Speak to the Earth Read online

  “That’s real nice, Mom. Now about —”

  “I’d like to hear what the big logging companies like MFI will have to say about your committee,” Jimmy said, his mouth full of eggs and toast.

  “Who gives a damn what MFI thinks,” Iris shot back.

  “Um, before you guys start your daily argument, could I get any answer, Mom?”

  Iris smiled. “Sorry. What’s the favour?”

  “Could you look over the essay I wrote for Richmond?”

  “Ah, the I-failed-the-test-so-I-had-to-write-an-essay essay?’ Jimmy said.

  “Uncle, you’re going to be wearing these eggs if you don’t watch it. And, yes, that’s the essay. Anyway, Mom, can you check the spelling and grammar and stuff? Don’t change any of the facts, even if you don’t agree with them, okay? Richmond’s husband works for MFI and she thinks the company walks on water.”

  “So does the company. Okay, leave it in the family room.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  The kitchen door banged open and Walter shambled in, kicked off his rubber boots, poured himself a coffee and sat down.

  Walter was a Nootka who lived with an ancient Irish setter named Dog in a trailer next to Norm’s Bed ‘n Breakfast. Before Jimmy had moved in, Walter had done odd jobs for Iris — a convenient but embarrassing state of affairs because Walter would not let Iris pay him. He had adopted her and Bryan and there was nothing either of them could do about it.

  “Eggs, Walter?” Jimmy asked, pushing the bowl in Walter’s direction without waiting for a reply.

  “Don’t want to put you to no trouble.”

  “No trouble, old friend,” Iris said.

  The ritual now performed, Walter silently ate. Over second cups of coffee, as Jimmy filled the kitchen with cigarette smoke, Walter commented, “Got some tourists on board today.”

  In his late fifties, Walter had spent most of his life on the sea or in the bush, so that the skin on his craggy face and calloused hands was leathery and dark. He was tall, heavy and arthritic and, as Iris once said not unkindly, he moved in slow motion. Walter owned an old fishing boat, and when necessity caught him by the throat or when a spirit moved him, he would put to sea. Sometimes he would hire out as a water taxi, when people could find him; sometimes he trapped crabs until he had enough money for a while, then quit until it ran out; and sometimes, when the whales were migrating — in March and October especially — he’d take tourists out to see them.

  “That’s good,” Iris said. “Nice day for it. Looking for whales, are they?”

  “Yep. Got six people this time.”

  Walter was a man with a profound belief in silence. It was not unusual for him to come into the house, sit down with Iris and watch TV for an hour, then say “Gotta be goin’” and shuffle out the door, those three words having been the sum total of his oral communication. Nor did he take a head-on run at a topic when he did have something to say.

  A few minutes and several sips of coffee later he added, “Lotta work, six people.”

  “Sounds like you could use a little help today,” Jimmy suggested, looking at Bryan, who sometimes helped Walter out when his arthritis stiffened his fingers so much it made handling and baiting the crab traps difficult.

  Bryan took the hint. “I wouldn’t mind going along, if you’ve got the room. I’ve never seen whales close up.”

  Walter nodded to no one in particular. “Always got room for my best crabber.”

  “Do you have room for two?”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes and said to his sister, “Ain’t romance wonderful?”

  “Mind your own beeswax,” Bryan said when Iris giggled.

  “Pretty big boat,” Walter said.

  Bryan figured he was probably the only person in Nootka Harbour who had not, at some time of his or her life, taken a trip out into the deep blue waters of the sound to see the greys, humpbacks or orcas. On the interest scale, whales ranked up there with watching paint dry or taking a walk to White’s General Store to try on gloves. Twice a year tourists flooded into town from across Canada, the U.S. and even from Europe, to study the leviathans migrating north or south.

  Now, here he was, blinking in the late-morning sun as he helped Walter get his weather-beaten but well-cared-for boat ready for just such a trip, looking forward to a day on the water with Ellen. As the customers — three middle-aged German couples decked out in new parkas and matching watch caps and hiking boots — climbed on board, Ellen swooped onto the dock on her mountain bike, dismounted, and locked it to the lamp post. Bryan introduced her to Walter, who grunted a greeting and fired up the diesel.

