In the beginning was the word, and the word was GO.  Flickering with inconsistency, my subliminal mind was set free in casual complication, the reigns of sanity that held me constant became elastic to allow thoughts I would have considered addictive and misleading.  Instinctually I pursued an unknown desire across thousands of miles of deserted highway.  Movement was in my bones, built into the very fabric of my soul through generations of persecution, a residual gypsy impulse I knew only as freedom, driving me to live in poverty on the street and in abandoned buildings, pushing me to fill the empty alleys and deserted storefronts with happy melodies, a faint reminder of a faraway land and another world centuries old.  The memories of buskers in front of ornate fountains, beggars in street corners asking for nothing special, just a morsel of food, a handful of change tossed from a faceless stranger with a look of abandonment.  A people living with simple tools, travelling in covered wagons and dirty clothes they remained vagrants, passing unnoticed through towns as if they were a pack of dogs, and throughout the years carrying a calm and peaceful beauty they remained happy and proud.

 

The frequent reminder of a forlorn traveller pursued by the wild beast of love through an endless labyrinth of slums, prejudiced and persecuted he becomes the scapegoat for mans shame and fear and the target for mans hatred.  From enchanting melodies of passionate street theatre spring the still waters of satisfaction, erotic dancers sparking a savage fire of romance yearned for by the most noble and coveted by the rich, a beauty which cannot be owned at any cost and is rebuked and criticized because of its simplicity.  To the earth it remains true, governed by love and truth the untamed cannot be domesticated, feral without shame it haunts the streets walking in silence, cursed and scorned without regret.

 

I sprawled out in the carefully manicured orchard and waited for an apple to fall in my lap while the dogs played an endless game of tag in the nearly perfect lawn, casually ripping delicate perennials by their roots.  Behind the five foot high stacked rock wall tourist busses and commuters took turns passing each other on their way to the parliament building.  I stood up and lunged against the tree, hoping that might help the ripe fruit on its way to my mouth, and stooped to pick up my breakfast from the lawn. 

 

The sandstone walls were stained with hundred year old minerals dripping in steady flows from the floor above my sleeping bag.  The chill wind blew through un-maintained window seals in pointed funnels to my wool blanket, finding an entrance in the hole I had ripped for a neck opening when needed as a poncho on brisk, party bound nights. I could have slept on one of the many beds scattered in disarray but chose to leave as little of an invitation for the lonely spirits that were rumored to live here.  “Don’t go into the chapel, it is SO haunted.”  So was the tale of Queen Anne’s, a Catholic orphanage for well-manipulated young female minds over a hundred years ago, now left to the squatters and adventure seekers to find a sense of religion in what remained of a place once chaste and pious.

 

“Got ten minutes, I’ll write a song just for you.  Grab a piping hot steaming triple shot latte and sit down, lean your chair against cheap plaster walls and get a piece of the action.  Two bucks, ten minutes.”  To a silent rhythm came an enchanting endless reign of invisible drama to sustain entranced emotion.  Watch the sound dance in echo down the boulevard, glass panes trembling to the shake, the rattle of fingers licking across silver keys fast as thought, bring your kids and relax. “Two bucks, ten minutes”

To the sidewalk I meant nothing more than any other pair of feet.  The cold stone staircase was formed to my butt cheeks that sat patiently waiting in the wee hours, intrigued by the melody of an acoustic guitar, for the next twenty bucks to slip into my guitar case so that I could get some more E strings, and maybe some food, and start playing some more.  The traffic had died to a slow whir, tracers lighting up the street with red and yellow, the spattering of autumn rain signaled the end to my show as I packed my beat up 1967 Krakus into its soft case and walked to the café for as much relaxation as eight hundred pennies could buy. 

 

We spent most of the afternoon walking to the rhythm of a thousand impatient tourist busses weaving through traffic, a posse intent to reach the beach.  The carefully manicured lawns drew our footprints into a well trodden path weaving around lichen covered boulders while over us naked Garry oaks reached their gnarled branches to grab the coastal wind that licked at the brittle leaves like fire.  Tunneled under woven hedges was the entrance to Wonderland, a small even black hole.  We dove in feet first and stopped halfway down to light up and relax, kicking our feet out as if in a hammock to gaze at the lingering surf below as it ceaselessly eroded the granite shoreline.  Emerging into hazy sunlight we kept below the brush line to avoid the lazy local eye and found an adequate somewhat level sandy area surrounded with large logs and tall weeds, well suited to be our latest squat.  With little more than a roll of hemp twine, some duct tape, and a nice sunny day we constructed a spacious home from the driftwood branches of thousand year old trees.

