The Haida Gwaii Detour

5. Dan-1

5. Dan

The view was spectacular, the hovel intimidating. At some time in the past, there had been at least one fire. One side of the hulk was substantially collapsed, as if some gigantic animal had leaned against the exterior and depressed the wall. Fortunately, the windows were intact. There were only blackened shreds of tires on the rims. On an aluminum scale, this was the House of Usher at its worst. Ethan called Dan’s name but received back only a weak echo. He put his gear down on the sand, took a warm beer out of the hockey bag, and considered the layout.

Toward the west, the still warm but setting sun was about to slip behind the wispy tops of Sitka spruce that towered over and lined the river’s far bank. In this light, the lower trunks took on a grey hue and the crowns a golden tinge. The soft colours of their graceful presence, the arc of the river, and the cottonwood backstop behind the trailer combined to create a secure, protective embrace. The onshore breeze had vanished with Aurora; the air was still with the full tide. Ethan held his breath to absorb the peace; however, to the east, the dogs began barking as someone at the ranch began chopping wood. Each whack and each bark was crystal clear. He walked several yards toward the tree line to peer over the slope and across the flats to the near riverbank. The water appeared still, as though it were a black ribbon that wound through the logging s***h and around the elevated dune to disappear behind the cluster of cottonwoods. From there, and freed from the forest, the river cut through the lush green fields before it ran to the ocean. The noise from the ranch ceased, but even a slight whisper failed to rise from the river; no riffle bubbled over a shoal or gurgled around submerged roots. It was as if time had stopped.

Ethan opened another beer and sat on a rickety lawn chair. He set the beer down on the wooden cable spool tipped on its side to function as a table. He inhaled, held, and exhaled another deep, relaxed breath and made himself look over and beyond the shambles of Monk’s logging clear-cut. Gone were telephone and power company cables. There was neither TV nor radio. There was no ... interruption. There was no lifestyle to maintain, no rent to pay, and no vehicle to insure or fill with OPEC-American Petrodollar gasoline. There was no clamour from ravenous corporations greedy for more profit. Madison Avenue no longer banged on his door, egging him on to purchase more — more unwanted and useless distractions. Wall Street no longer manipulated his attention away from selfish and useless politicians and other white-collar criminals he held accountable. There were no armed police abusing the law, martially establishing threat and control on the streets. There was no military, no bombs dropped, no missiles to run from, no religious ideologies to murder over, no debt, no greed, no hate, and no envy. There were no directors here, no one telling Ethan how and what to think. There was only the pure moment of the universe, which rotated on its infinite axis around Sçid Çándl, producing gamma-bursting peace and tranquillity.

A black bald eagle floated in from the beach, gliding on invisible air currents. It dropped low over the trailer to look at Ethan as it soared past and into the giant orange sun. The magnificent predator stroked powerful wings for height as it prepared its landing. The nest was built by generations past in the only snag amongst the ancient trees Monk had to leave along the river. Silhouetted against the sun, less than one hundred yards away, the eagle flared its wide wings to slow gracefully, its terrible talons reached for the grey, bare limbs, both wingtips fanned an array of long, precise feathers, tinged to fire by the sun, to sweep away its momentum until it dropped softly into the eyrie. Its partner arrived from the north and landed just as gracefully. The brown, mottled feathers of their brood stirred about inside the nest. The neighbours were home. Ethan felt as if he had been there for ten thousand years.

• • •

The stacks in the basement of the SFU library contained little literature that described modern life on the islands. Tedious geological surveys buried deep in a dusty stack of binders brought Ethan almost to tears and were a far cry from Dan’s high praise. Hundreds of black-and-white photographs existed of Haida art, totems, masks, and canoes, but many of the items themselves had been removed from the islands to foreign museums. There were photographs of people, most of which were images of serious Haida in ceremonial garb or sullen people dressed in drab Western attire that dated from the middle twentieth-century forward. He also found photos of totems and longhouses still erect on the southern islands, but little literature existed that was written by those who had lived among the Haida people or even on the islands.

Ethan was more hopeful for a wider range when he scanned through SFU’s microfiche library, but he found only a single newspaper article written by a self-confessed, inebriated English interloper passing through British Columbia on his return to Edwardian England. Ethan shared the page with me. The man’s singular contribution to a depiction of the islands was the memoir of his solitary, twenty-four-mile return journey along a boggy “road.” The trail dissected what would one day be named the Naikoon Park. The reserve is a massive swamp of mostly scraggy spruce that separates the village of Port Nowhere on Masset Inlet and the spectacular beaches on Hecate Strait. The swamp formed the northern edge of the small pioneer community with the awkward name of Sçid Çándl.12 The writer left me to form the impression that mosquitoes and black flies infest the islands and that a person would be unable to purchase a drink or sustenance along the sparse road that delivered bold — if debauched — tourists to nowhere. That promise, however, was good enough for Ethan, although it was impossible to resolve those paragraphs with Dan’s insistence, “Keep it quiet about how great a place Sçid Çándl is. We don’t want anyone up there who doesn’t fit in.”

