a bailer for a toilet and drawing my strength from adrenalin more than food. Now my body wanted to collapse, and it did. Too exhausted to pitch my tent, I cuddled up in a dry spot under an old cedar log lying under a grove of young spruce trees. All night long I wrestled with demonic dreams, sea monsters in wild waves and wrens singing for lost souls beneath weathered totem poles.
It was nearly noon before I awoke the next day and wiped the sleep from my eyes, only to wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming. The huge ovoid eyes, flared nostrils and thick lips of a Haida totem pole stared back at me from my place of slumber. Later, I would learn I had inadvertently landed at Yaku, another abandoned Haida village site, and had unknowingly slept under a collapsed totem pole.
I was famished and almost instinctively headed for the tidal zone for food. Thousands of tiny clam geysers spouting from the tidal flats suggested at least one good reason why this village was located here. I was so absorbed in digging for butter clams and littlenecks that I failed to notice a dozen kids sneaking up behind me. Suddenly I was surrounded by the twenty-four muddy gumboots and wet sneakers of a gaggle of Haida teenagers. “What are you doing?” they asked as they looked down at me.
“Digging clams,” I answered matter-of-factly. “What are you guys up to?”
“Watching you,” came the cheeky but very Haida reply.
The Haida youth were all from Old Massett and were working on an archaeological dig at nearby Kiusta Village, another ancient Haida habitation site. One of the boys, Lawrence Jones, in the spirit of Haida hospitality, invited me over to their camp for lunch. I jumped at the invitation; the clams could wait. It was a simple meal of soup and salmon sandwiches, but it seemed like a feast to my famished body. I was so delighted to be safe and in the company of people again that I offered to wash all of the camp dishes. This made me instantly popular with the kids on chore duty and provided a casual opportunity to visit with Nick and Trisha Gessler, the archaeologists overseeing the excavation.
When Nick learned that I had studied anthropology at Michigan State University, he told me they were short staffed and could employ me temporarily while I awaited calmer weather to make the crossing to Alaska. In retrospect, I think he was merely trying to save my life from another foolish attempt at crossing Dixon Entrance. I accepted the generous offer, moved my kayak and camp to Kiusta, and started working on the dig. Kiusta had been the site of the earliest contact with Europeans and the first foreign trade on Haida Gwaii; it offered great promise of significant archaeological finds and insights into that era.
Nearly every day after work hours, Nick and Trisha would encourage me to hike the Kiusta trail that led to a beach on the west coast. I had seen and camped on so many beautiful beaches from Alaska to Honduras over the past eight months that I was in no rush to do so. It was more than a week before I followed their advice.
The kilometre-long trail through pristine rainforest was enchanting, but Lepas Bay itself was more breathtaking than any bay I had ever beheld. A crescent-moon-shaped bay of fine ivory sand framed two lovely offshore islands, one a grassy seabird colony, the other cloaked in old-growth forest. A creek divided the beach and bordered a great rocky outcrop that cut off the northwestern edge of the bay at high tide. For some inexplicable reason I found myself drawn in that more difficult direction.
After climbing the cliffs above the crashing waves, I headed to the far western end of the bay. Dramatic sea stacks adorned in bonsai-like conifers, lush salal, ferns, red columbine, bluebells and yellow cinquefoils rose from the white sands as bold and beautiful as the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The waters on this end of the bay reflected the jade green of the surrounding forest with sky blue in the shallows gradually deepening to the dark cobalt of the open sea. Eagles nested on the westernmost point, deer grazed peacefully in a meadow of beach grass and a family of otters frolicked over the rocks. All my childhood drawings suddenly came alive in this place. I was home.
A strange compulsion had come over me; I had to do something here. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but hours later when I returned to Kiusta I found myself as bewildered as the Gesslers with my words: “I don’t think I’m going to work on the archaeological dig anymore, but could I please borrow a hammer, a saw and a handful of nails? I’m going to build a log cabin on Lepas Bay.”
Towering above the beach, this is one of several dramatic sea stacks at Lepas Bay, a place I came to love like no other.
Several weeks later, when the octagonal cabin made of beach logs was already three rounds of logs high, the utter absurdity of what I was doing finally sank in. I already had a cabin in Alaska. Why was I building another one in a country where I couldn’t legally live or work to support myself? I was discussing this dilemma with the Project Kiusta youth around their dinner fire one evening in late August when Clarence, the Tsimshian skipper of a salmon packer named the Ogden, dropped by the camp to say goodbye. “I’m making the last run of the season to Prince Rupert,” he announced. “Anyone need a ride?”
Bringing an end to three months of solitude, a friend unexpectedly arrived on Lepas Bay and shot this photo of me in 1973 erecting the final round of logs on the Navajo hogan–styled roof of my cabin.
Before I was fully aware of the move I was making I had my kayak disassembled and stowed back into the two storage bags, my tent dropped, and all my gear aboard the departing Ogden. The entire Project Kiusta team gave me a rousing send-off from the shore where countless guests had been welcomed and seen off for thousands of years. I sat out on the open deck watching the shores of Haida Gwaii fade away in the dark. I was finally returning to my home and friends in Alaska after a nine-month odyssey. I had come to the Queen Charlotte Islands on a whim and I was leaving on a whim; this was just another stopover on a grander journey. So why was I fighting back tears all the way to Prince Rupert?
A few days later, kayaking west of Ketchikan, Alaska, I really began to think I’d made the wrong move. A storm came up so suddenly that I had to make an emergency landing on a barren rock island with an automated light beacon. I swamped the kayak in a breaking wave near shore, and while I struggled to save my craft and myself, the storm devoured my tent, sleeping bag and most of my food provisions. I had to spend the most miserable night of my life cold, wet and hungry, seeking refuge from the wind behind the only shelter this island had to offer—a steel sign that read, “US Government Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.” I wished I’d stayed on Haida Gwaii.
When the storm abated nearly thirty hours later, I limped back to Ketchikan in my damaged kayak and set out to re-equip myself with a second-hand tent, sleeping bag, a cooking pot and some grub, all purchased with the small earnings I’d made working at Project Kiusta. In Ketchikan, quite by accident I bumped into a logger I’d met at the Gildersleeve Logging Camp back in December. He had bought a boat and was working as a salmon trawler now, and he offered to drop me off at Cape Muzon. Nearly a month after my aborted attempt to cross Dixon Entrance, I found myself at the beachhead I was striving toward.
The paddle up the west coast of Prince of Wales Island was marred only by the clear-cut scars on the slopes, some of which I’d contributed to in El Capitan Pass. I could see and feel the presence of Haida and Tlingit peoples in this region everywhere, from the intertidal zones where I discovered a beautifully carved stone net weight to the shell middens along shore where the wives of loggers were sometimes seen passing their idle hours by digging (illegally) for glass beads and other artifacts at old village sites. There were living communities too, like Hydaburg, where I enjoyed the local restaurant’s specialty, a Hydaburger, and the Tlingit village of Kate on Kuiu Island, where no one spoke a word to me for two days until it was time for my departure. What I mistook for the rude cold shoulder turned out to be cultural protocol. Strangers
