photo: matt j. simmons
unpleasant event was beautifully eclipsed by a chance meeting in that same park with Captain Highliner himself. A bearded old salt complete with Sou’wester, mildewed old wool sweater, and gumboots. Our piles of trip food and gear strewn across the lawn piqued his interest, and he asked about our plans. He listened politely to our visions of grand adventure exploring Gwaii Hanaas, then proceeded to trim them down to size with a tale of his own solo row in a dory around the entire Haida Gwaii archipelago, decades prior. And we thought we were tough. I recalled this meeting with a grin years later on a flight up to Haida Gwaii, where my seatmate was a keen fish biologist heading up to study the unique strains of trout and sculpins in the remote lakes along the West Coast of Moresby. Their isolation, he hoped, would provide a unique opportunity to study evolution in a situation not unlike that of Darwin’s famous finches on the Galapagos, where every island has its own, unique species of finch. Every lake, he hoped, would contain genetically unique species of fish. I dutifully bit my tongue as I thought of Captain Highliner’s tale of scrambling up to these same remote lakes, capturing fish in a bucket, and hauling them over the ridge to neighbouring lakes to make sure they were stocked as well. Nature untouched by the hand of man must be truly hard to come by if the lakes of Moresby’s west coast have been meddled with. Re-outfitted entirely from the Prince Rupert thrift store after the heist of our gear, our first nights on the islands were spent at the mushroompickers’ camp at Mosquito Lake, an eye-opening glimpse into a darker, substance-tainted renegade lifestyle if there ever was one. By this time our rebellious escape to the wild coast was seeming more mainstream by the day, as we encountered the true fringe of the world that helps make the North Coast the vibrant node of culture it has been for the past 10,000 years. There is little that compares to the stomach buzz heightened awareness of setting out on a new adventure. Maybe people do drugs, I have often thought, to try to replicate the hyper-reality and truly deep excitement of human journeys into the unknown.
56