Tag: Sakinaw Lake

I will sing the song of the sky

theresakishkan2 Comments

I finished sewing binding on the salmon quilt yesterday and have packaged it up to put in the mail for Forrest and Manon in Ottawa. I am so pleased with how it turned out, though the sewing is clumsy and the squares slightly lopsided. Perfection has never been my goal. I want them to think of this place when they shake it out, lay it on their bed; I hope they will remember the boat trip down Sakinaw Lake to the little bay at the end, where the salmon were congregating before swimming through the fishways and finding their natal streams.

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I think of this ancient Tsimshian song, sung before the distribution of gifts at a potlatch:

I will sing the song of the sky.

This is the song of the tired —

the salmon panting as they swim up the swift current.

I walk around where the water runs into whirlpools.

They talk quickly, as if they are in a hurry.

The sky is turning over. They call me.

Edge of the world

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Yesterday we went in our little boat down Sakinaw Lake. Manon and Forrest are here from Ottawa and it was such a beautiful day that a picnic at the bay beyond the end of the lake seemed like a good thing to do. Sakinaw is a long narrow lake with a fishway connecting it to the ocean at its western reach. Sockeye and coho salmon make their way through a flow control weir and into the lake, spawning in several locations each fall. When our children were small, we regularly visited the bay, sometimes to collect oysters and clams, once the gift of five yellow plates on a Thanksgiving weekend (only two remain intact!), and we always stopped at a cliff face to marvel at pictographs there.

Pictographs can be found in all sorts of places in B.C. and had, still have, important commemorative and ceremonial functions. They are records, burial markers, boundary markers, and have significance beyond what we might to able to determine. This particular group of images — fish, crayfish, prawns — has always seemed to me to be an inventory, a list of marine life common to our area. It speaks to the notion that when the tide is out, the table is set. And how lively these animals still are, after perhaps a hundred and fifty years! The pigment is red ochre, bound with animal fat or fish eggs; it’s extremely durable.

Here is the end of the lake as we approached it.

And here is the bigleaf maple, a study in arboreal architecture, against the October sky.

The tide was high, but heading out, so while we ate our picnic — baguette, pate, cheeses, apples, dark chocolate, accompanied by robust red wine — , the music was of water, herons, kingfishers.

And this was our view, in the distance — little islands, and the larger Texada beyond:

This bay has always seemed haunted to me. A place where human beings have sat in their privacy for centuries, a small relict of an older time. In the immediate past, our family and our dog Lily, children perching on rocks and unearthing tiny crabs to watch race back into the darkness of the boulders. And poking around the area above the high tide line, I found the remains of a midden — dry earth dense with clam shells. And this little ring of bone (vertebra?), light as air, an echo of other picnics, other feasts in sunlight, while above the maples turned gold and the mergansers muttered on their log.

Lower elevations in fall

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Last evening we were out for a walk around the Sakinaw loop, a route that takes us down Sakinaw Lake Road to the lake itself, then along a trail through the woods to our own driveway. It’s a walk I love in all seasons. In spring the bigleaf maples all along the road produce their chartreuse flowers, sweet as honey, and bright with warblers. There’s a section of ditch where masses of maidenhair ferns grow, too, the delicate fronds held aloft by black-laquered stems. In summer the maples create deep and welcome shade. We often gather bags of maple leaves from this area to mulch our garden and often there are rough-skinned newts hiding in the leaves, waiting for the day to warm up enough for them to make the great trek across the road. Sometimes we find them frozen in place if the sun’s vanished before they make it to their destination but holding them in my palms for a few minutes usually revives them. There’s always a day in late fall when I smell fish and know the coho are in the creek that runs down off Mount Hallowell to enter Sakinaw Lake, a long length of water fed by many such creeks, some of which are home streams for coho. There’s also a race of sockeye salmon native to the lake — alas, almost extinct. The coho run is the hinge of the year, beginning in December, usually around the Solstice, and continuing into January.

On our walk last evening, we were just about to take the trail through the woods when we heard loud crashing ahead of us. We stopped, expecting a bear. Instead, we saw a bull elk, maybe the same guy who visited earlier our place earlier in summer. (It’s more usual to see them up the mountain, as we often do when hiking there, but the field guide says they move to lower elevations in fall.) He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. And he was beautiful. John, who was wearing his glasses, counted five points on each antler. The full complement is six, so he was maybe a three year old. But huge.  Deep brown with a golden rump. He stood absolutely still for a few moments, watching us, and we did the same. We could hear his cows in the woods, moving about. Then he trotted off into the trees and all that was left was his smell, and the smell of his harem, as pungent as horses.