Getting further from Haida Gwaii all the time – DAY EIGHT – Prince Rupert to Port Hardy

Sunday August 17th, 2008

The big long ferry! When I first booked this leg of the trip, I was on the waiting list. I was going to have to show up by 4:30am to get in the standby line [images of cars sleeping on enormous stained lobby couches come to mind] and if I didn’t get on the ferry, I was going to have to drive the 3 days the long way around, via Prince George and Whistler, to Victoria. But I got off the waiting list toward the end of Calgary Fringe and sighed a breath of release.

I still had to get up at 4:30 – because I knew I would move slow. My neck was stiff from a pillow incident the night before: when I went to bed, I took an extra pillow from the empty bunk above me, but during the night I convinced my sleepy self that I needed to give it back – and then I crumpled my lone pillow in a weird way, presumably to make it seem thicker. When I woke up, the bed opposite mine – the one that had still been occupied at 2:00pm the day before – was still empty. Now that’s a late night! I got to the ferry check-in line at 5:15 and they started loading almost immediately. Andy got to load later (as a foot passenger) and met me in the enormous lounge. I had had trouble finding just the right window seat. My first choice had a nautical rope slung across the window view, and my second was very near to the air vent. I determined that white noise might be good in case of babies – we stayed there.

The Inside Passage is a famous and peculiar part of the BC coast. Our ferry ferried continuously from 7:30am to 10:30pm, and for about 85% of the day, we were in sheltered waters, protected from the open sea by a long chain of islands. The narrowest passage came first in the day – coinciding with the lifting of the thick fog that we set out into. The engines slowed to a halt for a moment. The captain came on, explaining that the ship had to wait for a deer that was swimming across the channel. Apparently this happens most trips. We looked at the map and, seeing the size of the island that the deer was swimming away from, we wondered what it was they felt they were lacking...

The view for most of the day (in between the intermittent impenetrable fog) was of waterfalls and small patches of mist over rounded mountains, mostly treed except for some craggy tops that inexplicably had snow patches. The altitude up there couldn’t have been more than a thousand feet, and most of the snow was in sun. I have no idea. We passed an abandoned village that I think had been a logging camp, built next to an incredibly fierce waterfall (where did all the water come from?) – one of the old wooden buildings had fallen apart outwards, four walls on the ground. We passed a series of cute lighthouses with cute white red-roofed buildings around them. The channel opened up as the day went on, and we caught glimpses of other channels that dig deep into the heart of coastal BC. I finished my book and actually looked at my script, trying to get my head to consider how Alison and I were going to make the show work. I stumbled into the main lounge just as Canada won the rowing gold on the big screen TV (I have a way of doing this. I flipped on the 198_ World Series just at the moment of the Oakland earthquake). Andy was chuffed that the UK came in second. We celebrated over dinner (fish and chips, one of the few things on the cafe menu I could eat). As a token of goodwill to Andy’s nation’s valiant effort, I ate my chips with horseradish and HP Sauce.

We kept catching glimpses of a pod of killer whales (what an awful name to give a creature, really) – little geysers of steam and black backs. Nobody showed any tail.

The fog came back in the evening, weirdly, but broke just in time to show the tailings of the sunset behind the ship. I stared at our wake for about half an hour, imagining that I was casting off my troubles with this show, until I got too cold and had to go back in.

In Port Hardy, blinded by tiredness, we looped around the streets of the town until we finally found the C+N Backpackers and stumbled bedward.