 

Off to the nearest alley in a wisp of sweet smoke surrounded in the carefree fearlessness of youth, the way that we are set up by destiny to receive the most bang for our buck, ten seconds of free flowing urine, ten minutes of intense scrutiny by bike cops.  “You’re not supposed to pee there you know, got ID?”  I scrambled to pee all over the place and then turned around just in time for a complete “routine search”.  If I ever was paranoid about getting busted, this would be the time.  Those cops are notorious characters.  When Gestapo bullies are reincarnated they become Canadian cops.  “Take off your hat”, I sweated bullets as he probed inside barely noticing the four joints tucked under the brim. 

 

The drums rang out like bells hammering the way through 18 inch thick sandstone walls.

 

 

We stood entranced in a rhythm, commanding attention from the escalators which never paused to hear the song.  Sometimes they threw change and you could see them groove a little, but the only ones who listened were trapped, in a chair with a piping hot mocha steaming sweetly, with an overspending wandering wife asking if Cowichan sweaters give you rashes.  Then sometimes we got loonies.  Ah, the fabulous ONE DOLLAR COIN.  Get drunk, sit down, grab your pack of smokes, and BOOM there it is sitting on the sidewalk.  At that rate the best paying job was waiting until bar rush and singing oldies until a crowd of blathering frat boys got drunk enough to sit down and grab a pack of cigarettes from their jeans pocket.  Even better, ask them for a light one at a time,  cool, ten bucks.  And then sing them to sleep with some funky anti establishment oldies to knock a few deuces and finns into the hat.  Cool, twenty bucks.

 

The melodies echoed from abandoned fire escapes throughout empty alleyways to the deaf ears of hurried commuters busily looming under seven stories of carefully placed concrete blocks.  The bars were our only competition for airspace, our location in the nether regions half a block from city center gave us the upper hand.  The only sound we heard was a dozen bumping rhythms cascading down the pavement and colliding with the spontaneous vocal pitch of half drunk, half stoned birds.  Our weapon was the music.  In any generic situation with homicidal tendencies if you were playing a guitar you were O.K., the music never died as long as the guitar was playing.  The stale exhaust came alive with flavor, take a drink of the cheapest vodka and stand up if you can.  Now let’s get drunk on cheap beer and whisky and wine and some vodka and pass out in some anonymous bushes with some anonymous big breasted sleeping bag and a couple smokes, wake up late and freak out some executives during brunch by talking loudly about fancy sexual positions in a too-fancy-to-eat-at juice bar and then run out the door after eating forty dollars of exotic custom smoothies with wheatgrass and spirulina without paying. And then let’s go back next week and do it again just for kicks, and play antiestablishment songs at full volume from our acoustic guitar every day for two weeks right in front of the door, after all the sidewalk is bought by taxpayers for taxpayers, and I sure did pay my dues

 

 

I picked up my welfare check and promptly spent half of it on bulk foods, half on survival gear from the army surplus store in Victoria.  I stuck out from the other street people, only well liked by a niche of other street bums-turned-woodsmen intent on spending more time away from anything else than living in plain view of the tourists and more importantly, the police.  We caught a bus and got to Sooke by nightfall and in sizing up the task ahead of me I realized I was in for the long haul.  When the bus dropped us off at the end of the line, I remember looking at the hazy beams from the headlights of passing cars, reaching up over the road like great fingers, descending through us back into the night.  A few short rides was all it took until we knew we were on our own.  The night holds a secret known only by the weary and unhurried traveler, and in time I would come to know it well.  Press on, and enjoy the silence. 