Ethan concluded from geological maps that the Charlottes had splintered eons ago from the central coast of B.C. This was different from the archipelago’s southern neighbour, Vancouver Island, which trundled up the west coast of North America from the tropics, ages before Homo sapiens appeared on Earth. The Charlottes have rumbled around a fair bit since; the islands had no doubt shouldered into each other then, as they do now, on their northern and western migration toward Japan.

The reader will recall that Ethan left his notes with me. As your narrator, I present here his interpretation of the history of the European invasion of Haida Gwaii.

In 1787, the first of three critical blows fell heavily upon the Haida Nation. The event was initiated by trespass, the bombast of menacing cannon shot, a retaliation m******e, missionaries, and subsequent, brutal oppression of the locals and suppression of the Haida culture. The rigid Royal Navy Captain George Dixon had anchored his warship in the islands.

After the European imperialist fashion of the era, it is easy to imagine Dixon standing stalwart on the quarterdeck, his jaw square and his demeanour arrogant and pedantic. Flanked by a squadron of marines, deck guns, and below his feet a brace of heavy cannon, the captain would have had less inclination for pomp and ceremony and more for a military display of force when he claimed the islands for his king and country. Dixon anglicized the nation’s geography; he assigned the landfall the name of both his sovereign and his warship — Queen Charlotte. Seizing this land from the Haida (and from under the noses of Russian and American sea otter fur traders) required a demonstration of fealty from the Haida Nation to the British Empire, intent on expansion.

The king’s captain, short on diplomacy and with cold discipline from beneath an unfurled Union Jack, would have encouraged the Haida in the form of a stern message. One can see the armed landing party cross the beach, the tribe gather around, the chiefs arrive to greet these new people, and shot sails overhead, volleys smashing the tops of the tallest trees. “All this,” says Dixon’s lieutenant to a stunned crowd, waving his arm across the bay, the beach, and the settlement, “belongs to your monarch now. You are, henceforth, under the protection of the Royal Navy. You are subjects of King George III and are privileged to serve him only through his grace and mercy.”

Besides planting the flag, the captain seeded that peculiar brand of blood-soaked European racism and conceit, which demeaned any foreign culture, relieving the island nation of any confusion about the real intentions of their visitors. The occupation was a poor disguise of a master-slave relationship that overlaid unneeded and unwanted English military presence on the previously free and autonomous Haida.

Mother England administered a second, decisive imperial blow when she trivialized and made vulnerable the culture of community within the indigenous population. Champions of religious fervour, more Europeans arrived, ministers and priests alike, to battle each other with weapons of faith to secure native souls into their own flock. The commonality shared by each doctrine was their intent to destabilize the Haida belief system. Pedantic, sombre men revered other men still in Europe, accessorized in pretentious hats, ornamental robes, and jewellery that glittered below towering Gothic arches and ornate, stained-glass windows. These same men, who had waved bibles and crosses over the heads of men and women for centuries, preached at the Haida in a foreign language to deliver their interpretations of their religion, though perhaps they left out the dungeon chambers in castles and palaces throughout Europe, the Inquisitions, the global witch burnings, the resource theft of several continents, and Christopher Columbus and his subsequent g******e of the Taíno people. Systematically and mercilessly, religious emissaries took irreverent advantage of the curious Haida to entrench the long-suffered European practice of icon worship, perfected in the torture chambers and on the battlefields in Europe and the Middle East, on the isolated First Nations population. Among many other crimes, guilt was bestowed on the living innocents, and their souls, converted to chattel, were dangled over an eternal pit of unimagined fire and agony.

Finally, the Industrial Revolution dealt the indigenous nation a third and potentially catastrophic disaster when commercial traders, intentionally or otherwise, brought wool blankets infected with smallpox to the secluded, disease-vulnerable population.13 In exchange, they took what they wanted from the islands and still do to this day.

To their credit, though Russians, Americans, and Europeans invaded, labelled, and poisoned them, and though they are a population that has endured centuries of persecution by foreign robber barons, the Haida were never conquered.

• • •

In minutes, the sunset faded to deep twilight, the pale colours washed to dark shades, and the air was noticeably cooler. A pickup with the unmistakable rumble of a failing muffler ascended the driveway. The yellow, dented, and rusty truck arrived and brought with it a billow of light, sandy dust. Ethan stood up to greet the driver.

Dan smiled at Ethan from behind the wheel. When he switched off the finely tuned motor, Dan sat still, stroked his fiery-red beard once, and said, “I thought you were gonna wait ’til I sent for you?”

Ethan opened Dan a beer and handed it through the truck window. “You’re trying to get rid of me already? I thought you were driving a blue one-ton.” He passed Dan the bottle and toasted it with his own.

Each took a huge gulp of his beer. Ethan waited for Dan to burst into laughter and for the practical joke to end, but he knew the joke was on himself when Dan said, “Welcome to the islands. You staying for a while?”