Wild Pacific in British Columbia

The Cathedral of Cedars

The first old-growth cedar I encountered in British Columbia made me reconsider my understanding of the word "tree." A tree is something you plant in a garden. A tree is something you climb as a child. A tree is something that provides shade in a park. This was not that. This was a column of reddish bark rising from a root system that covered an area larger than my apartment, its trunk so wide that when I stretched my arms against it my fingertips did not reach a quarter of the way around. The lowest branches were sixty feet above my head. The canopy was somewhere beyond that, lost in a ceiling of green so dense the sunlight that reached the forest floor had been filtered through so many layers of needle and leaf that it arrived as a diffused, emerald glow — not light so much as an atmosphere, a medium you moved through rather than a condition you observed.

The trail through Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island passes through trees that were old when Columbus was young. Western red cedars eight hundred years old stand beside Douglas firs that were saplings when the Black Death swept Europe. Their scale is not comprehensible in human terms. You cannot look at an eight-hundred-year-old tree and understand eight hundred years. The number is too large, the comparison too abstract. What you can do is stand at the base and place your hand on the bark — rough, fibrous, warm in a way that surprises you — and feel the trunk vibrate slightly in the wind, a low-frequency hum that travels through the wood and into your palm, and understand that this organism was doing exactly this — standing here, converting sunlight and water and carbon dioxide into more of itself — when Richard the Lionheart was fighting the Crusades.

The forest floor is its own ecosystem. Fallen trees — nurse logs, the ecologists call them — lie in states of decomposition that range from recently toppled, bark still intact, to ancient, reduced to a mound of soil and moss from which new trees grow in a line, their roots straddling the invisible skeleton of their predecessor. Ferns grow from every surface. Moss covers every branch, every rock, every fallen limb in a green so saturated it seems to generate its own light. The air smells of wet earth and cedar and something sweet and fungal that is the smell of growth and decay happening simultaneously, the forest building itself from its own remains in a cycle that has been running without interruption for ten thousand years.

I walked for three hours and covered two miles. The forest does not encourage speed. It encourages attention — to the woodpecker drilling a dead snag forty feet above, to the banana slug moving across the trail with a determination that its speed contradicts, to the shaft of sunlight that pierces the canopy and illuminates a single fern frond in a spotlight so precise it looks staged. Everything in an old-growth forest is happening slowly. The trees are growing. The logs are decomposing. The moss is spreading. The creek is cutting its channel deeper by fractions of a millimetre each year. And you — you are moving through a world that operates on a timescale so different from your own that the visit itself is a kind of time travel, a brief intersection between your decades and the forest's millennia, a meeting between two organisms that will never understand each other's relationship with time.

Breath of the Orca

The boat left Telegraph Cove at six in the morning, and for the first two hours we saw nothing but water and forest and the occasional eagle perched on a snag above the shoreline. Johnstone Strait is a narrow channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland, funnelling the tidal currents that bring salmon through in runs so thick the water sometimes appears to boil. The salmon bring the orca. And the orca brought us here — twelve people on a rigid-hulled inflatable with a marine biologist named Sara who had been studying this population for fourteen years and who could identify individual whales by the shape of their dorsal fins and the pattern of grey behind them, the saddle patch, which is as unique to each orca as a fingerprint is to a human.

The first sign was a breath. Not a spectacular breach or a tail slap — just a breath, a quick exhalation that sent a plume of vapour three feet into the air, followed immediately by the curved black back of a dorsal fin breaking the surface and sliding forward through the water like a blade through silk. Then another breath. And another. And suddenly the strait was full of orca — a pod of twelve moving north in a loose formation, their fins rising and falling in a rhythm that was coordinated but not synchronized, each whale breathing on its own schedule but travelling as a single unit.

Sara cut the engine. We drifted. The orca approached — not directly, but in a path that brought them within forty metres of the boat, close enough that I could hear them breathe. The sound was extraordinary. Not a blow or a whoosh but something closer to a deep, resonant sigh — an exhalation that carried weight, the sound of lungs the size of dustbin bags emptying and refilling in a single second. Each breath was followed by a brief silence and then the sound of the blowhole opening again and the next sigh arriving, and in the quiet between breaths I could hear the water moving against the whale's body, a soft rushing sound that was the acoustic evidence of six tons of muscle and intelligence passing through the sea at speed.