  “Friendly,” Ellen commented.

  “You have to get used to him.”

  “I guess.”

  Walter piloted the boat up Gray’s Passage and into the channel between Vickers and Flower Pot islands. Mount Vickers rose high above the rainforest, one side shadowed, the other lit up by the sun. Off the northernmost point of Flower Pot, an osprey floated high above the waves, scribing serene and watchful circles. Abruptly it pulled in its wings and dropped like a spear to the surf, sending up a puff of spray and, a few seconds later, beating its wings hard as it struggled into the air with a fish flopping in its talons.

  The tourists stood at the rail in the bow, chattering and fussing with their cameras. The sun glinted off a flask that occasionally passed among them. In the stern, Bryan sat beside Ellen. Her green eyes sparkled and her red hair lifted and fell with the cool breeze. He put his arm around her and pulled her close.

  Since that first evening, when he had gone to her house to study, terrified that he would betray himself with a stupid remark or trip over his own feet, he had seen her almost every night. Before his fourth visit to her house he had spent the day psyching himself up, for he had made up his mind to kiss her. I don’t care if she tells me to get permanently lost, he had insisted to himself, I’m going to do it. Enough of this reserved scholarly crap.

  All through the evening, as they pored over books and quizzed each other for an upcoming science test, he had chanted in the back of his mind, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.” When the quizzing was over and they were packing up the books in preparation for some serious video gazing, the chant had increased in intensity and the words had changed. “Now’s the time. Now’s the time.”

  He had sat down on the couch and readied himself for the attack while Ellen slid the movie into the VCR. “Okay,” Bryan had told himself. “This is it. This is it.” And as Ellen had traversed the rug that covered the patch of floor between them, “Don’t wimp out. Don’t wimp out.” The timing would have to be perfect. Split second. As soon as she sat down, he would turn to her and plant a big one right on her gorgeous lips.

  Here she was. He took a breath.

  But she didn’t sit down. In one startling motion she dropped to her knees beside him, put a firm hand on each of his shoulders, pushed him against the back of the couch and nailed him with a kiss that knocked his head back. Then, before he could react, she hit him with another, lingering this time.

  “I got tired of waiting,” she said as he caught his breath. “The suspense was killing me.”

  Once clear of the channel, the boat was gently lifted and lowered by the swells as it pushed out into Orca Sound. Bryan and Ellen brewed coffee on a small naphtha stove in the cramped cabin. As they passed out the steaming mugs to the tourists, a big blond man asked Bryan in a thick accent where the whales were.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “If anybody can find them, Walter can.”

  The man looked displeased. He poured something from the flask into his coffee. “I hope so. He is charging enough.”

  “Walter’s the best.”

  “He’d better be.”

  Bryan returned to the stern, where Ellen had taken her seat again.

  “I love this,” she said. “I’ve spent hours watching the orcas and belugas at the Stanley Park aquarium in Vancouver, but it just isn’t the same as being out her
e. The whales are so amazing. They migrate about eight thousand kilometres a year.”

  “You mean eight hundred, don’t you?”

  “Nope. Thousand. The humpbacks winter around the Hawaiian Islands and the greys go down to Baja California. The calves are born in the warmer water. Then they come back to the North Pacific every spring. The humpbacks’ round trip is about eight thousand klicks. I’ve been reading about them ever since I was a little kid. There aren’t many of them left.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like my mother.”

  “Huh?”

  “Flukes,” Walter called out casually, over the drone of the diesel. He pointed west and turned the wheel.

  Bryan felt Ellen’s body tense just before she jumped up and ran to the rail, peering ahead. “There they are!”

  Bryan inched carefully along the gunwales and found a place at the rail beside her. The tourists were all shouting at once, pointing, aiming their cameras.

  Bryan found it difficult to maintain his feeling of boredom; the excitement of the Germans, and especially of Ellen, was infectious. He scanned the undulating ocean ahead. About five hundred metres off the bow he saw white flashes in the surf. He suddenly realized they were not whitecaps.

