A Stone's Throw: The Enduring Nature of Myth

It is quiet on the dock. A speckle of frost on the handrail melts into the wood as I touch it. Trees on the far shore appear black against the slate sky, though a fringe of November light has begun to spread across Point Grey to the south. The eastern horizon is crimson. The water of the bay is now still. An ebbing tide sweeps the rocky beach without a sound.

I walk across fir planks to the corner of the dock, where my view of the channel widens. A row of moored sailboats blocks the open water and the tiny island with its cluster of residences; but I look in that direction, and listen.

Presently, I see a ripple curving along the white hull of the farthest sailboat: the day’s first stirring. And I hear the sound of oars in the water: quiet creak, soft splash, silence, then the patter of droplets. The day unfolds into the rhythm of these sounds.

A yellow dinghy comes into view from behind the moored boats. A set of spruce oars moves through the black water. I can see from the shape of the hull – steep rake of the bow, wide thwart – that it’s a Davidson dinghy. Upon the thwart seat, his back to me, his face looking along the channel to the open water, wearing a red windbreaker and a blue hat, my father rows.

I wait at the dock’s edge. As the dinghy approaches, my father slows, lifts the left oar from the water, and pulls with the right. The boat swings to starboard and comes alongside the dock. He ships the oars as I reach down to the gunwale. I find the cold painter, loop it through the dock ring, and tie it with a bowline. My father hands me a bag of gear and climbs out. The hull rocks gently, and small ripples skitter out into the bay. We say our good mornings. I remark on the cold. He mentions that a Thermos of coffee is in the bag, along with bananas for breakfast.

We drive north along the coast, past the islands of Howe Sound, into the mountains. Before the fjord closes in and we lose sight of the wide ocean to the southwest, we see – around the back side of a large island, fifteen miles to the west, hazy in the oncoming light – the shore where both he and I spent our childhood summers. We can’t see the cabin, or the trail that leads up the hillside to a plateau overlooking what seemed, to an eight-year­old, all of creation. But we can see the hill, round and slight at this distance, a bump in a far landscape. The cabin is still in our family, bought by my cousins when my grandmother died, but neither I nor my father has visited there for many years. Sometimes he passes that shore, during trips north on his sailboat. He doesn’t stop, though he’d be welcome. He keeps going, into the oncoming breeze that wraps the headland and through the channel to the sea.

Steep treed slopes border the road. Far ahead, white peaks are beginning to catch the gathering day. We stop at the diner adjoining the old mine; I’m surprised to find it open this early on a Saturday morning. A logger’s pickup sits out front, its owner the only other customer inside. As we select our snacks, the power browns out, the lights flicker, and the waitress pauses, looking both annoyed and hopeful.

This stretch of the old road has always felt derelict to me. The mine, once the largest copper producer in the British Empire, is long closed. Almost every window in its terraced superstructure is smashed; its tunnels are now a museum not visited much by travelers driving through the mountains. Southward, the city is spreading in this direction; within a generation, this quiet town will be another burgeoning suburb.

Before the mine, in the days when this landscape was not yet populated by ghosts, my great­uncle walked this territory. Just after the First World War, through the days of a long summer, lodging with trappers and homesteaders and sleeping in the rough; hundreds of miles across a land of impenetrable silence. He walked off the ache of his wounds here, along this shore where the sound widens and the glaciers first come into view.

We climb back into the car and head north. The road is wider than it once was and bypasses the old cemetery beside the nesting ground of the eagles. Highway crews have straightened out the tight corner we used to call the death curve, and they’ve blasted away the cliff face upon which someone once painted a false tunnel opening. We once hit a moose near that cliff face, late at night, the road slick with rain. The front quarter of the car was smashed in, but the moose kept going. We could hear it trundling off into the bush, hurt or unhurt we never knew.

By the time we turn off the highway and crunch onto the gravel track heading eastward, the sky is bright. Ahead, the forest ramparts – green and dark and thick with shadow – stretch across a series of ascending ridges. The distant peaks are cloud­hidden. The road meanders toward them, climbing three thousand feet over the next half hour, switchbacking through stands of fir and cedar along the shoulder of the mountain. The track has been worn into two ruts, now filled with water streaming from the alpine above. The ridged center of the road rises close to the undercarriage of the car. Halfway up a long switchback, my father reminds me that a few years back, along this stretch, the oil pan was ripped loose from the bottom of a car he was traveling in.