Steady rain in North Vancouver this morning as I close the garden gate to the AirBnB.
Today is a travel day.
I’m about to get on a bus crowded with gloomy commuters and their dripping rain gear. The bus will take me downtown to a train, which will take me to another bus, a double-decker, which will drop me off in Tsawwassen to catch a ferry across the Strait of Georgia, through a maze of little wooded islands, to Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island. The weather will settle just before we depart, and sun will tease at coming out. For a few minutes the horizon turns silver, before the clouds close in and a light ticking rain begins. From the upper deck I’ll see three curious seals pop their heads up out of the water then slide away from the deep gurgle of the engine that pushes us steadily forward.
When we dock, I’ll get scooped up by my friend Danielle, who will drive us down and then up the main highway past mountains and forests and streams and what I’ll think is a river, but, she’ll tell me, is actually an inlet, and therefore the Pacific Ocean.
I met Danielle 20 years ago, during the worst year of my life. I had left school in Ohio the winter before to be with my dying father, who had since died. I was living back at home in South Central Pennsylvania with my mother and brothers, all of us in a kind of blacked out bog of grief. I was getting ready to transfer to the local univeristy where my parents taught when I was growing up. Even though this was all I could do to keep moving forward in life, it felt like a big tumble backward.
But when I met Danielle, whose partner at the time was good friends with my partner at the time, I learned she was heading into her sophomore year at the same univeristy. In the fall we found we actually had several classes together. Soon we were hanging out at her dorm more days than not, going on adventures, writing and making art together, and building a friendship that would carry us both through.
After graduation and a few years on separate paths, we wound up in Boston at the same time, and we lived together during what may have been the hardest year of her life. She wrote a beautiful book about it.
Many more years and griefs and partners and cities since then, we understand each other in a way few others could and I count myself lucky to still know her.
And what kind of crazy luck that the weekend I finally planned to visit her in Victoria, where she’s been living for 7 years now, should coincide with a snorkling and stargazing retreat at a lodge in Bamfield, a remote peninsula on the western coast of Vancouver Island, just north of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.
The innkeeper at the lodge, who is also a marine biologist, will want us to text him when we make it to a town called Youbou. Two or so hours into the drive we will dutifully text, “We are now entering Youbou,” and he will respond, “Ok, great. See you in about 3 hours.”
The main road to Bamfield has been closed for a month after a forest fire. From here it’s a muddy, pothole-riddled logging road. Along with a link to the Google Map directions, which we’re instructed to download since there will be no cell service, the innkeeper sends a PDF of photos of signs we’ll pass along the way, and details about which ones to follow, and which ones to ignore, which ones to turn what way at, and some that will just reassure us that we’re heading in the right direction.
Shortly after the road switches to gravel, another text from the innkeeper will say “Veer LEFT at the fork at km marker 22, NOT RIGHT.”
It’s going to be a long, slow, bumpy ride.
This detour will also take us deep into the wilds of the island. Dense and ropey with moss. I will want to get out and get lost in the soft forest floor, but we are moving slow enough as it is. I can only take pictures when we are pulled over on to let a logging truck pass through.
Our final mode of transportation for the day will be water taxi from East Bamfield to West Bamfiled. It will be evening now, and rain will have stopped and the clouds will start to move along.
The innkeeper will greet us at the dock with a warm smile and a thick Canadian accent, and hurry us up to the lodge to drop our bags and join the rest of the group for dinner.
I will think, what strange forces will have carried me here. Machines and currents and people.
My mind will rewind back to the dark of the morning. To closing the gate and turning to the road. The rain is coming down hard, but I’m safe and dry under my poncho. I have my two feet and I’m traveling light. I only have to begin.
❤️♥️❤️