Victoria Times Colonist 15 June '02
Part 1 of a 5-part series - Starting out in Prince Rupert, BC

Passage to paradise
An abundance of time and a kayak-load of dreams

"Have a nice day - despite the rain," says the checkout clerk at the Prince Rupert grocery store says as I buy last-minute supplies.

"How about a nice 84 days?" I think.

Several days ago, before the 16-hour drive to Prince Rupert, dried food for three months covered the living room floor of my Victoria apartment. In the bedroom, equipment - paddles, wetsuit, stove fuel, a solar panel.... Incredibly, I would have to fit it all into a kayak along with the metre-tall stack of books on the kitchen table.

This mass of provisions for mind and body seems impossibly large to fit into the torpedo-slim hull of a 200-litre sea kayak - a couple of waterproof hatches with about half the "trunk" capacity of an average Volvo. It reminds me of all that I hope to cram into the next three months as my friend Dave Aharonian and I paddle our kayaks from Prince Rupert to Victoria down B.C.'s Inside Passage and the exposed West Coast of Vancouver
Island.

Roughly measured on a provincial road map, that's 1,250 km. We could do it in under 8 weeks. It's not hard to paddle 25 km a day in a sea kayak. But we scheduled an extra month to explore the coast because getting from A to B is only part of our purpose. Time is one thing we can feast on that we don't have to store in our boats or pull out of the sea on a fishing line.

There's a shortage of time in the city these days, but on the coast we will have time in abundance. And this is critical.

Time in our days is as important as space in our boats. Time equals safety as we paddle a gauntlet of reefs and headlands. No matter how well I prepare, my palms still sweat when I think about places like Cape Scott. A logger from the area tells me we'd be better off portaging across Vancouver Island than paddling around the Cape, where tidal currents rip around the the Island's northernmost tip to meet ocean swell.

Then there's Cape Cook, where the uninhabited Brooks Peninsula juts out toward Japan - notorious as the windiest spot on the coast. Or the rocky shoreline of Pacific Rim National Park, a place more often experienced from the dry-land perspective of the West Coast Trail.

The line between life and death in those waters can be the difference between right side up and upside down. If I get knocked over by a wave in a place like Cape Scott, the last thing I'll want to do is get out and swim. That's why when friends held a going away party a few weeks before our departure, I couldn't taste the cake. My sinuses were clogged
with water from practicing kayak rolls all afternoon.
I can now right myself without fail. I have a VHF radio, pockets full of flares, bear bangers and a well-stocked first aid kit. But time is still the first line of defense. Time to think
wisely. Time to wait out bad weather. This trip isn't about taking risks.

Time will let us record the journey. Those dangerous spots are also the most beautiful and inspiring outcroppings of wilderness on this coast. Dave, a photographer, may become the first person to kayak the entire B.C. coast with a 4"x5" camera and tripod (the negative is 4 inches wide instead of the usual 35 mm). Film and camera gear, books and writing paper are an indispensable chunk of our baggage.

For the past month I raided the used bookstores (and went awol with a few titles from the university). I added 36 titles - everything from The Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, Captive Among the Nootka, 1803-1805 to Henry David Thoreau's Walden - to a growing mountain of equipment. Dave has his lenses and filters to take pictures, and I will use my floating library to refract and shape what I record in words. We are working on a book.

And over the next three months, we'll also be filing reports with the Times Colonist wherever we can find internet and a post office. We'll have time to cook and time to fish (for food displaced by books and film). And time to explore. We will detour into Fjordland, a seldom-visited provincial recreation area where the peaks of the Coast Range abut the narrow inlets of the sea. We will have time to meet the locals.

For Dave and me, city dwellers, this trip is partly a pilgrimage to the wilderness that exists for us most of the time in dreams. But there's also a real world out there that is the everyday home of fishers, loggers, boat captains. Maybe the coast for them is no more wilderness than Highway 1 or Howe Street. I'm curious what those people will have to say to a pair of crazy paddlers. Most importantly, we will have time to linger in wild places, which is the real inspiration for this voyage. A geography graduate, I make sense of the world in terms of landscape and I have looked to wild places all my life for inspiration. I'm not doing this trip to prove that I can, or to be the first (I'm not). As roommates in Victoria, Dave and I talked about the day we'd be able to get in our boats, paddle away and not turn back at sunset. Going from A to B is just an excuse to go outside at the end of spring and not come in until fall. I expect the intervening weeks will lead me somewhere not just physically but mentally, even - who knows? - spiritually. That's the main reason I've bought myself this much time to go kayaking.

"Must be nice," strangers say, "to be independently wealthy." Who said anything about wealthy? Dave and I have suspended our routines for 12 weeks at the one time in our lives when we can get away with it. I just finished grad school. In the fall, Dave dives headlong into his photography business in Vancouver, and I begin the first job of my life that's not seasonal and temporary. In the meantime, being gone will probably cost less than staying in the city. Mostly I'll be spending time, and it's hard to imagine a better investment. I feel like Thoreau, who went away to Walden Pond to make life count. Or Bruce Chatwin, the literary nomad who thought that human life was meant for journeying.

I'm doing what I've always wanted to do. This trip has been a plan for almost two years, a dream since before I can remember. Frenzied preparations now completed, the dream is almost a reality.

The longest days of summer have arrived. Equipment is sorted and 300 pounds of food - seven microwave-sized boxes worth - sits back home ready to be mailed in instalments to Bella Bella, Port Hardy and Tofino. In a few minutes, I'll leave the warmth of the Prince Rupert internet cafe, feel the cold drizzle on my scalp, bare from the final "haircut", and perform the clumsy miracle of loading our boats for the first time. With four weeks between us and first resupply stop at Bella Bella, we'll point our bows south toward Fjordland and the area known as The Great Bear Rainforest.

Friends have said we'll be sick of kayaking after 90 days. Exhausted with paddling. Tired of the sea. Bored of wilderness. But I'm an optimist. If there's a downside to this trip, I haven't thought of it. Parts of the journey may be dangerous, but I wonder if the biggest risk of paddling all summer is that won't want to come home - as long as it stops raining.

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