Balancing Clayoquot Sound

Six Northwestern springtimes deposited six seasons of Pacific Northwest pollen on my white truck, turning it chartreuese. 

I was using the truck so infrequently that I neglected it's upkeep, and mosses and lichens were beginning to set along the rim of the windows, hornets were making their nests in the doors, and a few plants were beginning to grow in the roof rack and the rear-view mirrors.

In anticipation of a long road trip with Jane and our four-year-old son, I finally got to it, coaxing pine cones and acorns from the cracks, and scrubbing hard with soap.  To celebrate the progress, I set two lawn chairs, a lantern and a small library of books in the back, and with my son, I sat in there with the rear door open, pretending road trip in the driveway while it rained.

Polishing the truck off makes me realize, my true love in travel has always been the road.  By road, I don’t just mean cars.  So of much of travel, for me, is walking along the side of the road, sometimes wishing I could move just a bit faster. 

This summer, I dabbled in that Pacific Northwest conversation about transportation by picking up the old longboard skateboard that Jane bought me eight years ago.  For years, while walking alone down a really long road, I would look at its curves and it would make me kind of sad.  It made me miss human-powered speed.  All at once those roads would dig up a deep craving from childhood, of biking down hills, and skis and sleds.

The longboard was always a novelty in the garage.  But I found myself thinking about it more and more as a possible mode of transportation, a slow movement for travel, and the long winter had hit me hard with that deep craving of summer's freedom, of speed and movement.

By the end of summer, I was just starting to get comfortable with the so-called foot brake, where you drag the sole of your shoe along the pavement to control your speed, when suddenly, my longboard wheels hit something on the road. I lost my balance and I was just a lump of flesh in the air. I hit the ground hard on my chest.

Breath wasn't coming easily, and I was disoriented.  Maybe 38-year-olds shouldn't be skateboarding, I had told my neighbor only minutes before, which was my way of balancing my embarrassment with a gentle prodding, a way of saying, “Hey buddy, we're not that old.”

Our road-trip had a purpose.  We were driving to an international mecca of self-propelled transportation – an isolated, fog-shrouded fishing-town in Canada that had become an international surfing, kayaking and biking destination.  But now, my injury meant none of that. Still, I couldn’t resist keeping the kayak on top of the truck, and I hid the longboard just out of Jane’s sight under the duffle bags.

On a bright morning, we leave Portland and pass slowly through the nightmarish traffic of Seattle.  People from other places always want to compare Portland to Seattle, often confusing the two outright or speaking of them together, as if they are interchangeable.  Passing through reminds me that few cities are so different – the food, the population density, the ethnic mix, the architecture, the geography, the layout, the traffic.  It is wrong to talk of what unites the two cities without including Vancouver, B.C.  The three Pacific Northwestern cities, all quite different, are united by just one thing: they are Pacific Northwestern cities.  

The border into Canada is a long line, lots of security.  I ask the Canadian immigration officer if he could stamp our passports.  He looks blankly at the passengers in the truck and sees the four-year old kid.  He says, “I can stamp his,” he explains, meaning, I don’t really have the time to stamp the adult passports.  What a douchebag.  But is this heavily-secured border really even necessary?  Commerce should flow freely through the Pacific Northwest.

From Vancouver, we take the morning ferry to Vancouver Island, and cross the giant island on the only paved road to the open Pacific in Canada. 

After we pass through Port Alberni, about half way across, Vancouver Island becomes a wilderness of fjords and aquamarine rivers, mountains of conifers and valleys of cottonwoods. 

The terminus of the Trans-Canada Highway ends at Tofino, population 1,650, at the end of a long peninsula, separating the vast Clayoquot Sound from the Pacific Ocean.  

Clayoquot Sound itself is cluttered with islands and inlets stocked with whales, sea lions, crabs, oysters and salmon.  The rainforests dotting and surrounding the sound are the last intact old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, and even the southern half of British Columbia.    

A few days after arriving at the sound, I meet up with a local school teacher, and we drive south to the edge of the Pacific Rim National Park, where we walk on a coastal trail through a thick fog.  The fog is so thick that we see almost no details.  We can barely make out the trees; the ocean is just a gray blank canvas, and alI that is revealed to us are the leaves on the trail, and a big, warm, brown pile of chewed berries.