 

Off into the horizon, illuminated by a thousand sodium lamps, was the murky haze of the Fletcher Challenge mill.  Upon driving the miles that were between us, I noticed that the murky haze was actually the brilliance of fire consuming a pile of slash, debris and to my eyes fully usable material, the pile was at least fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet long, throwing shadows of eerie shapes almost to say  “where are we going now?.”  The drive was more than long, down windy bumpy roads forever stretching through miles of clear-cut wasteland, a legacy in itself leading my thoughts to a new way of using the six foot wide logs lying around like 100 foot long toothpicks, never to be used.  I could make a castle, take a chisel, an adz and go off into the woods.  I could carve a solid canoe and float off to those great mountains.  The Olympics raised from the shallow blue water of the Juan de Fuca, ancient majestic and endless wilderness. The heartland of the wild was all around me ringing with life and bounty asking me to leave and leave it alone.

 

Morning brought us into the Bamfield ferry, the thing must have been as old as the guy running it an old man from the Nitinat tribe blind in one eye, with a large cataract over the other I wondered how he could see at all.  It was really just a rowboat, didn’t even have an engine, and was the only lifeline between the trail we were following and the rest of the world, not much of a lifeline but then I didn’t want one at all at the time.

On the shore was a large cast-iron bell on a carved stick, must’ve weighed 200 pounds.  “Ring that when you need a ride back” was all the man said after I paid him the five bucks for the ride, and he shoved the boat off into the mist.  Ahead of us the trail wound its way through the hills and into the distance where the old trees stood proudly out of the second-growth canopy under them.  They were what I had come to see, the last remnants of a world before my time, a land of monsters and giants.  Unfortunately the monsters are my ancestors and the giants are all but gone.  I had come to pay my respects, though I had no idea what it would cost me.  The West Coast Trail is a gem like no other.  It’s been around since the original oxen hauled logs bigger than a train car out in the 1880’s, and now is the only strip of old-growth forests on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  It travels unbroken up the steep and slippery fiords, traverses many crazy deep canyons and is equipped with several trams across gorges hundreds of feet in width.  We hiked that trail for three days, opening our food rations as little as we could, I had planned on being there for as long as I could stay.  We reached the halfway point, the giant roiling river Walbran on a tiny beach with great accessibility from the open sea, that is if you didn’t go to the far north end.  The tide pools are amazing, deep crystal clear pools filled with swarms of fry and every color of anemone.  I couldn’t help but think how wonderful a fish would taste after all that dried food, but alas I would never be able to spear one that deep in the water.  We stayed on the beach for a few hours before we made our way to where we really wanted to camp, Carmanah beach, the home of the fabled Qwa-Ba-Diwa tribe.  Story of them had floated to me in Vic, about how they were displaced in the thirties, their population decimated by smallpox like so many others, and made to fit to the tribal patterns of the neighboring Nitinat tribe which the whites assumed they belonged to.  This was not a good pair.  The Qwa-Ba-Diwa were from the north tip of the Olympic peninsula in Washinton, what now is Neah Bay, from the Makah tribe.  As the story goes, a young man of the Knighton family was carrying the ceremonial rattle during a celebration and dropped it carelessly on the rocks, where it shattered.  The fury of the others was so great, and when they heard about the occurance they banished the family from the land.  In a canoe they set afloat, elders, parents and infants, to a new shore and a new life.  They drifted to Carmanah and have been there since.  Within the last ten or so years the Knighton family of Nitinat reclaimed their beach in a show of strength and solidarity among their brothers in the rest of Canada, staging takeovers in Buffalo Creek, Alberta, and most notably in Oka, Ontario.  Several of the famous Oka warriors split the scene after burning a few too many police cars during the months-long standoff on the only bridge between Montreal and Ottawa and headed west to this spot with a barrage of fancy weapons and explosives, vowing to use them if the government and logging companies refused to leave their tribal lands between the Nitinat ridge and the Walbran ridge.  To me that was really cool, I thought that if the indigenous peoples were in so much poverty and their culture was being lost to the WalMart society, why not give them what’s theirs to live a little better, even if they just go ahead and log it, or develop it, at least they’ll see the cash.  Well, I was unknowingly right in the middle of the sticky situation once I set footprints on that beach.

