Every spring, they arrive, heaving themselves out of the salty sea and waddling onto the log booms of Chemainus Bay. For days, we’d heard them barking, a cacophony of fierce declarations about who owns what and—just as importantly—who doesn’t.
Their ceaseless honking reminded us of our kayaks, stowed in the garage. They hadn’t yet been towed down to the Kin Beach boat launch this year. So off we went, trundling them on their carts along Maple Lane en route to our first waterborne outing of the season. Life jackets shrugged on, paddles assembled, stroke-by-stroke, we glided into the familiar unknown of our seaside world.
We approached close enough to the herd for me to get a couple of decent shots with my long lens. The images fit pleasingly into my currently framed version of Chemainus Harbour and the Salish Sea. I am fascinated by them, I honour them… dare I say, I love them?
But unlike the sea lions lolling and grumbling at the western extremity of Chemainus Bay, I don’t shout my articles of faith from the sloped rooftops for fear of being mocked or shunned. I quietly live them to the best of my ability, reminding myself as often as I must, that my being, and every other’s, is impossible to comprehend. We are nodes in a vast array of varied consciousness.
The trick of wonderment is that awareness of how infinitesimally small we are in the intricate matrix of space and time.
It occurred to me that if I were wrapped in a straightjacket and placed on a rock in the midst of a lolling, raucus herd of aquatic mammals, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to survive! Like me, sea lions are members of a miraculously evolved species. As is every living thing.
Our first paddle was an inspiring excursion. Afloat, often drifting on the sun-flecked sea, we took our bearings by juxtiposed sightlines: a freigher at anchor, between the distant coast mountains and a flock of resting gulls; the cliff faces of Bare Point behind Diana, reminding us of our own diminutive stature; a lay-line from the beacon on Bare Point’s grassy tip back to the Kin Beach boat launch.
It pleases me to think I don’t have to make reservations, buy tickets, pack my bags, and go through increasingly invasive customs checks to reach intriguing destinations. This here and now is a convergence of wonders in the compositions of land, sea, and sky that I call home.
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