Spring on Vancouver Island’s west coast—wind still raw, sky still volatile. Pinched between mountains and ocean this narrow frontier is constantly under assault. Weather systems swirl. Tides pull. Hills of swell move perpetually shoreward. Residents grasp moments of sun like they’ll never get them back. Even though we are connected to other places by Highway Four, the endless construction and road closures at Kennedy hill have added to our isolation. Throw in the pandemic restrictions, the heat dome, the floods—and feel the kinship flourish for those who lived here when the only way out was every three weeks, by ship. Trapped under this bell jar of external forces, members of the Clayoquot Writers Group have managed to keep and deepen their connection thanks, opportunely, to Zoom.
Local poet Janis McDougal is currently re-reading Chasing Clayoquot—a Wilderness Almanac, whose author David Pitt-Brooke has been called "a Thoreau for Clayoquot" by the Globe and Mail. The author takes the reader on twelve journeys, one for each month of the year.
“I'm only through February now,” Janis sends me David’s seemingly-prescient 2004 introduction of the term atmospheric river: “Picture an enormous river, a turbulent river with vast tributary streams rushing in from either side . . . The west coast of Vancouver Island lies in the path of a vast river of air flowing across the Pacific . . . generating enormous eddies in the atmosphere.” As I write, our week of sunshine and early daffodils has been truncated by storm-force south-easterlies and an anticipated eighty millimeters of rain. Yes, a river.
Atmospheric in a more figurative sense is The Gripping Beast, by Janice Lore, a poet whose handmade books featured in the Miniature Pieces Art Show held by the Pacific Rim Arts Society. These small marvels are proof of this poet’s commitment to expressing art in more ways than one. Hold one in your hand, examine the architecture, unfold the words. Amid swirling winter weather, locate yourself in a Viking legend:
The Gripping Beast
It will find you.The fierce north squalling in,
squatting behind round shields
in the open longboats,
square sails set by the Sagas and a sunstone,
running hafvillr in the fog and gales.
Useless to set the beacon fires
The beast has already slipped in.
Dragons surging up
the river on the tide,
plundering even the abbeys,
the barbaric hand
that grips your throat
your own.
© Janice Lore
hafvillr: Icelandic. bewildered, all
sense of direction lost
But as every hesitant salmonberry flower unfurls her pink skirts, the grip of winter weakens. And without a doubt, the spring event that west coasters are collectively holding their breath for is the April 30th launch of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, edited by 2020-2022 Tofino Poet Laureate, Christine Lowther, and published by Caitlin Press. This collection features an impressive number of influential poets, several of whom have attended the recent Fairy Creek blockades and still others who defended old growth ecosystems in Clayoquot Sound nearly 30 years ago. “This is a gorgeous and necessary collection, to be returned to again and again,” writes poet Stephen Collis.
Beyond exhibiting the work of poets, however, this collection also showcases a community that believes in the arts, supported as it has been by the Tofino Arts Council, the Tofino Poet Laureate Steering Group, the District of Tofino and the Pacific Rim Arts Society. Not only did these agencies help create of the poet laureate program back in 2018, they have helped each poet laureate achieve their goals by every means possible. Perhaps westcoasters do live under a bell jar, but if so, it’s one that rings with the collective richness of community.
