This trip takes me far into the world’s largest protected unlogged temperate rainforest, home of a First Nations people, the Xenaksiala lands and to their isolated spiritual lake refuge, Xesdu’wax (Huschduwaschdu) for the “blue, milky, glacial water” also known as Kitlope Lake.
This experience will deepen my connection to nature under the totem signs from the bear and eagle.
– Michael M. Conti
But to first reach the Great Bear Rainforest, in the heart of coastal British Columbia, Canada, we sail along the Inside Passage, on a 92-foot wooden schooner, The Maple Leaf, built in 1904.
My view of the Gardner Canal, the longest fjord on the B.C. Coast, hasn’t changed much from when John Muir sailed these waters in 1879.
It is a mist-filled landscape of awe-inspiring peaks and low green valleys.
This fjord is “Yosemite by the Sea” as waterfalls carry the snow melt down from glaciated peaks that are at times lost in the clouds.
The old growth forest here is also the lair to the elusive White Spirit Bear that we have come to try and see.
My reaching Lake Kitlope is both a physical and spiritual journey. We haul the Zodiac over a shallow bend in the river, to reveal the majestic glacier fed Lake Kitlope.
Before leaving Kitimat, we were advised by Wa’xaid aka Cecil Paul, the last male Xenaksiala elder to take a rite of baptism, and we wet our eyes from the holy waters we meet.
Few boats have made it this far in years. The lake is long and has a stillness that invokes a prayer that was shared with us before we left.
When we get to the Kitlope, I am going to ask you to wash your eyes. Our story says that though you may have 20/20 vision or glasses that improve your vision, we are still blind to lots of things. We are blind to Mother Earth. When you bathe your eyes in the artery of Mother Earth that is so pure, it will improve your vision to see things.
I will also ask you to wash your ears, so you could hear what goes on around you. So, I could hear you talk. I could hear the wind, and you can hear the birds and animals. If you have the patience to listen to hear the songs of the birds early in the morning, all these things will be open to you.
We are so busy, we don’t have the time for all these beautiful things. If you have the willingness and courage to do that, you will see little things that you have never seen before. You will take a better look at your children, your grandchildren, a friend.
You’ll say. “Oh, I never saw that before.”
Cecil Paul, as told to Briony Penn “Stories from the Magic Canoe of Wa’xaid”
We bless ourselves with a washing from the lake’s waters as a release of tears intermingled into those waters. It was a sweet connection that I have felt before within the 11th century ruins of Saint Hildegard’s abbey in Disibodenberg in Germany,
I lose myself in the water’s reflections like a veil lifted between worlds, I neither here nor there, but felt at home.
The lake is immense and mirror-like in the stillness. It was hard to tell the up and down between the reflective worlds that emerged as we travelled across the surface. I found myself in a state of awareness that I was in a very special place. I felt the veil lifted in which time became one, the past and present were one.
I sense that John Muir’s stories have become my own story to share and to inspire others to get out and wander the many paths that life has to offer us.
