Do you believe in signs? And if so, do you act on them? Last year I started to get strong pointers, what New Agers would call, “messages from the Universe”, sending me in the direction of Vancouver and British Columbia. A character in my novel, The Courtyard in August, wrote a country song called “My life is at a level crossing and God won’t lift the gate.” When I found myself at a similar intersection, I decided to lift the gate myself but I wasn’t quite sure where to go. I’d written a couple of novels that had sold well but not changed my life. I was currently without a partner and my mother had recently died. She was old, it was expected, I kept busy and hoped the grief might be brief.
The first pointer came from an astrologer who deals in relocational astrology - the study of which places on the globe hold strong planetary influence for an individual. She said that a Jupiter line ran through my chart in Vancouver and that this represented spiritual growth, prestige and expansion: In BC, I would embark on a spiritual journey, prosper, and probably grow fat.
As I cleaned out my mother’s flat, I found a compass from the Vancouver tourist board saying “Chart a course in our direction.” While sorting through old manuscripts one day, a five year old postcard from my best friend dropped at my feet. It showed a sleeping bear on a rock and said, “In Vancouver and dreaming of you.”
“Enough already,” said I and with the help of a tiny inheritance, boarded a plane. The Canadian West Coast is, like California on the American West Coast, a place at the far end of a continent that often attracts people who are seeking a nameless something new in their lives. But BC has Canadian understatement and common sense thrown in. The wilderness is at the back door - (black bears occasionally stroll across patios in North Vancouver) and the Indian or First Nation presence is beginning to exert an influence on the region’s spiritual and cultural life.
Things get off to a good start. On my first evening in Vancouver, I share a hot-tub with Terence Stamp at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel. Our thighs actually brush as we each move around in search of the most powerful jet. But I don’t think Stamp notices; he’s perfected the “stare off at a distant mountain look” of the long-term famous. And in this case he has real mountains to contemplate - Vancouver sits on a spectacular harbour surrounded by snow-capped summits.
Hot-tubs and movie stars are not, however, what this trip is about. I am staying true to that Jupiter line and looking for the more spiritual elements. Even in this big hotel, I find a quieter more meditative world out in the magnificent herb garden on the hotel’s second floor. . The chef shares herbal remedies and recipes with regular guest, Terence Stamp and works with local First Nation leaders to incorporate their cuisine into the hotel’s menu.
Debra Fontaine cooks up fabulous vegetarian food at the Hollyhock holistic retreat, an hour’s floatplane flight north of Vancouver on Cortes Island. Hollyhock is to Canada what Skyros in Greece is to Europe: a resort cum retreat set on a white sand beach on a lagoon-like sea with snow-capped mountains as a backdrop. Like Skyros, Hollyhock attracts the finest speakers on subjects as diverse as Shamanic journeys, Tibetan Buddhism, songwriting, yoga and didgeridoo playing.
On a sunny afternoon, I take the floatplane out of Vancouver harbour, out over all the yoga studios and coffee shops of this West Coast city, over the snow-capped mountains and the dense green forest of Stanley Park along the coastline of Vancouver Island to Cortes Island and Hollyhock
I have ambiguous feelings about places like Hollyhock. I know there will always be galumphing steely-haired women dressed in floaty purple dresses who will freedance around a bonfire or hottub while they liberate their spirit after the sauteed tofu supper. And I’m pretty sure that someone will find an excuse to be naked before my three day stay is out. So when Dina, the general manager of Hollyhock welcomes us all at dinner and says “Our purpose at Hollyhock is to provide a safe place that will hold you while you explore and grow,” I look at the strapping Seattle attorney on my left as he shovels down a second helping of the excellent Thai noodles and wonder just how much holding he needs.
The next day I have the best massage of my life in a cabin in a woodland clearing where, and I’m not making this up, fawns frolic and foxgloves blow in the breeze. Walking back through Hollyhock’s exuberant flower and vegetable garden, I encounter a hummingbird. In native Indian belief this little creature is a sign that healing and joy will come after a time of sorrow. Out in the pine forest, a class of didgeridoo students are looking for all the world like eccentric elephants as they curl up in tree trunks and blow that primordial sound out into the woods.
Hollyhock is not cheap but by the final night, I was almost convinced of everyone’s need to find the money to come up here and meditate and drum and blow and breath or whatever. Then we were all led to the beach for a Buddhist blessing of the ocean which was just fine until one of the didgeridooers broke off and flung himself naked into the freezing water. Several others followed and splashed and shrieked gamely while their more personal parts told the truth and withered. I retreated to the perfect peace of my cabin in the pine forest.
At sunset on the beach in Quadra Island just a ferry ride from Cortes, I’m scouring the rocks looking for the centuries -old petroglyphs that the native peoples once carved when I become aware that in the sky another creature has its head down and is scouring the beach and finding me. A bald eagle is swooping low over the water.
Next morning the eagle is perched in a tree above the balcony where I am drinking a cup of tea at the Tsa Kwa Luten lodge, an Indian-owned and operated luxury resort on Quadra Island. The lodge was designed to resemble a traditional west coast “Gukwdzi” or Big House. It’s a dramatic cathedral-ceilinged, cedar and glass structure looking out over treacherous Discovery Passage and the snowy mountains beyond. Captain George Vancouver first made landfall just along the coast at Cape Mudge and in nearby Cape Mudge Village, the Kwalgiuth Museum is known for its fine collection of First Nation ceremonial regalia.
To the native or First Nation people of this region, the eagle is a symbol of power; its down is a symbol of peace and friendship. There is even a Canadian law that forbids anyone other than a native owning an eagle feather. Just beyond my balcony the gardener looks up at the bird looking down at us and says,
“With his eyesight, he can see every pimple on our faces, every vein in the whites of our eyes.” And he points out the bird’s enormous nest in the tree and explains that nests are passed down from generation to generation and that this one is probably at least fifty years old.
