Pilgrimage to Haida Gwaii - DAY FIVE - full day on Haida Gwaii #1

Thursday, August 14th

That thing is happening. That thing! Where I'm writing when I should be doing. When I get up and write instead of getting up and getting up. That thing!

So, garn dosh it, this is going to be concise. This is going to be dense!

I'm on Haida Gwaii. Still. Obviously! The propriotor of the Golden Spruce Motel is *very*( similar in look, accent, and demeanour to Clemens Merkel, who plays violin with the Bozzini string quartet (I did a workshop with them in April in Montreal). They're both Swiss, I believe. And where are we? Port CLEMENTS. Weird stuff. This is not just a motel, but a terrific breakfast spot. Clemens (I forget his real name) made us terrific food to order. I had salmon eggs benedict with rosti (Swiss-style hashbrowns) where the potato literally lived just for my order.

Then we went to the Golden Spruce trail. It's about 6 km south of Port Clements, along the Yakoun river. The trail is probably only a five-minute walk to the view of the tree, but I took my time. Severely. I recorded the sounds of the forest as they showed up: small birds, ravens, the sound of Andy (my serendipitous) English companion and I walking on gravel, mud, grass, mud, boards, stones. We took pictures of the largest trees. The Informative Sign at the head of the trail used to call this forest "second growth", but it has been re-stenciled to say "old growth". How old is the sign?

It was a very, very odd feeling that I had, walking a path that my fictional characters have walked for 30-odd performances already without me. It certainly looks like forests I've been in in BC before: deep, dark, wide green, moss on reaching branches, mud on the ground - but there it all was, things I've written and read about: the river, 20m wide. The bench where people used to sit to watch the Golden Spruce, slightly taller than the trees immediately around it, glowing, they say, when the right light touched it. And the tree itself: now just a skeleton, hanging out a little over the river. I have been completely wrong about how it touches the river. It's not square on, it's at a 25-degree angle or so. I recorded the sounds of the river. Every two minutes are so, regularly, there was a splashing sound, like a fish, in the same place. What could that have been?

Then we went to the little museum in Port Clements. It's filled with artefacts from the white history of the island: saws and other tools and cash registers and signs... and the White Raven, the other genetical delight mentioned in my show, Port Clements' *other* tourist attraction, who also died tragically in 1997. Ravens are big, when you get close to them. Andy and I wondered how a white raven would keep the blood from showing. If you're going to eat carrion, wear dark clothes.

We spent the afternoon up past Masset, at the very top end of the island, on the beach under Tow Hill. The hill is actually a sheer cliff rising just above the sea - half of a volcanic formation of basalt columns (like Staffa in Scotland, or Giant's Causeway in Ireland). The other half shaved off, and what's left is a cliff sticking up out of the flat part of the island. The whole beach there is volcanic rock, boulders fallen from Tow Hill, and small pebbles of infinite colours. The volanic rock is strange and porous, with perfectly circular potholes around it. The famous Blow Hole there shoots out water under high pressure at fairly random intervals - watching the waves didn't really help us to predict it. Right next to it, a tiny seam in the rock spits out high-pressure air that needs to be released when the water pushes into the Blow Hole. The sounds were amazing - so I recorded them.

On the other side of the river, the beach instantly changes to smooth shell sand, rivulets and ripples, and a line of enormous jellyfish and crabs (all dead of course) at the last tide line. There were people out looking for live crabs, I think - this is where the locals come to catch them.

This - or beneath Tow Hill - is also where Raven discovered the first people in a clamshell, and brought them up to be humans (Haida, to be specific).

On the way back, we stumbled into a fantastic restaurant and bakery call Trout House, and spent much of the evening there, eating and talking to the locals - and visitors working there for the summer - all of whom have the same fantastic demeanour. This is undoubtedly a hippy community, on the north end of the island. The restaurant was beautiful and a rare sight in Canada: not only un-winterized, but un-winterizable. We ate in the greenhouse part. Staff kept reaching in to pick edible flowers with which to garnish salads. Andy and I both had clam fritter burgers made with local razor clams (he also had the clam chowder, but that seemed a bit much to me) and nachos, and we finished up with spontaneous three-fruit pie (the selling point being that it was fresh out of the oven, and served with natural vanilla ice cream). Several people dared me to return to the Golden Spruce and *cross* the river to touch the stump. I'm thinking about it. We trundled home, stuffed, via Old Masset, which really, for this island, is a sprawling metropolis.