Tides by Jonathan White

Author:Jonathan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595348067
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2016-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

The next morning I crank Crusader’s 150-pound anchor aboard and motor toward the snow-topped peaks of the coastal range and the narrowing channels of Sechelt Inlet. The tide is flooding at about three knots when I enter Agamemnon Channel, but you’d never know it by looking at the surface. In this wide, 600-foot-deep passage, there’s no sign of friction: no boils or whirlpools, no backeddies. When I turn the last corner into Egmont, where I plan to moor Crusader, I see boils erupting in the channel’s center and I feel Crusader shifting subtly from side to side, the way an airplane moves in turbulent air. Skookumchuck is a couple of miles away.

In Egmont, I tie off at the government wharf. When I walk into the wharfinger’s office to pay overnight moorage, Vera Grafton is sitting at her desk in a loose T-shirt and turquoise sweatpants, eating cherries and swatting flies. A seventy-five-year-old Nuuchahnulth Indian who has lived in Egmont since she was eight, Vera wears her long gray hair draped loosely around her face. She spits a few pits into a plastic bowl, then offers me a chair and, eventually, some cherries.

She laughs when I tell her I’m planning to take my skiff into the narrows the next morning before light. “I see lots of people—kayakers, rafters, sailors, even hikers—come to see the rapids,” she says. “I understand why you’re drawn, but you’re crazy to go out there alone.” I sense her eagerness to share tales of caution, but I’m relieved that at least for the moment she chooses a more poetic story.

“According to the Salish Indians,” she says, leaning back in her chair, “a beautiful young girl, Ko-Kwal-alwoot, follows the tide’s whisper into the churning waters of Deception Pass, a narrow channel down south. She enters slowly, first to her ankles. She’s afraid of being swept away by the current, but when she’s waist-deep, a hand from a guiding spirit reaches up. It offers itself and gently draws her in.” After a number of meetings, the young girl falls in love with the spirit, Vera tells me, and accompanies it into the undersea world. Today, the Samish tribes believe Ko-Kwal-alwoot and her spirit-lover look after the people’s welfare. The turbulence in the water is Ko-Kwal-alwoot’s long hair, reminding the people of her presence.

Vera gazes out her small window and spits a few more pits in her bowl. “Like Ko-Kwal-alwoot, I think many of us are drawn to these waters. There’s a spirit in them, a life, something that whispers to us. They’re dangerous, but maybe that’s part of the attraction. I don’t know.”

Out Vera’s window is a scene that could be found almost anywhere on this coast: mossy boulders, thick cedar and hemlock forests, a fleet of rusted trawlers in the harbor, frigid blue-black water fingering the channel’s edges. I can’t hear it, but I know how it sounds: the water’s lulling gurgle, the light snapping of halyards against masts, a bald eagle’s little-girl-like cry. If I could smell it, there would be tree resin warming in the sun, salt, iodine, and fish.

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