A calf surfaced beside its mother, its dorsal fin still soft and curved, its movements quicker and less assured than the adults. It breathed twice for every one of the mother's breaths, and Sara explained that calves stay with their mothers for life — that the pod we were watching was a matrilineal family, led by a grandmother whose knowledge of salmon runs and safe passages and seasonal movements was stored in her brain and transmitted to her children and grandchildren through years of close association. The grandmother was the large female at the front, her fin nicked and scarred, her saddle patch worn to a distinctive pattern. She was estimated to be sixty-five years old. She had been swimming this strait since before the logging roads were built, before the fish farms arrived, before the whale-watching boats existed. She was, in the most literal sense, the memory of her family.

Storm Season

The Pacific does not approach Tofino gently. It arrives as a wall — a horizon-wide line of grey-green water that builds offshore and travels toward the coast with a momentum that is visible from the lodge windows two hundred metres back from the beach. The wave rises. The crest feathers. And then the whole thing detonates against the rock shelf in an explosion of white water that sends spray thirty feet into the air and produces a sound that is not a crash but a sustained roar, the kind of sound that fills the chest and stays there, vibrating, long after the wave has retreated and the next one is already building.

Storm watching in Tofino is a winter activity, but even in summer the Pacific swells are formidable. I sat in the window seat of a lodge that had been built specifically for this purpose — glass walls facing the ocean, heated floors, a fireplace behind me, and a view that was essentially a widescreen nature documentary playing on a loop. Each wave was different. Some arrived in clean, symmetrical lines that broke evenly across the shelf. Others came in at angles, colliding with the rocks in asymmetric explosions that sent water in unexpected directions — sideways, upward, occasionally toward the window in a trajectory that made me flinch even though twenty metres of air and reinforced glass separated me from the impact.

The surfers were out. Of course the surfers were out. Tofino is a surf town in the way that Queenstown is an adventure town — the activity is not an add-on but an identity, and the people who live here year-round are people who have made a calculation about what they are willing to trade for proximity to good waves, and the answer is: nearly everything. They paddled out through the white water in wetsuits that made them look like seals, sat beyond the break, and waited. When a set arrived they turned and paddled and dropped into faces of water that were over their heads and rode them toward the rocks with a casualness that was either skill or insanity or both.

Between sets, the ocean exhaled. The foam retreated. The rocks emerged, slick and dark, crusted with barnacles and mussels and the dark green of sea lettuce. Eagles circled above the headland. A grey whale surfaced beyond the break — just the back, a dark curve breaking the water for two seconds before disappearing — and no one on the beach reacted because grey whales in Tofino are as unremarkable as pigeons in Trafalgar Square, which is to say completely remarkable and routinely ignored by the people who live among them.

The Hidden Spring

The boat to Hot Springs Cove leaves Tofino at seven in the morning and crosses Clayoquot Sound — a body of water enclosed by islands and forest and mountain that UNESCO designated a Biosphere Reserve in 2000, which means the old-growth rainforest that surrounds it on every side is protected, which means the trees you see from the boat are the same trees that the Nuu-chah-nulth people have lived among for ten thousand years.

The springs are at the end of a boardwalk trail through old-growth rainforest — two kilometres of planking that winds through cedars and spruce and hemlock draped in moss so thick the branches look upholstered. The air is wet and warm and smells of cedar and sulphur, the sulphur strengthening with each step until you round a corner and the trail opens onto a series of rock pools cascading down a cliff into the ocean. Hot water pours from a fissure in the rock above, tumbling down through the pools — each one a different temperature, the highest near scalding, the lowest barely warm where the hot water mixes with the cold Pacific tide.

I lowered myself into a pool halfway down the cascade. The water was the temperature of a hot bath, perfectly clear, flowing over my shoulders with a gentle current that carried the mineral heat along my body and into the rock beneath me. The pool was edged with smooth stone and draped in ferns. Rainforest rose on three sides. On the fourth, the Pacific Ocean stretched to the horizon, grey and vast and cold, the waves breaking on the rocks below with a rhythm that harmonised with the flow of hot water over rock and created a soundscape of extraordinary complexity — rush and crash, trickle and boom, the hot spring and the cold ocean conducting a duet that has been playing, unheard by most of the world, for geological time.

I soaked for an hour. The boat would wait. Other visitors came and went, climbing between pools, finding their preferred temperature, settling in with the slow satisfaction of creatures returning to an element they were never meant to leave entirely. A bald eagle perched on a snag above the highest pool and watched us with the tolerant disinterest of a landlord observing tenants. The forest breathed. The springs flowed. The ocean crashed. And for one hour in a rock pool on the edge of a continent, surrounded by trees older than most nations, I was warm, and still, and entirely unable to imagine being anywhere else.