one time or another we all adhere to boundaries, borders and lines in our lives. They help us establish our territories, define our relationships, set sight on our goals, or just bring some semblance of order to a world that all too often appears chaotic. Somehow, though, it’s not adhering to pre-existing boundaries but creating new ones, or defying established ones, that define us most. Heroes and fools, geniuses and social misfits know what it’s like to do so. A person’s actions can create a boundary just as their other actions can challenge and break a boundary down. My involvement with South Moresby and Rediscovery would soon put me at both ends of that spectrum, though it would confound me how I got there.
Arriving back in Skidegate in July 1973 after my kayak trip through South Moresby left me in a bit of a quandary and had me asking myself, “What exactly am I doing on the Queen Charlotte Islands?” I decided to press on back to my cabin in Alaska, my original goal when Stormy had detoured me with her cloud-busting trick back in Prince Rupert. I needn’t return to the mainland to do so, I reasoned; I could paddle back to Alaska across Dixon Entrance. If the Haida could make this sixty-kilometre crossing in their dugout canoes, surely I could do the same in my kayak, I thought with all the self-assurance and blissful ignorance of a twenty-three-year-old convinced of his immortality.
Rather than deal with the long, shelterless northeast shores of Graham Island, the largest of the 150 Haida Isles, and treacherous Rose Spit, I decided to head north through Masset Inlet from Port Clements, a small logging-based community in the heart of Graham Island. According to Haida legend, this passage was made possible by Taaw, the younger brother of a larger hill by the same name. These hills, it is said, once resided side by side in the centre of Graham Island until the two brothers had a dispute over who was eating too much of the food. One night the younger Taaw left his sibling in a rage and stomped out across the bogs in the dark. His aimless wanderings carved out what is now Masset Inlet, an unusual body of water that extends from a wide bay near Port Clements fifty kilometres down a long, narrow channel to Old Massett at the mouth of the inlet. When Taaw reached the shores of Dixon Entrance he continued wandering east along the beach until he came to the mouth of the Hiellen River. Taaw looked out over the twenty kilometres of glistening white sand that forms the Great North Beach and knew he’d found his new home. Here was food in abundance: razor clams, cockles, weathervane scallops and Dungeness crabs that washed in on the big storm tides and piled up like windrows along the beach.
From the top of Taaw (Tow Hill) today, one can look out from this ancient volcanic basalt plug and view Masset Inlet to the west and Rose Spit to the east. Naikoon, “the nose,” was the name the Haida gave this great sandspit that extends out into Dixon Entrance and marks the boundary with Hecate Strait. East coast erosion from the prevailing southeast winds is depositing sand at the tip of Rose Spit so fast that the land is growing two to three kilometres ahead of the colonizing vegetation.
The Great North Beach is noted for another reason—it is the sacred site of Haida creation. It was here, legend tells us, that a bored but ever curious Raven heard sounds emanating from a cockleshell on the beach. Prying open the strange bivalve, Raven inadvertently released the first humans—the Haida.
I was thankful to Taaw for the passage he had created as I raced out of Masset Inlet in my kayak on the strong ebb tide that midsummer morning. It seemed amusing that an early European explorer had once sailed to the head of this inlet thinking he had found the fabled passage to the Orient.
I stopped briefly at Yan, a lovely ancient village site opposite Old Massett at the mouth of Masset Inlet, and then proceeded out into the open waters of Dixon Entrance. I could see that a storm was beginning to brew but foolishly pressed on toward Langara Island. A pod of feeding killer whales surfaced from directly below me, giving me quite a start. The sea grew dark and threatening; steep breaking waves compounded the huge swells rolling in off the open Pacific and the wind built to gale force. There were no boats in sight and no apparent landing beaches; only kayak-crunching waves exploding on fortress-like rocky headlands. I needed to find shelter, fast. The orcas appeared again, nearer to shore, and one of them breached in a spectacular display, which couldn’t help but catch my eye even amid the storm. It was a good thing I looked, for directly behind the breaching whale I spotted a narrow opening into a small bight. Riding the breaking swell, I shot through the passage into a perfectly calm harbour where a dozen salmon trawlers were tied up at a floating dock. The place was called Seven Mile and it was a harbour day, with the entire fleet sitting out the storm. All eyes turned on me in astonishment as I paddled my seventeen-foot canvas kayak in out of the storm. “It’s a good thing the Lord looks after fools,” was the only comment I elicited from a fleet of fishermen looking down on their first kayak sighting in these waters.
The next day dawned bright and cheery, and if the sea wasn’t exactly calm, neither was it life-threatening. I set out at dawn and paddled westward along with the trawlers. Virago Sound acts like a great funnel, drawing boats into Naden Harbour, another important Haida heritage site. Sitting on the western point of land that constricts the passage to Naden Harbour is the strategically positioned but serene setting of Kung. The ancient village site of Kung gave me the feeling of coming in out of the storm; it probably gave its ancient inhabitants the same sense of security.
The following day I pressed westward and camped at Pillar Bay, where a stunning conglomerate of rock pillar stands proud of the water a hundred metres offshore at high tide. Some say a shaman’s bones rest atop the thirty-five-metre pillar. It would certainly take superhuman powers to place a corpse or the bones of the deceased there.
Working my way up the east coast of Langara Island, I kept a close eye on the weather and the southernmost of the Alaskan islands, barely visible across the sixty-kilometre expanse of Dixon Entrance. A lighthouse stood on Langara Point and another across the entrance at Cape Muzon, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. My plan, which seems absurd in retrospect, was to depart Langara Point at first light, paddle all day and through the night using both light stations as beacons to guide me in the dark. I had calculated that I could paddle thirty kilometres a day, meaning I should be able to reach Alaskan shores by dawn the next morning. What I had not accounted for was fog that, more often than not, obscures both light beacons, currents running east and west through the passage—which can pull a kayak completely off course—and the prevailing southeasterly wind. The wind in particular would prove my nemesis.
The Haida, I learned later, never set off for Alaska from Langara Island, but from Tow Hill on North Beach so that if the prevailing wind, a southeaster, came up, they still had a chance of reaching Dall Island in Alaska before being blown out into the open Pacific. My route would likely have put me in Korea.
I felt a bit anxious about my uncertain adventure when I pushed off from a beach on Langara in my kayak, but I was well rested and well stocked with bannock, dried fruit, nuts and adequate fresh water. The swells rolling in off the Pacific were on average two to three metres, but the surface waters were calm, at least until midday. Langara Island was growing distant behind me when the wind came up on the turn of the tide. The eastwardly flooding tide now encountered strong resistance from the southeast wind and the seas built up alarmingly fast. Learmonth Bank, a submerged shoal that would be a substantial-sized island if sea levels dropped a few metres, was directly on my course and the tide was ripping dangerously over it. With the wind stiffening, I had to make a decision as if my life depended upon it—and it did! After a blast of wind and a breaking wave spun my kayak around, I got the message. Years later, Haida elders would tell me that 180-degree kayak spin had nothing to do with weather. “You were sent back to us,” they insisted.
It was well after dark when I found myself wearily trying to work my way through huge breakers rolling over the reefs on the west side of Langara Island. At least I was in the lee of the southeasterly storm, and I could smell the reassuring aroma of land. The flood tide drew me into Parry Passage, where I searched the dark shores in vain for somewhere to land my craft. It was well past midnight when a glowing white beach of crushed clamshells appeared like a ghostly apparition in the dark and I was finally able to pull ashore.
