to bamfield; the edge of the sea

bamfield is located on the edge of barkley sound on the west coast on vancouver island at the end of an eighty-kilometer winding logging road through old growth, active cutblocks, jungle-sized salal, and moss-choked standing wildlife trees; at the beginning of the great pacific. the weather systems of the coast greet us with sheets of intermittent rain and hail and blueblue skies as we roll westward, sarah's vintage jetta lolling over stones, skidding over gravel, bouncing beneath the boughs of western hemlock, curved cedar, white-barked trembling aspen.

we are going to visit stacey, who lives at the edge of this world and works in the public education department of the bamfield marine sciences centre. she designs and directs outdoor creative experiential education programs for highschool and university students and has an amazing attention to the details and intricacies of the natural world and is a storyteller rich with inspiration and wonder.

we toured the touch-tanks in the public education building; running water filtering through little tanks of anemones, feather-dusters worms, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, sponges, and chitons. students here have the opportunity to peer closely, hold, and compare these living organisms, look carefully at their specific adaptions, and marvel at the incredible diversity found on the beaches, rocks, and below the dark waves around this treasure cove. stacey tells us about anemones that can live over two hundred years and abalone reintroduction projects and porcelain crabs losing their limbs and bat star colouration diversity.

for a moment, between hail and rain and wind and something else, the sun broke thorugh the clouds long enough to walk through the damp forest to the beach. we pick out way between outcroppings of rocks, softsoft sand dotted with smooth, wave-carved shells and bundles of fragrant kelp rafts, everything salty and fresh.

surfbirds and black turnstones chatting and feeding and hopping and flapping all over the rocks, dodging the pacific swells crashing below them, dancing up and down, moving in time with the surge.

 

we peer into tidal pools, their biological communities arranged in arcs, imprinting the story of wave breaks and water resistance patterns moving over the pool. anemones, soft bodied and green and pink and sticky, taking the inner arc, with the mussels, the giant calcified shells, feeding on the direct wave action on the outerarc of the pool. barnacles, all over, their featherfeet feeding and feeding in the rick plankton currents, the soup of saltysea.

 

there are a hundred little mouths in here, feet and tails churning the water, the crunch of a stolen shell-home and glistening seaweed. there's true magnetism in this place, a power of fresh sea air and everything so alive you can't blink for a moment.

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

-- e.e.cummings, "maggie and milly and molly and may"