I decide to walk the trail along the seashore that leads to the Indian Village at Cape Mudge. The village is a humble cluster of small, trailer style houses, a school , a playground and a church and cemetery where some of the graves are curious hybrids of Christian and Native belief: white crosses with a raven’s head. The museum is closed for renovation. A carved wooden welcome figure still stands its arms outstretched at the entrance but a notice says that important restoration work is being done. I’m sitting wishing for a cappuccino when an Indian woman passing in a Range Rover rolls down her window and says the place should reopen in 2002. She takes me into the Band House, the local native community centre, serves me coffee and tells me that most foreign visitors to the island come from Germany. “They know more than I do about our culture and are very big on reenactments.”
When I prepare to leave Tsa Kwa Luten the next morning, the eagle is still perched above my balcony. As I slide the window closed, he utters one cry: “Good to hang with you,” he just said, smiles the bellboy who takes my bags.
Killer whales or orcas are in fact dolphins. To the Kwakiutl people of the Pacific coast, all great chiefs who die are transformed into orcas. The orca is believed to be closely related to the human thus allowing transformation from man to killerwhale. The killerwhale symbolizes long life.
In Victoria, that all too English capital of BC on Vancouver Island, I’m staying at another symbol of long life, the grand old Empress Hotel. These days even the Empress is dabbling in the New Age with plans for a holistic spa to be opened in early 2002. But for all the English colonial gentility of the hotel’s ritual afternoon teas and curry buffets, wildness is, as always in British Columbia, just around the corner, this time in the form of the resident pods of killer whales that patrol the waters around Victoria harbour. On a sunny July morning I sign up for whale watching and make my way out of the hotel and walk along the harbour to the wharf . Victoria does still have a lot of the dowager in her and today, as every day on the jetty, a Filipino nurse pushes a huddled resident of one of the many nursing homes in a wheelchair to take the sea air.
Minutes later a dozen other tourists and I are skimming out of Victoria Harbour in a zodiac motorized raft. Soon we see whale spouts a few hundred yards from the boat. Brett, the young marine biologist who accompanies us, recognizes and can name each member of the various resident pods around Victoria Harbour. The arching black masses that move rhythmically towards us now are sleeping he says. In this state they have closed down one half of their brain and ensuring that each of them is touching another, they move as one in a trance like, semi-watchful state through the water. They suddenly disappear for what Brett calls a deep dive. We wait and watch on the still, quiet waters, each of us trying to calculate where the pod will reappear. But all is silent, the sea looks empty. My arms and eyes ache from peering through the binoculars. Then three orcas surge out of the water within feet of the raft.
They are emerging from sleep,” says Brett as one whale in particular leaps out of the water. “That’s the matriarch - the head of the whole pod. She’s 92 years old.” And as this grandmother arches and swoops, I look back towards Victoria Harbour and think of the old genderless person wrapped in their blanket in the wheelchair on the jetty and conclude that those Indian chiefs knew a thing or two when they chose to transform into whales.
The wolf is revered because of his hunting prowess. Wolf also symbolizes family and togetherness.
I’m standing on a jetty clutching the paddle of an Indian canoe. All around me is the royal blue water of Deep Cove, an exquisite fjord-like inlet a few miles east of Vancouver. The local Tsleil-Waututh tribe or “people of the inlet” run an eco-tourism venture here that introduces visitors to the ways of their people through such activities as canoe trips, drum-making workshops and tours of First Nation sites
When I arrived at Deep Cove on this hot August morning, I was carrying my note book and camera. Justin George the director of Takaya tours handed me this paddle. “Thought you were going to sit back like Cleopatra?”. His grandfather was Chief Dan George who was also an actor, nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Little Big Man His community of about 500 people share Vancouver with the Musqueam tribe. They have recently elected their first woman chief.
Out on the jetty, Justin’s cousin sings a greeting song that “will link the spirit of everyone who hears it here at the harbour. It will reach out to your loved ones - the people that you care about, here and in the world of spirit.”. And he starts to drum and chant. Indians do not perform. There is never a sense that their ego is involved in their actions. This young man moves seamlessly from a brief, gentle explanation of the song to the song itself. We are just a few miles away from the highrises of downtown Vancouver but here in this cove of deep blue water, surrounded by lush green mountains we seem to step briefly outside of frenetic Western time. And as he sings I find myself believing for a moment that this incomprehensible song by someone from so far away will reach my dead and desperately missed English mother.
And so for all my travels, I was brought back to where I began - a forty something woman who needed to grieve and to learn from the native culture of a gentler and, for me, more believable afterlife. And to share ebullience and irresistible energy with the leaping old lady whale and stillness with the watchful eagle. I had followed the signs to learn that we are all part of it all.
When I returned to one of Fairmont’s Vancouver hotels last week, I got to thinking about what hotel chains represent in our minds - the worlds, even the eras in history, that they conjure up for us: romantic and grandiose or tacky and lowlife - sometimes all it takes is a name. The Fairmont’s portfolio contains two such properties of the romantic and grandiose kind: The Savoy in London and The Plaza in New York. Those legendary names immediately evoke a more elegant, glamorous era. That’s what grand hotels give us and that’s why, on a harried city day, when traffic noise, digital displays and shop windows filled with trashy mass-produced clothes are starting to get me down, I often wander into the foyer of a grand hotel. Like Dr Who’s Tardis but for people with a hankering for marble halls, chandeliers, sweeping staircases, opulent bouquets and a bit of Cole Porter to accompany it all, we step into another world once we go through their revolving doors.
