Moody skies over Clayoquot Sound

Clayoquot is a big sodden sweep of fiords and islands along the west coast of British Columbia's Vancouver Island. Like I said, we're out for a week and will sleep each night on a new beach and give each day to a new stretch of sea. Halfway through the week, we're at the turnaround point, Hot Springs Cove, and we settle on the idea that the week owes us nothing. There is not a single image or event we can point to as sponsoring this general air of satisfaction, but we both understand we have found what we came here to find. Most nights, the stretch of beach we choose was our own. Every night there are eagles fishing the shift of tides. We're in rain forest, one of the wettest climates on earth, but it hasn't rained once.

This turnaround point requires a decision. We've gotten this far along the sheltered route, the inside passage. The sound, a big bay, is stepped with miles-wide stones that are islands, and they form a sheltered channel along their inside edges. In these channels, one glides along with the islands' mountains rising on both sides, mountains that brunt the bite from the ocean just beyond them. That's one route. The other is to cut outside the islands to the ragged edge of the world's most inappropriately named ocean.

The guidebook had said don't even think about cutting outside of Flores Island. Two features on the outside, Rafael Point and the nearby Dagger Point, are associated with body counts. Without warning, the sea can grow violent and sweep in great histrionic waves against the rocks. I know this, but I also know that just beyond those points are Siwash and Cow Coves, and that they hold whales, gray whales. Guidebook be damned.

Now Tracy and I are engaged in another game we play, a variation on the theme of the money game. I played this one in the first marriage too. The push of muscle and adrenaline against the drag of caution and fear. Trace had read the guidebook. But the game dissolved before it began really, dissolved in trust or in a shared confidence in competence or unseen coercion, whatever. What caused it to dissolve is our deal. For you, we only say that it did. We go outside.

There is a whale in Siwash Cove, a gray as long as a house. We paddle with it for a half hour, and I lose track of it as it submerges in a roll maybe a hundred yards straight off my kayak's bow. I sit bobbing on the gentle little swells, barely able to breathe for want of the complete silence that will let me hear the break in the sea's surface that is the whale's next rising. Taut, terse silence like a bomb ticking. The leviathan is below.

Then comes the resonant, throaty snuffle of a whale's body drawing air through it, and still I can't see it. Can't because it hasn't yet surfaced, but it is close enough to my tippy kayak that I can hear it breathe. Then it rises, no longer off my bow but beside me and close, close as the grave, so close I can hear the rattle of air through lungs, then it rolls.

Move on to Roll Practice

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