“I was beginng to feel like an expired can of vegetables,” the Innkeeper tells me. “I was technically past the date on the label, but I knew inside I was still plenty good.” His PhD in marine biology had led to what was primarily a desk job working with sustainable fisheries. “And I had just about reached my quota for hours of my life spent sitting in front of a computer.”
He had first come to Bamfield as a grad student, TAing at the Marine Science Center across the inlet. And he’d visited the building that is now his lodge, back when it was a school. Later it had served 15 years as a private fishing lodge for a group of guys he knew. It just happened to come up for sale right as he was looking for a change.
Nowadays, when guests are in, his job is somewhere between boat captain, consierge, head waiter, and camp counselor. Recapping the day’s highlights, sharing the activity options and forecast for tomorrow, giving tours of marine life in the Barkley Sound, pouring the wine at dinner, and generally making sure everyone has what they need.
“Don’t get me wrong, peak season I work 18 hour days back to back, but it’s not like I’m sitting in a cubicle. Quite often I’m out on the boat, and any day out on the water is a good day.”
When he takes us out, I can see what he means. We skip around to a bunch of the little islands, which all have dramatic rock formations. Sea caves, lagoons, sea stacks, and cliff faces that reveal themselves to be islands to themselves hiding a narrow channel between them and the larger island.
We spot a California sea lion balncing on a whistling buoy, then come around to a whole colony of them laid out on the rocks of Folger Island. The ones closest to us bark and belly flop into the water, an act that’s meant to be menacing. Another island farther off is home to a friendlier family of harbor seals. Off the shore on the other side, one solitary, but seemingly content sea otter busies himself grooming and doing somersaults.
In between islands the Inkeeper picks up speed, and we bounce over the swells. When we make it to largest open expanse of the sound, he spots a water spout off in the distance kicks into high gear.
Suddenly we’re chasing whales.
It takes me a while to see what everyone else on the boat is seeing. It’s not yet a spiney crest, just misty gyesers on the horizon. But soon we’re close and zig-zagging to keep up with a loosely gathered pod of four or so humpbacks. They never do a full showy breach, just slow dives called rounding out. Their dorsal fin breaks the surface and their spine spins forward like a gear as they slide under again. In the moments spent scanning around for where one will come up next, the scale of what’s around and benearh us hits, and a feeling like fear and joy, that I guess is called awe sets in. Speeding over the waves back toward the mainland my heart is soaring. A good day out on the water for sure.
(Caught having blast and a half by Danielle)
There are nine of us guests here now for the “Stars and Sea Stars” retreat the marine biologist Inkeeper coordinated with two astronomy professors from the University of Victoria. One of the astronomers is an avid snorkler and wrote the proverbial book on snorkling in the Pacific Northwest.
As if it weren’t enough that I’m American, and the only guest who’s never been to BC before, which has everyone kind of talking to me a it like I’m a child, I’m also the only one in the group who has never snorkled.
“Not at all? Not even in tropical waters?” the snorkling astronomer asks.
“No…”
“Have you been in a wet suit though? Or at least put on a mask?” I slowly shake my head. I hadn’t anticipated this would put the spotlight on me, but everyone is quite concerned or amused.
It’s a whole process getting the right size suit and rolling and tugging yourself into it. Pulling the hood over your head and tucking it into the suit. Booties on your feet. Flippers strapped to those. Gloves and course a mask. Everyone keeps saying the cold water will rush into your suit and give you a bit of a shock.
I’m prepared to be very uncomfortable, but committed nonetheless. The Innkeeper reassures me, “Even if you just crawl in and float around in the cove, you’ll see plenty! And if you’re in there 10 or 15 minutes, and decide that’s enough, just come on back.”
I follow Danielle down to the rocks. She’s an old pro at this and has toothpaste to smear on our masks to keep them from fogging up. We sit down in the water and put our flippers on.
“Ok! Now, just get on your belly and go.”
“Just go?”
“Yup.”
I take to it like a duck to…I dunno, whatever ducks like.
(Caught posing as a sea otter by Danielle)
We round the point and fly into a forest of golden waving giant kelp.
I surface to yell to Danielle, “There’s a crab clinging to the kelp!”
She nods and sings back, “It’s a kelp crab.”
Kelp crab. Got it.
(Caught snorkin by Danielle)
We also see ochre sea stars, which come in both orange and purple, green sea anemone, yellow nudibranch, what seems like a million perch, and one stealthy kelp greenling.
(Danielle has a camera designed for underwater photography. I just snapped a few shots at low tide.)
Later at dinner, another guest asks me how the first time snorkling went, and I beam but don’t have the words. He understands and says, “I find it hard to explain to people who haven’t done it, that it’s not so much about what you see as what it feels like.” I nod in deep agreement. I could kick my legs when I needed to and glide around, but was like my body disappeared. My self was contained to the sound of my breath and expanded out to everything my eyes could take in.
Later I’ll learn he gave up practicing law to become an aquatic therapist.
Being in a group full of new people means introducing myself over and over, and over and over answering the question of what I do. Being six-months unemployed this is a bit of a touchy subject right now. Or ar least a long story. One guest offers, “Well, I suppose you could always marry rich.”
But I’m also comforted to hear the variety of careers and second careers and non-career callings in the group. The aquatic therapist lawyer’s husband also switched careers from registered nurse to talk therapist. There’s a painter who used to be a tirathelete.
When I ask the snorkling astronomer’s astronomer husband what path led him to that career, he warns me that it’s a pretty boring answer.
“It wasn’t some passion or curiosity about the universe. At least not in the beginning. No, it was quite simple. In Britain, during secondary school, you specialize in three subjects. For me those were maths, physics, and chemistry. Again, it wasn’t because I particularly liked them, these are just the languages my brain speaks. Then when I went on to university, it’s not like the States or here, where you have general courses that everyone takes and electives and then select a major. You start again with three subjects and eventually pick one of those to specialize in. I would have picked the same three, only my school didn’t offer chemistry. So I just flipped through the catalog for the other sciences and saw astronomy. I thought, huh, I wonder what there is to learn about that. So I picked that, and then I just kept having more questions about it, till eventually that became my subject. And when I graduated, I had no clue what to do next. I knew I didn’t what to do what most of my classmates had done, which was to go and get a proper job in whatever field a physics degree gets you into. So I just kept going. Kept asking questions about what I could learn about this and that. And at some point working on my PhD research, I looked around and realized, oh, I suppose I’m an astronomer. It’s a funny thing, identity. It doesn’t happen all at once. It builds up gradually in layers.”
“I tell my students now, ending up in academia as I have, I’m not someone to look up to. I’m a bit of a failure, at least in terms of how do you get a job in this field. I really encourage them to keep their minds open about what to do next.”
The weather never quite behaves for stargazing, but on my last evening in Bamfield, the astronomer pulls out a hardshell briefcase that looks like it should be used for a handoff of drugs or money. It holds his meteorite collection. He passes around the 4.6 billion year old space rocks, and describes how they were formed from the run off of different parts of solar systems coming into being.
“Not every planet is a success story. For you to be holding it in your hands essentially means it failed at becoming a planet. But what it succeeded at being is a record of that process. It is a text we can read to understand what we are made of.”
💙✨🐠🦀🤿🦭🐳💙