We took the highway out of Tofino towards the junction. Today our aim was to reach Virgin Falls, right at the end of the inlet. Our only access was through a logging road, so we left the main junction and headed off through the thick forest along a stony track. The irony wasn’t lost that in order to gain access to the wilder places, we were using a road designed to facilitate the rape of the forests. Either side of the track lay thick forest. As we drove, everyone scanned for a bear – a high point of the trip if we were to catch a glimpse of one – your eyes lost their bearings a few rows of trees in. It was as if the forest began to swallow you. I’m sure a lot of this was second growth, you could tell by the size of the trees around. Nonetheless, it seemed wild. There was an edge of the unknown about. You could imagine losing yourself here.
As we passed Kennedy Lake and the road got somewhat worse, we started to see the inlet to our left; little coves accessible only by boat lay at the base of sheer slopes where we were level with the tops of trees. To the right, the rock cutting loomed high above, exacerbated by mighty trees which seemed precariously perched on the edge but whose branches and trunks towered above us so far that it made you dizzy looking at the heads of them. We had been driving nearly an hour by now and we began to feel very distant from all the bustle of Tofino on Easter Sunday. It was as if the deeper into the forest we travelled, the further away from our society we ended up.
Suddenly we broke through the forest cover and were faced with a testament to our ability to make our mark on surroundings. A swathe of clear-cuts lay ahead of us. You can never prepare yourself for the devastation of a clear-cut area and I am always horrorstruck at the brutality of this. I wish to remain so. If I become inured to this then it would be to deny the fundamental horror of the rape of these forests. There is a careless air of disregard surrounding clear-cut areas – only humans could execute something so vicious. Broken stumps lay all around – indiscriminate, universal destruction. How many years combined did these trees live and how little thought and time went into the action severing their links with this world? The action was irreparable – no matter how many seedlings were planted, how hard they had worked at removing the roads, the damage had already been done. This ecosystem had been destroyed and while a new one grew now in its place, this new one would be different. We can never know what has been lost in this place. A part of this is our own loss. In being a species that can do this, we show that we have lost our connection with the forests around, we are out of sync with the natural world.
We found the falls, the river level was low (there hadn’t been much snow that year, the winter had been mild, another symptom of our changing climate). The falls were still beautiful. Along the way the road bridged several small rivers. Looking either side of the bridge, icy cold water, clear as only crystal iced flow from high mountains is, bubbled over grey, river-worn stones, forming pebble beaches rimming meanders. We scanned for fish – we saw none, although the warning signs were there to prevent the dumping of garbage and engine oil in a fish habitat. They were too well camouflaged on the rocks for us to see from afar. As we drove out, I checked the high tree-line for lone bears coming out of hibernation. We were more likely to see one than a cougar. High up, on harsh inhospitable slopes, steep and tree-ladened, the bears remained hidden today. A wise move on their part for we are the more dangerous species of the two.
As we followed the logging road back, the mountain-filled horizon was visible. One of the party pointed out that it was a traditional view of Canada. In the far distance, rugged snow-covered peaks stood, almost close enough to touch but distant enough not to be of my world. Despite the fact that individual trees were visible, or perhaps because of that, I could visualise the isolation there. In the mid-ground, dense forested peaks, covered from base to top with cedar and fir, a green cloak hiding so much. Contemporary Canada had had its say, however, as in the foreground a clear-cut slope screamed its presence, justified in its position in the vista as much a part of wild Canada as the trees that once occupied that space, although not something the tour brochures broadcast.
We need to be reminded sometimes, that there are wild places.
to the important things in life, I refused to compromise and revise that weekend even though my O-levels started on Monday morning and I sat the whole lot of them with my Joshua Tree Tour T-shirt firmly affixed to my back – I was 15 and it was a statement (15 year olds are very good at statements!). I’m pleased to say that I have lost neither my addiction to T-shirts nor my ability to work out what’s really important in life over the ensuing decades – I don’t even remember what the exam was that I sat that Monday but I don’t think I’ll ever forget Bono belting out classics on the Wembley stage. My one lasting image of that concert, however, is not the stage but the wheelchair bound guy at the back (where I retreated to because if you know me, you’ll testify that I just about come up to sweaty armpit level and there was a box I could stand on at the back by a concession stand) – he was no longer wheelchair bound but scooped up by one of his friends and they were both going crazy, lost in the music. Great live performances really can make you less earthbound.
closest friends and a big bag of marijuana (which, obviously, no-one inhaled, *ehem, ehem*). Seriously though, this is the album I come back to when I want that dose of nostalgia that only music can bring (you know the one, the visceral one that actually takes you back to where you used to listen to it). When nothing else is right, out comes ‘Levelling the Land’ and all becomes well in the world again.
open fire and listened to it on repeat (which in those archaic days involved a lot of rewinding of cassette tapes). It was a moment of change in all our lives because our close group of friends was separating after the final year of school and it was the last time we all sat together as childhood allies without complications of partners, widening networks of friends and a hefty amount of mileage between us. It was the reason I packed this album when I set off around South East Asia later that year, the reason it now has many more associations than just teen-angst, most vividly listening to it on the verandah of a shack in a hill-tribe village in the Golden Triangle north of Chiang Mai, Thailand watching children who could barely toddle wielding machetes and women in an eclectic mix of national dress and modern attire. It still comes with me everywhere, but in the age of the iPod at least I don’t have to carry the brick sized Walkman that I did then (which is a good job because some mean individual filched it from my backpack when I was camped out at Bangkok airport waiting for a flight to Indonesia … ).
up the whole Seattle scene to me – I was so a grunge-head, even had a scruffy lumberjack shirt to boot. This is one of those albums that just become your best friends. When I first went away to Uni, I was a mature student (well, chronologically at least) and didn’t really need a new complement of friends so it was an upheaval. I’d only just got back from a fantastic few months travelling and it seemed odd to be sitting in a room in halls having to redefine my connections (I would say ‘a bare room’ but I tend to move with at least 3 boxes of books, anywhere, even abroad … and some rugs … and some posters … erm … and the odd piece of furniture …) and this was the album I chose to listen to while I hung out the window looking at the lights in the botanical gardens on the other side of the road (which I never got around to visiting despite the best intentions …). I finally got to see Pearl Jam live in Warsaw on a bitterly cold November 1st (Day of the Dead in Poland, so I’d spent the day walking round cemetaries looking at candles). I was just blown away by the concert and the fact that I’d finally managed to see one of my all-time favourite bands live (albeit in a really unexpected place). We slept the night on Warszawa Centralna (the main train station) and it was FREEZING. There’s a real underbelly of society that spends the night in Warszawa Centralna (or at least there was, over a decade ago) – drug dealers, prostitutes, drunks – but none of that mattered because hell, I’d just seen Pearl Jam and they had played loads of songs from ‘Ten’. The fact that this is the first back catalogue re-release leading up to the band’s 20th anniversary in 2011 just makes me feel old!
year. They’ve followed me everywhere and I find that there’s a comforting feeling coming back to my old favourites, like visiting old friends you haven’t seen for a while. A love of poetry is something I had instilled in me from a young age, growing up in a house where poetry books were always available, encouraged always by the wonderful use of language in this written form, and (for better or worse) it has been something that I have always written myself. This led me down the path of considering why people write.