  “That’s the underside of the flukes you see,” Ellen explained, her voice heavy with wonder. “Those whales are humpbacks.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “From the white underside of the flukes. And from the blow. There!” She pointed to a whiff of white mist that puffed into the air above the dark water. “The humpback’s blow is sort of bushy.”

  As the boat ploughed toward the herd, the tourists became more ecstatic — shouting, pounding each other on the back, laughing.

  “They’re turning this way,” Walter announced above the din. He cut the throttle.

  With the engine now silent, other sounds filled Bryan’s ears — the wash at the bow of the boat as it lost its momentum, the irregular splash of the long gentle swells, the cry of a gull that had followed the boat from shore and the constant gabble of the tourists. This last noise he unconsciously tuned out as the mammals moved toward him.

  The flashing of the flukes could not be seen now because the whales were coming head on. Their dorsal fins appeared and disappeared; their backs arched and submerged, revealing the humps between the dorsal and the head. The blows puffed into the air.

  To Bryan the whales seemed powerful, free, unconcerned with a few humans floating in a wooden boat on the surface of their ocean. They could go anywhere, in any weather; all the seas of the world were their realm. They were intelligent, and they breathed air. How could he ever have thought they were uninteresting?

  About fifty metres out, the whales turned gracefully and passed by. Bryan felt a sudden chill as one of the humpbacks maintained its course straight toward him, its massive bulk becoming more apparent with every metre of water it covered. The dark hump rose from the surface, water foaming around it, then the three-metre-wide flukes broke from the sea and lifted high above the swell before sinking slowly out of sight.

  A few moments passed. Voices murmured near Bryan, but his attention remained fixed on the surface of the sea. His breathing was quick, his throat dry. He felt the rapid thud of his heart. And then, like a small island rising from the floor of the sea, a gigantic shape loomed from beneath the waves, a shape almost twenty metres long. The dorsal fin cut the surface and the mammoth back broke from the surf, water cascading from the dark skin. The humpback’s two blow holes spouted water four metres high, spraying Bryan and filling the air with the fetid odour of fish. The white edges of the whale’s long curved wing flashed in the sun as it slipped alongside, raising the wing as if to avoid rubbing it against the hull. Bryan caught sight of the humpback’s eye, an eye that seemed to examine him. The beast’s back arched and the flukes towered above Bryan, throwing a long shadow over the water. And slowly, the gargantuan shape sank beneath the dark blue swells.

  Bryan became aware of human voices once again and looked around. The tourists continued to laugh, talk, click their cameras. A few moments later, about ten metres off the bow, the surface of the Pacific boiled and foamed, and the whale’s head reared up.

  “Skyhop,” Walter said.

  “He’s taking a look at us,” Ellen explained.

  Silently Bryan stepped away from her and braced himself on the gunwale alongside the cabin, still captivated by what he saw. A few more moments passed. A hundred metres to port he caught sight of a blow and then a dorsal fin. The humpback was heading straight for him again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the blond tourist moving toward him until he stood at Bryan’s side, elbows out as he held a camera to his eye.

  The whale came on. It sounded, reappeared. The camera motor whizzed and buzzed as the man shot his pictures. The whale gracefully turned, raising his wing once again. Bryan heard a shout from the bow, felt a stunning blow as the man turned abruptly, slamming his elbow into the side of Bryan’s head. Bryan dropped to the deck and slid head-first into the ocean.

  The storm of sensations that broke inside his skull — the searing pain in his temple, the bone-crushing grip of the icy water, the numbing rush of terror — seemed to arrive in slow motion. He felt himself sinking. He felt and heard an unidentifiable sound, distorted, like a stereo turned up too loud. The noise enveloped him. A growling. A squeal. A door opening on rusty hinges.

  The spell dissipated and, thrashing in panic, Bryan broke the surface, coughing and spluttering. He fought for breath when a wave crashed over him and he went down again, pulled deeper by his sodden clothing, falling into an arena of reverberation. A long, mournful whine. A hollow growl. His chest vibrated with the power of the sound.

