Botanical Beach

One of the Known Sights of the island is Botanical Beach, about two hours' drive north of town outside the hamlet of Port Renfrew, in Pacheedaht Territory.

The area has the distinction of being the place where the heads of the Juan De Fuca Trail and the West Coast Trail almost but don't quite meet.

(K. has hiked both of these multi-day trails and I have hiked neither.)

Almost heretically, I had never been to Botanical Beach, because I don't drive and there's no bus that far north. But K. drives, and she loves a hike (QED).

We originally planned to take the road across the island too -- make the new loop. But the wildfires have made that passage difficult, so we stuck to the coast.

We left early to arrive at low tide. We got stuck behind several different nearly identical gravel trucks along the way, and once had to wait at some construction, but on the whole the drive up-island is a flying dream all its own, the deep trees and flashes of sea, the long string of beaches that mark the West Coast Trail.

For a game on the way up we named local fauna and I asked questions: no, no porcupines on the island; no skunks! (that surprised me); a few misplaced grizzlies in the north, but all male; no coyotes, no moose, but yes elk in the dense woods, obviously deer everywhere, and all kinds of lithe and slithery minks and weasels and otters in every niche and cranny. Sea lions and seals on the reefs and in the harbour. All the whales we knew. We named wolves, cougars, black bears, eagles (bald and golden), vultures (of course) and the corvidae, crow, raven, Steller's Jay.

But we did not see any mammals save humans and dogs on this trip, nor had we named all the creatures that we would see.

All along that road the last fifty clicks or so, red sumac glowing along the banks. K told me that one of the bridges up this way used to be made of a single gigantic log, wide enough for a lane of traffic. Gone now, but within living memory.

The parking lot was busy but not overwhelming. To get to the beach, you take an easy trail in over wobbly walkways and then drop into one of those wild impossible panoramas the island manifests when you begin to think complacently that it might be tame.

The rocks were a half-stirred mixture of golden sandstone and blue-grey granite, thickly crusted with mussels. There were thousands of mussels in riparian crevices, in blackish beds, in gleaming overhangs. I would not be shocked if you said a million.

The rock was spread densely with half-dry weed, green underneath and translucent on top, like cellophane hair.

The tidal pools on these jagged dark outcrops were crammed with bright purple sea urchins (and once or twice a bright red one), and more mussels, some six or eight inches long. Clumps of gooseneck barnacles in their Star Wars armour leant over edges, observing alongside our camera eyes. Pink curvaceous sponges and in the deep overhangs red ones like raw muscle; wee conical limpets like accidental stains upon the rocks. Living fossils of chitons hunching along bare sandstone patches. In the deep pools, ice-green anemones two hands wide.

The waves that beat back the bull-shouldered rocks were white, high, ruthless. Not storming -- it was a clear bright day -- just tameless, ten feet of foam, the tide grappling in with great surging claw-swipes at the stone.

An eagle sailed in low to see what we were all looking at, drifted indifferently away.

We climbed over the rocks to the east -- an interesting climb but not too challenging -- clambering through the strangely purposeful beauty of water-carved formations. Tn places the rock looked rumpled like crushed paper, and in places smooth as skin.

More tidal pools, sculptural in the warm sandstone, artful amoeboid voids where tiny striped sculpin were swim-walking over the submerged rocks.

We sat down on a white whale of driftwood in the hollow of the high cliff, looking out over a calmer stretch of ocean. We spread out cheese and crackers, honey-roasted peanuts I bought at the gas station on the way, dark crimson cherries, chocolate.

"Look, a Steller's Jay!" I said, and he was, peacock-blue body and crested corvid head, very congenial and very interested in our lunch, but not pushy like a crow; dancing around us instead, showing off his gleaming, shifting feathers, aqua to ultramarine to indigo.

He seemed so tame that I did an irresponsible thing -- I held out half a peanut on my flat palm. He danced a little more, gauging the leap, and then in an electric blue blaze, seized it from my hand. I felt his small precise talons, that incandescent corvid. Rogue beauty.

Then back into the tree, and again onto the sand, to catch up other detritus.

There was a robin, too, very fat and glossy, if not so glamorous.

We went back by the trail, the dry orange root-sculpted earth. On the way we detoured down a long steel stair to Botany Bay to see a tiny island utterly beached by the low tide.

Walking, we talked about an article K.'s friend had sent her about the omnipresent metropolis, about the battling ideologies of natural splendour as national smuggery and world-gutting resource extraction. Secret economies and the networks of empire. About writing and teaching. About whether the pink stuff was sponge or coral.

I thought of Leanne Simpson, writing that her own territory is irrevocably decimated by colonialism, and how -- despite clearcuts and second-growth, invasive species and of course the highway that let us traverse it -- this place seems (to me) still in some deep sense this place, up to today. And I wished I knew some way to keep it at least this whole.

Then we drove again, back along the highway (all paved now, though some of it was gravel once, in living memory) -- stopping at a small cafe whose cluster with the fire hall and community centre makes up the entirety of downtown Shirley, BC.

(Port Renfrew is likewise mostly fire hall and community centre, with the addition of a large pub serving triumphant or shattered hikers, and a coffee cart, closed today.)

We sat on the patio and I ate tay- and raspberry crumble and K. ate cranberry something else. One huge black raven crossed overhead and disappeared into the other side of the sky.

And then I came home to tell you about it.

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