction opposite the gale?

Someone — or something — is here. I feel it.

I am past timidity. The whiskey has fortified my resolve, so, again, I venture out with empty valour to reclaim my space. If I am dared to show myself outside, I accept the challenge. The lantern still throws light that illuminates massive raindrops blown on the horizontal past my open door. My legs are as heavy as bags of cement when I take my first tentative steps into the viscous, drenching downpour. I tighten my grip on the flashlight, and my shirt flaps whip at my arms and back. Drawn from my cover, I anticipate a violent confrontation, a growling emergence from the sand of an enraged spirit in a black and scarlet feather shroud, its bare claws digging at my flesh while its raven-head beak tears off vengeful, bone-deep bites. I stand outside my door, pushed around in the wind and soaked to the skin, but no evidence materializes to validate my suspicions of a haunting. Surely, I rationalize, if I walk around my home, my domain is mine to recover. But this is no night for rational dismissals; the same deep terror confronts me as I round each successive blind corner.

Having circumnavigated the trailer and failing to encounter an agent from another dimension, I am left to consider only a finite set of other, anticlimactic possibilities: the invasion might have been one of Monk’s free-range cows seeking shelter from the storm.

“Monk, you asshole.” I curse like a madman from the bottom of my strained lungs into the gale. “Look at what you’ve done to this place.”

I hurry to gather an armload of firewood before I return inside. My hands tremble as I loop a secured rope around the inside doorknob. I turn the kerosene lantern up full, light both propane lanterns, and am quick to strike a match to every candle I find in the bedroom. Eventually, an impressive luminous intensity radiates out of all the trailer windows. I am ashamed and embarrassed, but still I draw all the curtains closed.

I sit in front of the stoked wood stove and enjoy two more full, fortified cups of hot herbal tea. Once my jangled nerves have calmed, I remove my wet clothes, towel myself dry, and change into dry clothes. I even laugh at my folly. Then I decide to try automatic writing to conjure up a more agreeable muse.

When the visitor reveals himself, he has no shape and arrives without malice to fill me with calm conjecture and wonder. He speaks, or rather I sense a gentle, soothing rhythm that resonates with the approximation of a confident Scottish brogue — after the fashion of Sean Connery in the movie Marnie. I have the absurd notion that I have conjured the voice from within myself, but, as if dosed with Haitian zombie powder, my will has surrendered. I scrawl his message on my pad of paper. When finished, my highland visitor fades quietly away into the stormy night, and in his wake, I am left with this dictation:

“This is a playground, a place in time, abundant in reality where others still hunger for more. Real people take roles in masques and can bewitch themselves.”

And …

“No one is guaranteed a stereotyped role, a spotlight, or even a script, and no one is immune from the final plot twist, and no one is guaranteed an encore.”

Sure …

“Youth and passion must be celebrated in radiant bloom. Invest your ration completely; it can end forever at any moment. Death’s strong first cousin, Life, draws us outward, where each of us earn our first breath — so enjoy it until your last. Life is the precious substance closest to your soul.”

…and blah-de-blah blah…

I decide these musings are only my own sophomoric creation; I never liked Sean Connery in that movie anyway, so I crumple the pages and throw the paper ball into the blazing stove. The flames flare, the words glow neon orange, and then the white ash separates from the ink and drifts up the chimney and into the gale. I douse my lights and retire to toss through the remainder of the night, listening to the demented witch vent her outrage despite my humble offering.

• • •

The storm persevered well into the next day before it blew itself out. I toured Sçid Çándl on foot to survey any local damage, of which there was very little, before I was finally able to enjoy a decent meal and regenerative sleep. It took three days for a crew to clear the downed trees from the highway and two more before the electric power returned, but there were no reports of anyone lost at sea.

• • •

Thank you, dear reader, for your tolerance. By now you are well introduced to Ethan’s story. The next pages will continue true to Ethan’s heart and faithful to his experiences, which are the aspirations of any scribe. For the purposes of authenticity and presenting the plain truth, Ethan instructed me to remove his voice from the narrative wherever possible and produce all events in their natural order of occurrence. We can now return to the past, where the present seems so real, to the day Dan came to visit.