Grief and Enchantment
It is a grey and murky day aboard Tushita between Blind Bay and Anacortes. We motor east against the tide through Thatcher Pass into Rosario Strait. We were in the islands exploring the western approaches, anchored in Reid Harbor, Fox Cove, Garrison Bay, now headed home. The islands are wrapped in grey-brown haze, the product of millions of diseased trees and thousands of dessicated acres burned by wildfires hundreds of miles away. Straight up, the sky is robins egg blue, viewed horizontally across Orcas Sound it is putrid yellow. It is still and cool and except for the purring diesel, quiet as the grave.
Two weeks ago we camped by Boulder Creek a few miles below Mt Baker and Mt Shuksan. The normal moss and fern understory was dry and crackling after weeks of drought. The snowpack on Baker was diminished and low. Hiking at Artist Point between the two peaks was abnormally free of snow in early July, the sunshine intense.
Salmon hardly run in the Salish Sea anymore. When I first came this way in the 1980's, gillnetters and seiners dotted the sounds and bays during late summer and fall scooping up millions of returning salmon. The return of the fish to the Fraser River in BC was celebrated. Alaska Airlines would fly the first salmon catch of the season from Vancouver to Seattle in a cheesy corporate salmon return ceremony.
No more. The Fraser River run has collapsed, no fish have been harvested in the Fraser for three years. Resident (fish eating) orcas struggle to survive and now range over thousands of miles in search of salmon. Smaller pods of non-resident (mammal-eating) orcas have replaced them.
The forest is different now. Moist, mossy and soft replaced by crackle and snap. Fires and disease wipe out millions of pine and fir to be replaced by alder, beech and scrub.
The sea is different now - more jelly fish, more algae, fewer birds, fewer salmon. Salmon carcasses no longer nourish upstream forests and the resident whales wander hungry far offshore.
The mountains are different now - less snow, more rain, less ice, more rock slides, muddy rivers.
This is not climate change, it is slow motion climate collapse.
You all know this, have heard it before. Some of you believe redemption is not possible, we will get what we deserve, the earth will shake us off, better without us. Party on. Some of you are overwhelmed by the catastrophe, see no way out. It's inescapable so what's the point, and turn away. Some of you believe its not all that, no reason for alarm, the destruction is sad, but there is no reason to change, we will survive. We always do.
Doesnt matter what any of us think. The climate is collapsing and we are all along for the ride.
I mourn; strong, hard, dark emotion, first anger, then grief. Anger flashes, flares, subsides. Grief punches like a heavyweight, descends like a black cloak. I am flooded with despair, want to howl like a wounded dog. I am undermined, broken, lost. Again.
I mourn climate collapse amid poisonous politics and persistent pandemic anxiety. I mourn climate collapse amid our failure to address it. I mourn thousands dead, millions of acres burnt, the baked earth, the hypoxic ocean. I observe the extremes - rain fell for the first time on Greenlands ice cap, it was 100F degrees above the Arctic Circle, super-typhoons in the Pacific, no rain in the Pacific Northwest for weeks! Smoke filled skies, record temperatures, dusty riverbeds - none of these stir us to take action, none of them get our attention, none of them break the spell of our carbon and digital addictions. We're doomed. Gloomy nothing smothers my senses, rotates my mind inward.
I take a deep breath, exhale, take another, relax. Cool air fills both lungs, I exhale slow and shaky. Another round of deep inhales and exhales, miraculous oxygen swirls through my bloodstream, feeds my heart, soothes my mind. How to transform this anger and despair - this grief?
Grief over climate collapse is no different than any other grief. As when mourning a loved one, it comes on as a surprise, a hard shock, a sudden vertigo and collapse. All that seemed important before grief becomes trivial, inconsequential. Grief has a life of its own, you can't fight it. But within it are the seeds to carry on. Within it are the seeds of transformation.
High in the sunshine around Mt Baker glaciers glitter, waterfalls tumble down bouldered ravines, eagles soar on invisible thermals. Early spring flowers bloom red, blue and yellow below fast-melting snow banks. Staggered by immense beauty, I sit in the sun on a flowered rock outcrop, Echo-dog sits facing away, leaning hard on me guarding my back. It is silent. Blue mountains roll away eastward to a massive smudge of smoke on the far horizon.
Meditating on a million miles of threatened heaven, transformation happens. I dissolve and combine with Echo, the mountains, the forest, the flowers, the snow and sky. We are all connected, inter-dependent, perfect, one. I need this land - this universe - in order to become, just as the universe needs me. What happens in the universe, happens to me. As I feel guilt and grief, so the universe feels guilt and grief. As I cry, so the universe cries. As I laugh, so the universe laughs.
Grief breaks me open. There, at my weakest, on my knees - sobbing, with no hope left, comes the light of understanding, joy and love.
Grief is the doorway to enchantment.
He is on the dock early that morning, knocks on our hull near the galley window. C'mon he said, I got whales - transient pod in the channel, get in the boat and lets go! I gulp my coffee, whistle for the dog, call for the wife and trot to his boat - a modest, salty New England lobster boat modified into a whale watcher. We power out on a quiet, grey day just off San Juan Island looking for misty whale blow. Two miles to the east we spot them - four transient Orcas heading west a quarter mile off the island. We recognize one big male, a smaller female and two juviniles - pod T57. We shadow them from a quarter mile away, warn off a busy sportfisher about to run them over who slows and turns away. The whales come our way and we stop, engines idling. There are no other boats close. The orcas dive, then one by one surface and swoosh-breathe less than 100 yards away. The captain turns, flashes a magnificent grin and says simply - "Beautiful".
Forty years of watching whales and they still enchant him.