           

As the sun set over rocky Carmanah point we noticed a light from the other side of the beach, it was yellow and constant, “must be a lamp from the Indians over there” I said, starting to get my things packed up tight to walk over “we’d better hurry before it gets too dark, I hope they are friendly, I mean, we are here to help them after all.” My voice trailed off to Jessica who hurried to keep up with me.  Crossing a river in sandals is like catching a greased pig where you never get a good grip, and having a backpack that weighed a hundred pounds only compounded the problem, and after nearly losing my step a few minor times in the current, we stepped up the pace a little.  The light was coming from an oil lamp in the window of a small cabin, barely 10 by 12 feet, sided with weathered but relatively new plywood, with a rusted steel roof.  We reluctantly walked up the path “I hope they don’t shoot us” I joked uneasily.  Before we could knock the door was flung open and the face of a grizzled man in his fifties peered out at us “What do you want?” he commanded, not taking his eyes off us for an instant, sizing us up with a stern look.  “I heard about you guys from some friends at the University of Victoria, and we came to help” I said meekly, and then almost as an afterthought I added “Is the chief here?”  He laughed like I was from some other world and replied briskly “Peter isn’t here, but he’ll be back tomorrow…he had to go into Duncan to help his brother, but he’ll be back.”  I wondered if tomorrow meant a week.  “Well, you should put your things down and come on in, you look like you could use a hot drink…I made some tea.” 

 

            The sudden change in attitude when I mentioned why I was there made me curious as to what they had to worry about.  I mean, the cabin is a good four hours drive from the closest village, and then you have to walk down a rough trail for another hour.  After we had started drinking the herb tea I tried to make some conversation, and he could tell that I was uncomfortable.  “So, have you ever met Peter before?” he asked, obviously sure that the answer was no.  I could see him saying to himself “why do I have to deal with all these city bumpkins, if we didn’t need the support I would never have welcomed them in.”  “Oh, no.” I answered, “I have heard a lot about this place from students that were here last summer.” The walls were stacked to the roof with canned foods a few layers thick, furs and blankets hung from the rafters and a cozy woodstove was pumping heat out from the far corner.  “Well, I had better tell you then, my name is Wiley, I’m the guy who brings the supplies in, we fly ‘em in on a helicopter and they don’t really hold that much, when you’re talking everything we could need for months.  They’re fucking expensive too, those bitches.  Peter runs the show around here.  He’s got a lot to think about right now, so don’t go bugging him when he gets in.  Now his wife, she’s a different story, she’ll talk you out of house an home, that lady.  They also have a daughter, Christine, she’s twelve.  Every now and then I bring in a couple of my guys to help get things straight around here and they’ll be coming next week sometime.”  I got the impression that they ran a pretty loose ship.  After a few cigarettes we went out to sleep on the beach with a wonderful view of the cloud laden skies, all but our heads fully covered in a blue tarp, wrapped under us.

Of course we woke up soaking in the sand, the puddles in our backpacks once again needing a good drying.  I had gotten so used to rain I barely noticed when the tarp leaked in the night though I often wished there was a better way to stay dry while living out of a backpack.  I had taken all the preparations I could to prevent any of the food or essential items from becoming soaked, and the Ziploc freezer bags seemed to work just fine, though after a couple weeks I became very dependant on the roll of duct tape to patch the tears that appeared every time I opened the bags and I’m sure the trail of grain and beans slowly pouring out of elusive holes in the fabric scattered along the trails I had hiked was a good way to create food for any future uses.  The next time I would use plastic jugs with the screw top.

Upon our arrival to the cabin site that morning we found a fresh and lively scene, seemingly much different than my initial impression in the questioning illusionary darkness the night before.  There are many places similar to this in the world, a quaint homestead built with very little to use, consisting of several sheets of plywood, 2x6’s and tarpaper, with tarps and black plastic stretched out from the stick frame as far as possible to provide as much shelter around the perimeter as the brisk winds would allow.  In this area was a great assortment of rustic tools, old wooden chests, fishing gear and stacks of blankets under the stacks of tarps.  There was no question these guys had a good amount of essential backcountry experience to make up for the inherent lack of everything else.  The home site was littered with stakes, small stumps and branches from coastal shrubs and larger fir and cedars that were cleared.  For the amount of heavy iron tools and other gear it was hard to imagine how long it must have taken to build up seeing as the only entrance was the rough West Coast Ocean, the endless trails or expensive helicopters. The salty ocean air blew in strong and cold from the crest only 150 feet from the cabin, and I wondered if the waves would ever wash up in a good storm. “Never had a problem yet” Wiley said, “grub’s ready”. 