John explains that it's bear poop, and that the bear was here this morning, maybe just 20 minutes ahead of us.  He shows me the bent horsetails where the bear joined the path. 

In a few minutes, we come to another steaming poo.  John looks at it and explains that the bear has diarrhea.

"Must have ate something real bad," he explains, when we arrive at the third giant poo on the trail.  Seeing that we are literally trailing this bear is to understand how close you always are to large mammals here.  Just two days ago, an 18-month boy was walking with family on a trail near a campsite in the Pacific Rim National Forest when a cougar leapt from the forest and sank his fangs in the boy's skull. Cougar attacks are more likely to take place on Vancouver Island than anywhere else in North America.  And the forests around Tofino are teeming with them. 

The pooping bear, explains John, is not a concern.  He says he knows of this individual bear, and that she knows to keep her cubs away from the trails, which makes her no threat.

But as we slip off the trail and onto the fog-shrouded rock beach, John urges caution.  Bears bring their cubs here to sift through the washed-ashore kelp.  "What are they looking for?" I ask.  John lifts the kelp, and tiny bugs spring out.  "They’re training the cubs to find beach fleas under the kelp."

While walking on the beach, John mentions that he had lived in Oregon when he was younger.  "We are the same people,” he offers.  "Oregon and Washington, British Columbia." It is common refrain you hear in British Columbia. 

"But I do notice one thing different, everybody smokes a lot more pot here.  I smell it everywhere!  It's like the scent of Tofino."

"Once, the (national park) warden approached me.  He wanted to know where he could get some marijuana.  I asked him, who is it for?  The police, he said. They can't seem to seem to get it anywhere."

John continues.  "When I was teaching, most of the kids’ dads were on welfare or were very poor fishermen.  But these two kids drove around in brand new trucks.  When they were graduating, they approached me and said, 'I guess you figured out why we have so much money.' I told them I had a pretty good idea.  They replied, ‘But we don't smoke a lot of it, and now we're both going to good colleges, and we can afford it.’ "

We leave the beach, and connect with the forest trail, and wind through old-growth trees, while navigating around steaming bear poo.  John explains that these trees host nesting marbled murrelets. 

The nests of these small seabirds had eluded scientists for decades, until a climber found chicks high atop an ancient tree in 1974.  As logging encroached on old growth forests across the North Pacific coasts, the species declined severely.  The population in Clayoquot Sound is healthy, due to the protection of the old growth trees.

But that protection didn't come easily.  Nearly all the old-growth forests of Vancouver Island had been logged.  The islands inside Clayoquot Sound had been spared, due to their inaccessibility.  But as all the forests of Vancouver Island were stripped, Clayoquot Sound looked more and more enticing.

In 1984, the British Columbia Government declared that Meares Island, a giant landmass inside the Clayoquot Sound, would be logged.  The results would be devastating to a wide range of wildlife, from sea life, migrating whales and migrating shorebirds, as well as the rare ancient forest itself and the health of the Clayoquot Sound fisheries.  First Nation tribes began to say, the rest of Vancouver Island has been trashed.  You’re not going to trash Clayoquot Sound.

Locals blockaded the logging company, and tasted the sweet air of a local victory when the government relented.

In 1993, the Canadian Government again agreed to allow logging on Meares Island. 

Protesters, organized by First Nation tribes living in the sound, and environmentalists in Tofino, organized the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. 12,000 people swelled into the Clayoquot Sound and protested, resulting in the largest mass arrests in Canadian history.

A lot of people were saying, hey you hosers, you can’t do this because it will be destructive to the environment for a list of reasons.  But others were also saying, hey, you newfie lumberjacks, anybody with half a brain knows that this land is worth much more to the Canadian economy if it doesn’t get logged!

The protests brought international attention to the sound.  Greenpeace and The Sierra Club joined the fight, and musicians played to the protesters.

The government again relented, and the protesters won.

Seven years later, Clayoquot Sound became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and today Tofino swells with tourism.  Its fisheries are productive and profitable.  Clayoquot Sound took something vital to the Pacific Northwest belief and packaged it: balance is not a tipping scale between economy and environment, balance is an act of environmental preservation that invigorates economies.