NATURE’S RHYTHM
Kurt Johnston writes of finding one’s place on the Juan de Fuca Trail
They say to go west, to see the country: to experience things grander, wilder, and more beautiful. A long, wet winter — coupled with a lack of knowledge of our new environs — has limited our exploration to short, temperamental days.
What we’ve seen is, beautiful, yes — wild, more than we’re used to. But our constraints thus far have led us to fall short of a real connection with our new home. And this lack of connection makes us feel like visitors, like we are still travelling to some new place. We want to feel familiar in these lands.
Along a rugged, 47-kilometre stretch of Southwestern Vancouver Island, the Juan de Fuca Trail winds from China Beach, just west of the old logging settlement of Jordan River to Botanical Beach outside the town of Port Renfrew. The trail is often overshadowed by its famous neighbour, The West Coast Trail, running further west up the coast from Port Renfrew.
But like anything overlooked, there lies a beauty in the less-familiar, the less-trampled, and the Juan de Fuca, with its scant markings and sometimes spartan beach camping, seems to proudly boast of its relative obscurity.
It tightly hugs the coastline, rarely meandering more than a few hundred yards from the shore, and it draws a great deal of energy from both land and sea. As an introduction to British Columbia, we thought this: a perfect place to start.
DAY 1
Excitement started to build when my partner, Jen, and I began packing the bags and loading the supplies. It brought out a creeping feeling of adventure. Sure, it was little more than a four-day odyssey, but after a long grey winter of rain, an afternoon of sunshine had finally come.
It moved with us across the Strait of Georgia, through the Southern Gulf Islands, down the Saanich Peninsula, and further westward. The long, warm days were here and we wanted to put them to use.
Departing from China Beach, a short, 40-minute stroll through a forest succumbing to the fading light was pleasant and affirming. While we expected the long weekend to bring a bustle of human activity, the forest seemed to be quieting at each turn, as if the day’s throng of beachgoers and throughhikers had pressed down on the trail, keeping it from air, and the forest was preparing to take one last breath before nightfall.
And just before dark we arrived at Mystic Beach — the whole halfmile stretch filled with tents and driftwood campfires.
The past few days of anticipation as well as the previous hour of quiet excitement inched aside to a feeling of nervous unfamiliarity as we strolled, awkwardly, down the cobblestone beach looking for a place to pitch our tent. We had the feeling of arriving late and being interlopers. The fact we were all visitors to this back-county beach was a hard sentiment to hold on to. And with all the proper tent sites occupied, most of the firewood already collected, and light fading quickly, anxiety crept in.
This was quickly calmed when a trio of women huddled around their fire called to us, inviting us to set up next to them in an area they had cleared for the next hikers to come through. They were beaming with positive, welcoming energy, even gifting us a log for our fire.
We settled into our site, with a small fire, set back from the serene ocean. The waves, crashing with a calm, metronomic surge, accompanied our conversations as we wandered through topics: tectonic plates, fish and trees, the Ottawa Senators, the best taco spot.
We talked for hours, all the while starting to feel some of the weight of the place. One could begin to imagine the thousands of years this land has pulsed and moved.
Humans inhabited this place long before Juan de Fuca and other Europeans sailed and settled these coasts. For centuries, along this stretch of coastline, the Pacheedaht people called this place home.
Closely tied to both the land and the sea, the Pacheedaht moved seasonally through the varied landscapes and ecosystems, taking advantage of what resources the region had to offer, including the dangerous practice of openocean whaling.
Across the Strait of Juan de Fuca still lies the traditional land of the Makah people, closely related to the Pacheedaht. From where we sat we could see the lights of the Makah Reservation in the western distance, where the silhouette of the great Olympic Range tapers into the Pacific. Its silence betrayed it as an image, a reflection of a time when nature and man were less distinguishable, when ferries and trail shuttles didn’t move wide-eyed travellers around, compressing the earth.
As our fellow campers drowned their fires and turned their lamps off, we tucked into our sleeping bag. The ocean grew louder — a reminder, as we dreamed of the days ahead, that the world is still there, always there — pulsing, alive.
DAY 2
Setting out in the morning, a long series of creek valleys was a firm and demanding reminder that while described as a Marine Trail, this is still British Columbia, and there are always hills.
With our legs full of energy and our packs full of food, it was a pleasant, testing hike.
After a few hours, Jen commented how, after working through the chaos of yesterday and a morning of packing bags and settling into a rhythm on the trail, she finally felt like she had left the city behind.
That attachment to a distant geography we associate with stress and unwanted responsibility had been cleared, replaced by a more present mindset.
I tried to be in the moment, but my mind was clouded with the reminder of a beach cutoff after Bear Beach, passable only at low tide. My memory of the tide table I had written down, and immediately lost, was hazy. But after a short lunch break it cleared. The tide was low, and the beach passable.
The exposed reef, providing us with access to the next section of the trail, injected us with a greater sense of adventure.
