November 20, 2016

It seems natural to be lost in the roll of waves

and the sawing of insects,

all night to lie hearing this,

then stand up and walk to the ocean

while the heat grows around us

like a room filling up with parachutes

 -Carolyn Smart, Dawn

xxx

I’ve been keeping the idea of this entry in my back pocket for a while. At the beginning of the semester, I interviewed a couple of students about a new club on campus, called Turning the Tide. The leaders (I will call them TJ and Mack) started the club with the goal of protecting the Salish Sea and its coastline, (Willow’s Beach included) from urban expansion, tankers and other oil production industries. The club’s mandate was what most intrigued me; Tj and Mack plan to organize activities that will get club members out and experiencing the “wilderness” they are trying to protect. Their idea is that members will be more likely to defend the wild areas with which they’ve formed a personal bond. TJ explained to me that the club’s activities (like hikes and beach clean-ups) are designed less as protests against the vague threat of encroaching industry, and more as productive celebrations of Victoria’s surrounding wildlife areas.

TJ said that “success for the club doesn’t depend on whether or not the oil tankers” or other such projects, “go through. Obviously we’d like it to be as pristine of an area as it can be… but if the pipelines do go through, that’s not going to make us stop loving the Salish Sea. We just want to do what we can to let people realize how beautiful it is and why it deserves protecting.” Mack said, “Promoting a culture that loves this area and is politically engaged in this area is most important, because… it means you build a resilience within the community to respond when these kinds of things do happen.”

But the club’s main focus is on the end-of-year canoe trip, and it is this point that most closely relates to my project. In conjunction with the Redfish School of Change, UVic’s Turning the Tide aims to include its membership in the annual Turning the Tide People’s Paddle, a four-day, 70km-long canoe trip in which participants paddle up and down the Salish Sea in a display of unity against pipeline and tanker projects. In reviewing my notes on the interview, I draw parallels between TJ and Mack’s description of the protest paddle and that of the canoe trip in Pierre Trudeau’s essay “Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe” (13). In his essay, Trudeau describes the canoe trip as laying a base and building a foundation upon which he may rebuild himself as a better man. TJ and Mack claimed their canoe excursion would lay a similar base for their ongoing protest. Through the People’s Paddle, TJ, Mack, and other participants felt closely connected to the nature around them and were renewed in their desire to protect it.

I remember TJ and Mack emphasizing the physical hardship of the excursion with a sense of pride. While most people did choose to canoe or kayak the distance, they spoke of one man who swam the full 70km. Mack herself was a first-time canoer and found the physical strain of the trip challenging, but rewarding. They shared in Trudeau’s opinion of the necessity of the physical work: it brought them closer to both their fellow canoers and their surrounding wilderness. Though Trudeau’s essay was aimed towards rich boarding school boys, while TJ and Mack’s club is aimed at mostly liberal-minded university students, they share a common thread. They both reflect the ongoing desire of society to better understand ourselves and better connect with our fellow man through time spent in wilderness. For Canadians, the act of getting out on the water still represents a return to our roots and a renewal of our spirit, no matter where we’re from. In class, we analyzed how we may be wrong in thinking this way. Time spent in nature cannot rid us of our humanness, cannot render us more animal than we already are. But at the same time, there is a part of about us that remains animal.  And that part of us likes water, it just does. Like golden retrievers and Bengal tigers, we humans are of a species that nurtures a natural predisposition to enjoy playing in pools, lakes, rivers, and seas. In class, we have been asked to analyze our birthrights, to consider what we consider belonging to us, and why. I have thought about it. And I have come to the conclusion that renewal through water is our birthright. Something (God? Evolution?) made humankind responsive to the sound of sea waves, the salty smell of ocean air, the feel of sand between our toes. When we feel out of touch with ourselves, our friends, or our place in the world, then we go back to the water. It’s simply in our blood.