Apparently, people who know things know that when you clean an interior space, you start at the ceiling and work your way down. This was relayed to me as an obvious fact, not told to me directly but through a story about how someone else had also just learned it.
My flight back to Haida Gwaii last week was one of those trips where you rise above the clouds into a perfect sunny day, a light denied to those below. It feels like cheating, a loophole in the weather’s plan, a guilty pleasure that borders on heaven itself with its endless white horizon.
That sense of stepping into a place I should not reach only grew as we neared Haida Gwaii. The cloud was so low that the island’s mountains pierced through like dark ships on a foamy sea. The familiar shape rose from the billowing carpet.
Surely this is where the supernaturals dwell. Surely this is not a space I’m meant to occupy.
Yet there I was, coming home to the islands I chose in this restless modern world. A place that is both mine and not mine.
Thoughts of space and belonging circled as I set down my copy of Heather Ramsay’s A Room in the Forest and turned to the window. Heather once lived here. Her book follows Lily, a forest technician who arrived in the late 1990s. Lily’s story is partly Heather’s, partly mine, and partly everyone’s who found their way here.
The air was crisp when I stepped off the plane in Sandspit, a welcome break from Vancouver’s smoke. I went through the familiar paces: a glance at the clock above the luggage carousel to gauge the 3:30 ferry, a quick trip to the washroom, a walk to the car with a silent prayer the keys were in my pocket and the engine would turn. Pulling around the car to the curb painted red, an insufficient deterrent for me to not park there. I wait for my bag, watching the clock. Get the bag. Drive to the ferry, silent prayers all the way until I round the corner and see if I’ll be ahead of “the sign”. A soft exhale.
That routine, more than anything, felt like belonging. It tethered me. As I reached the landing, the clouds that had clung to Haida Gwaii began to thin, drifting away or dissolving, impossible to tell from my vantage point.
There was a time when much of my family lived here, right in Tlell. Many have since moved on. I wondered again if I should too.
But those thoughts scattered as quickly as the clouds. The flight above the islands had cleared the cobwebs, leaving me stunned by the beauty of this place. It was a felt belonging, a sense of safety I carried with me as I rolled into the ferry lineup and joined the familiar chatter of friends and neighbours. Some of us would be lucky, some not.
The euphoria like no other when you’re down to the last few potential cars and the ferry attendant waves you down.
Haawa, Haida Gwaii.