We decided to try our way down the beach, past the forest trail entrance, marked with a large red buoy, to see how far we could make it on the water.
Being the hardest section of the trail, we thought our timing with the low tide and acceptance of waterlogged shoes would get us to China Beach by late afternoon, all the while avoiding the steep hills inland.
After a couple traverses in waistdeep water, slipping on submerged rocks, our ankles wrapped in kelp, we reached a dead-end.
The steepness of the river valleys that made this section so hard inland pushed all the way to the ocean, and it became impossible armed with anything less than a kayak. We backtracked, and caught up with the trail, which was every bit as hilly and difficult as we anticipated.
Soon after re-entering the forest, a long traverse up a creek valley was greeted by a short hike down an overgrown logging road. Always a pleasure to hikers, graded logging roads provide a great respite from the gnarly roots and rocks of a more natural trail, but they are there for a reason. That reason, we soon saw, was a large clearcut just a few hundred yards from the trail.
This is one of the few significant man-made scars you can see from the trail. I thought, perhaps naively, that land as beautiful as this would inspire people to rise above such behaviour.
The pleasant grade of the logging road was short-lived, and changed to a steep, gruelling series of switchbacks up and down the valleys.
These hills, when viewed later, blend into one long undulating stretch, but in the moment, each time we found ourselves crossing a creek and facing another fernlaced wall, we had one battle to fight. One hill to climb. We hunch our shoulders, put another leg out, and fight the impulse to consider it all. “One last push,” my mind says to my legs in encouragement.
“It levels out just beyond that tree,” it says to the lungs, ignoring the likelihood that it doesn’t, and may never. It’s a helpful trick, this wilful ignorance.
“Once you have reached the top, it’s all downhill. I promise, this is the last. Enjoy this now. Better than the alternative,” the mind says. “Stop thinking about it,” it suggests.
The arguments get weaker with each valley.
The hard day’s hike ended in the early evening with a long, pleasant descent into China Beach. Again, with a full beach of campers, we faced another graceless stumble looking for a campsite.
The loose rocks giving way with each step, and our heavy packs throwing their weight around, we looked like a couple of sea-legged shipwreck survivors.
Eventually, we found what we lovingly described as a “nook,” which was little more than a small patch of loose rocks walled in by two giant cedar driftwood trees. We collected what wood we could find, erected our tent, and fought with a dwindling fire until sunset.
Certainly, we thought we had it bad.
We arrived late, due in large part to our reef excursion, and as a result we had an unfortunate campsite. But a short time later, once the tide had filled in and darkness consumed the forest behind us, a lone hiker strolled along, coming from the direction of Bear and Mystic Beaches.
Scanning the mile-and-a-half stretch of exposed beachfront, discontent with his options, he eyed a completely exposed section of loose rock a dozen paces from us, dropped his pack and happily proclaimed, “Well, this is home!”
Jammed between two monstrous trees, awkwardly shifting our bodies to get comfortable on the rocks, we tended our damplogs-and-wet-twigs fire. We watched as our neighbour, in his even more hostile, exposed surroundings, threw his small tarp down, anchoring the corners with large rocks and jamming a trekking pole inside. He had a bedroom.
He wrestled three cedar logs from the bush behind him, twisting, nudging and kicking them into his table, chair, and hearth. His enthusiasm, energy, and deftness with an axe made him a fury of wilderness aptitude. He quickly and surely built himself a fire.
This was both surprising and perfectly expected, as we knew the moment he dropped his bag he was no stranger to life outside. When he was finished, his small, sensible fire generating exactly the heat he needed, his bag tucked away and dinner consumed, he wandered over to the bushes to retrieve a fourth large cedar log, and dragged it our way.
“Cedar. This is the good stuff,” he said, throwing the log on the rocks near our fire. “It’s like building a fence.”
That was inexplicable for a number of reasons, but we were not about to press for clarification, as he proceeded to chop at the log, quickly reducing it to a sensible pile of firewood.
“That should do,” he beamed, leaving the firewood and nimbly trotting back to his kitchen, barefoot.
“Thank you!” we said, happy to have a hero in our midst.
In our regular lives, as part of our increasingly complex world, we have built communities that are full of pleasant interaction and genuine care. This is all very real, and on every street, in every city, everywhere in the world, people are living well with their neighbours. We cut each other’s lawns. We wave friendly hellos, and we pop by for an afternoon drink. But still, this is done in a hostile environment. The backdrop to this community is the partitioning of land, ownership, and control of space. We have barriers to signify it all.
This is one of the reasons we commune with nature. It has no artificial walls, no natural constraints to community. This act of walking 30 paces across a wild and open beach to deconstruct a log beside our fire was never done, or received, with any sense of propriety.
He was just being nice, and amid the open space of nature, he was being human. If there was a barrier to our lots of land, none of us could feel it. At any rate, it was the worst attempt at building a fence I have ever seen.