  Then, despite his terror, he knew. It was the whales. The whales were singing.

  He felt a light tug at the back of his neck. A sharp jerk. Above him, shapes wavered against the light. He came to the surface to see Walter with a long pole in his hands. Bryan was pulled through the freezing swells to the stern, and Walter and Ellen hauled him into the boat.

  “I heard them,” a voice said as he lay gasping on the deck. “I heard them.”

  Soon afterwards, Bryan sat shivering uncontrollably in the cabin, out of the wind, with a cup of scalding black coffee clutched in his chilly hands. His head ached and his ribs were sore. Walter had stripped off Bryan’s wet clothing and wrapped him in a thick goosedown sleeping bag, then returned to the controls to steer the boat back to Nootka Harbour. The blond tourist had come in and offered to add to the coffee a splash of something from his flask as he muttered his apologies.

  “I thought Walter was going to throw that fool overboard,” Ellen said after the tourist had left the cabin.

  “I heard him singing.”

  “That stupid guy?”

  “No, the humpback.”

  “You look like you’re in a trance, Bryan. Are you okay? Maybe it’s hypothermia.” Ellen took the mug from him and held his shaking hands in hers.

  “Huh? Oh, no,” Bryan answered through chattering teeth. “I mean, yeah. I’m fine. I’m okay. Did you hear him, Ellen?”

  “No. But I’ve heard them on tape.”

  “It was weird, like he was talking to me. Like he was trying to tell me something.”

  “Try to keep warm.” Ellen pressed the coffee back into his hands. “Drink it while it’s hot.”

  “They’re great, aren’t they,” he said. “They’re so big!”

  “Yeah. They’re the dinosaurs of the deep.”

  Bryan thought of his old home town, the arid Badlands holding their secrets and fossils, the giant bones of extinct dinosaurs.

  “I hope not.” he said.

  FIVE

  B.C.’S FOREST INDUSTRY

  draft one

  by Brian Troupe

  for Mrs Richmond

  a make-up assignment for failing my test

  The forestry industry in our province is one of the richest and most important. The other two bein
g are mining and fishing. The biggest logging company in B.C. is Mackenzie Forest Industries which like a few of the others is an international a multi-national company. That means it is not owned completely by Canadians. Most of the rights to log the province has have been sold to these corporations.

  Our wood products go all over the world to make paper, newsprint, furniture and houses, to name a few. About 90 per cent of the wood is exported in raw form and manufactured somewhere else, so there aren’t very many manufacturing jobs connected with to the forestry for Canadians. There’s There are about 76,000,000 cubic metres of wood in B.C. (Or is it Canada?)

  Ninety per cent of the trees cut in B.C. are clear-cut, even though many countries in Europe don’t allow it. (I couldn’t find out why.) This is a method where all the trees in the area are cut down, although not all of them are used. Clear-cutting is safe and efficient and saves the lumber company a lot of bucks money. (Time is money!) Many clear-cuts are about 400 hectares in size. After the trees the loggers want are taken away, the clear-cut is set on fire to burn away the slash and crap stuff refuse left behind and other plant life so the area can be replanted. The replanting is to produce more trees, and herbicides and pesticides are sprayed regularly, just like on a farm. A lot of this replanting does not work — about half of it. (But I couldn’t find out why.)

  Nowadays the lumber business is a lot more efficient than it used to be. For example the rate of logging in B.C. has doubled since the 1960’s. A machine called a “theller bunger” (sp?) which cuts the trees at ground level and lifts them up can do the work of about 12 loggers. So it’s harder to get a job as a logger these days.

  About two thirds of Alberta’s forests are planned to be cut down, but I’m not sure about here in B.C.

  So as you can see, like I said on my test (which I failed) the forestry industry is important to our province.

  MY BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I watched two videos, “The Nature of Things” with David Suzuki (my uncle says he’s a troublemaker and my mom thinks he’s a saint) and “The Forests and You” and made notes on them. They contradicted each other all over the place.