Haida Gwaii

We sat naked outside a fishing cabin. The fire burned inside, we rubbed our eyes.

The next morning the water forgot to freeze our bones until they hurt. It allowed us to laugh, to float. We swam in the freedom of a day that felt ours. The butterflies, the smoked fish, that fed our undernourished bellies.

Remember I landed here after the city. Landed being a strange word. How I could land, on a landless land.

“As if the nature and the spirit of a much larger region were compressed into a space too small for it to plausibly hold.” The author of my book thought libraries, Lower Manhattan, and these islands had that in common.

I told you about the clouds. How on clear days, when night is about to fall, they arrive tired and rest—so intricately—on the ruggedness of the mountains. How I thought they were a blanket, for cold nights. Most likely they’re lovers (because, when you look at them, they are unequivocally one) or little cushions for the feet of giants who don’t want to hurt the soles of their delicate feet on their traverse.

1774: 30,000 inhabitants.

Do you remember the passing of time—stretched, quick, interspersed? Our laughter an event, our day a single breath in the thickness of the moss-ridden forest.  Fallen trees. Their bark narrates hunger, abundance.

1900: 350 inhabitants.

Have you also noticed this crystal-like film that covers everything, everywhere, when the rain stops? I read somewhere that light cannot escape all the water in the landscape. It gives up, passes right through it, gives everything the charm, the awe, of a rainbow.

2024: 4,500.

Rennell Sound, which was much more than a sound. Its colors reverberate through many cobbled, faraway grey mornings.

We cooked the salmon, the halibut, that neighbors hung on our doorknob on days of abundant catch. We drank orange juice and tequila.

Queen Charlotte was long dead before she gave up on the name. Reconciliation started with giving back the words.

You see, it was here that the mountains learned how to see.

Eagles and ravens. Sea otter pelts, gold, and timber.

Did your eyes blind, blend, with the brightness of moss?

Did my gaze land on the stones that would not cease, that seemed to covet my every corner, your every corner and when they reached they landed hard, made us breathe heavy, sob a bit, grasp – for air perhaps?—or just grasp.

But the stones they wept. They wept.