Breakfast consisted of seven grain mush, pot after pot of weak truck stop coffee and the most delicious bannock.  Cooked in two deep cast iron skillets together on a wood stove, flipped over when barely browned, oiled just so it wouldn’t stick to the metal the bread was a welcome touch of home.  It was about the only thing other than soup or gruel that didn’t come out of a can in the entire place, a tradition as old as the colonization of North America.  Flour, water, sugar and salt in that order.  Mix it together and cook it up.  It seemed that cigarettes were as much a part of breakfast as the food, with smoke constantly trailing from Wiley’s lips as fast as the stories he told.  “I own four blocks of downtown Vancouver, I tell the cops down there what to do, and what not to.  I use this place as a way to get out of the city, cool off and then get back before everything falls apart.  I’m gonna have some guys out here to help with the clearing in a couple weeks when I come back with me girlfriend, but until then it’s just us.  Get’s a little lonely now and then; we just keep busy and don’t think about it.  Today we are finishing up the clearing over there” he pointed to the west where all I could see was a pile of debris and brush.  “That’s where we are building the longhouse.  Over sixty years ago there were Indians all over this place, more than 600 of ‘em right here, happy and alone until the smallpox got all but a dozen of them.  We hope to build part of the longhouse into a museum of tribal history for the tourists when they start coming like every summer.  Hopefully by then we will have the gardens ready and can feed all the yuppies good organic food and hotdogs, and sell smokes and chocolate bars.  That’s what they want the most next to coffee; we could make good money from that.”  Obviously there was not much else to hope for. “You wouldn’t even believe the battle we had to get this land back, 60 fucking acres and they have a hard time giving that up.  Goddamn Canadian’s.  This whole place is Peter’s, from the Nitinat ridge to Carmanah river, all the way up to Nitinat lake, unceded lands it is.  The Queen ain’t got a leg to stand on here, no treaties – no nothing, they just assume it’s all theirs and make us fight to get anything.  Fuck em. We’ll fight! We’re the ones with nothing else to lose; you bet we’ll put up a good fight.  You remember Oka?”, he asked not expecting me to know about much Indian history. “Yeah, sure, they beat the hell out of those pig frogs huh?”

 

Okanasake is the most recent famous case of tribal war against the government both Canadian and American.  Before Montreal and Ottawa the floodplains on both sides of the great St. Lawrence river were deemed Oka territory.  These lands stretched across many miles, creating a bountiful heartland for the powerful Iroquois nation.  Back then no one thought about the bridge that was built through the reservation to connect the two major cities, and no one could have known the consequence to arise from some far out money hungry developer turning the fruitful lands into a golf course.  “Great idea guys, sounds like the best place for it, those Indians will thank us for the tourism, you bet!”  Immediately the bridge was blockaded by burning cop cars and dumpsters, a stand off for months of chaos.  The Iroquois are notoriously brutal warriors and finally after decades of dead-end negotiations had a good excuse to scalp whitey.  In solidarity with numerous other tribes across Canada and the US warriors came out of the wilderness, migrating to the cause, and bringing it home to their own towns as renewed cultural pride.  It shut down any hopes for eager commuters, and brought the army in full force to set precedent.  Of course the Indians got what they wanted, as well as many long jail terms.

Wiley walked outside, down the walkway and stopped, looking wistfully through the mist.  “Randy was a fucking madman, he never stopped fighting.” He turned and laid a hand on a rifle poking out of the sand, alone in it’s own corner of the yard capped with a wide brimmed leather hat, the last memory of a fallen warrior.  “He made it all the way here, a wanted and hunted man, only to die on the rocks over there.”  Wiley pointed with a steady hand towards a small outcropping of rocks on the beach, “he came over from Makah with more guns and smokes than we would ever need.  We were ready to go to war after Oka, and he was the best they had, fuckin maniac. No one could beat him in the woods man, a damn rock!” he kicked at the ground and shouted “Those rocks have always been a problem for the people, we are gonna dynamite ‘em this year sometime after the coast guard leaves in spring. They got a lighthouse right around the corner.  Used to be the protection this area had from incoming boats, now all it does is stop us.  We’re the only ones that use wooden boats anymore, anything we need to stop will be in a heavy duty skiff, like the Nitinat, otherwise it’s helicopters…” he trailed off thinking about the complications of his situation.