The Wild in You
text by Lorna Crozier
photographs by Ian McAllister
Voices from the Forest and the Sea
The Wild
in You
Vancouver/berkeley
Introduction
A GRIZZLY HUNCHES by the berry bushes on the other side of the estuary, so close he can hear the rain pound on my jacket. My rubber boots slip on the rotting bodies of salmon tossed from the water by claws uniquely curved to grip a fish thrashing against the current.
This is the heart of the rainforest but it’s also a charnel house without walls or ceiling, the stench of decay brushing my face like the wings of mortuary moths. Gulls scream and dive with remarkable precision into the spawning beds. Their beaks pluck a single orange salmon egg, no bigger than a pea. The return of the salmon to the rivers of their birth, the new life spilling from the mothers’ torn bodies, is one of the most poignant of the earth’s miracles.
The grizzly raises his blunt head and courses the air. Stares at me and sniffs. He is huge. Above the reek of fish, my smell is drawn into his body through the nasal passages in his long snout. Part of me now lives inside the mind of an omnivorous animal whose Latin name ends with horribilis.
I know in my gut, in the place where you know the deepest things, that I am changed. On the far west coast of North America, I’m vulnerable and naked, though I’m clad from head to foot in rain gear. I struggle to name what I’m feeling. It’s like trying to label that spot on the back of the neck where fine, invisible hairs, sensitive to fear and exaltation, rise. Suddenly, I get it—I’m wilder, yes wilder, than I was before.
Drenched and cold, I squat above the ragged salmon, keeping my distance, but eye to eye with my first grizzly bear. I hold onto this sensation as if I’m gripping it with long sharp claws. For a moment, what keeps the spirit in the body and what separates one species from another disappears. I have moved outside my skin into a state of sweet connection. Attentive, nameless, quieter than the rain, I see the bear and the bear sees me. What is untamed and unafraid has reached out from me to meet the largest land mammal on the continent. “The brain is wider than the sky,” Emily Dickinson wrote. Our brains, human and bear, touch each other.
To be silent at such a time is proper; it’s part of being in a state of grace. But because I’ve lived most of my life as a writer, I’m obsessed with trying to find words that will hold my wonder, however clumsily, and pass it on. Like the best of photographers, poets strive to translate what the eye sees, but also what the soul catches and holds up to its own uncanny light.
Ian McAllister is such a photographer: he knows that inner shine. It illuminates his photographs of the Great Bear Rainforest, that sweeping track of coastline that flows from the tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle. He and his wife Karen have known this traditional First Nations territory intimately for over twenty years. It’s their home. Their life work is to protect it.
My stay in the Great Bear lasted only five stormy days one October. Kim Gray, the editor of the online magazine Toque & Canoe, sent me there to write a travel article and she set up a meeting between me and her
friend Ian. She thought we’d like each other, she said, and he’d agreed to take some pictures while I was there. Knowing the brilliance of his photographs and his international reputation, I didn’t expect to meet such a modest and laconic man.
A chewed-up wool toque pulled low on his forehead, his face reddened from the ocean and the wind, he hopped out of his boat onto the dock, held out his hand, and—Kim was right—I liked him instantly. She’d also said, with naïve optimism, that maybe Ian and I could do a book together. We both circled that suggestion like strange wolves and promised each other nothing. Yet by the time I left, we’d agreed he would send me some photographs and I’d see if they triggered a response. He doesn’t need poems to enhance his images—they don’t require any explanation. My challenge was to make a new thing that could stand beside each picture and speak to it in an unpredictable, hopefully surprising, way.
It wasn’t only the days I spent in the rainforest and Ian’s photographs, brilliant as they are, that turned me to poetry. It was also learning about the vulnerability of this place and its inhabitants. I share Ian’s passion for the natural world, and though it may sound crazy, I believe that if we honor living things other than ourselves—orcas, ravens, wolves, cedars—our attention will remind us that they are holy. To see them clearly is the deepest kind of praise, the deepest kind of love. To wound them and their habitats is to wound ourselves.
As I move toward seven decades of living on this earth, I find myself growing lonelier. It’s not the deaths of friends and members of my family that make me feel forlorn, though those losses bring a grief that numbs.
It’s the loneliness that comes from the wiping out of songbirds, salmon runs, and old-growth forests. It comes from trophy bear hunting, where men with rifles walk with a bear’s head and paws past the Coast Salish signs banning such gruesome acts in their homeland. It comes from overfishing, fish farms and feed lots, from hydro dams that flood a valley full of life, from tailing pond spills, from sulfur spewing out of smoke stacks, and the likely deluge of bitumen into the waters of the largest intact rainforest in the world. Soon there will be almost nothing left but us, the most destructive species ever known. The damage we cause is eating us alive, no matter what our jobs, our age, no matter where we make our homes.
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