salmon coast

I'm in the beautiful Broughton Archipelago, at the Salmon Coast Field Station on Gilford Island -- home to noble fir, hemlock, and salal, huckleberry, cougar, and belted kingfisher.

We're working to sample individuals of chinook salmon, collecting tiny cuts of their heart and gill tissue to screen for viruses, but it's been slow; the fish aren't biting in this area. So we occupy ourselves with the tasks of not-science:

Coady built a fish smoker and we keep it running all day. Two early morning fishing trips out of Cramer Passage left us with several pink salmon and a few coho; we feast and feed the green alder fueled fire below the screens of fish strips, salmon candy for visitors and for the winter. We haul firewood up the hill, clean garlic bulbs from the garden, and watch the water for humpback whales lolling and rolling in front of Echo Bay. We harvest and chop kale, dig potatoes, and bake rhubarb cake.

Every day-or-so, I hike into the dockside community of Echo Bay, following up our waterline to a stream where our drinking water and showers are piped down from. From there, I follow a stream down to the estuary, scouring up and down the streambank for mushrooms and forest treasures; salmon bones, flowering succulents, animal scat, ripe huckleberries.

I jump in the green-grey cold sea every day, eyes open under the surface, looking for hazy fish darting between the kelp, log-floats, and barnacle-shoreline. Yesterday a seal lifted his head above the water, watched me kick my fin-feet through the deep. This evening some Pacific white-sided dolphins came close while we were swimming; the ocean is alive.

Coady and I run around on his little boat; we visit the nearby Blackfish Lodge, a floating fishing lodge located across the passage from us to collect samples for our project, to eat birthday cake, and giggle with four-year-olds. After the party, we peer through the pitch dark to guide our ride back to the station. Thousands of bioluminecent fish shoot away from the hull of the open aluminum boat; their bright silver bodies obscured by the opaque darkness of the midnight waters' surface -- our route guided by the forested silhouette shape of the hills imagining a whale-propelled galaxy of plankton exploding beneath our tiny boat.

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"