Off the Pacific shore of Vancouver Island, the California Current – a mammoth river of tropical water – zooms close by the coast on a southerly turn after having split from the great North Pacific Drift. The current's warmth is released in the form of billows of tepid vapor. When the prevailing winds drive this coastal fog inland, it is abruptly pushed upward and outward, cooling as it rises and condensing into rain.
Vancouver Island's temperatures are Canada's most mild and even. But it’s wet. Rain forest wet. It’s not unusual for precipitation to fall on five of every seven days during the winter rainy season. The cloud and the gray can be pervasive; the sun nothing more than a little boiled potato in a stew of dirty dumplings.
The somber skies convey a sympathetic moodiness to the earth below. It becomes a landscape in a minor key. A sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together in a silver-gray-green blur. Great, wild evergreen expanses fall from view behind the veil of low-lying mist. Eagles nest on the exposed crowns of the island’s highest trees, and blue herons flap through the gossamer gray.
It is a poetic setting, one which suggests inner meanings and invisible connections. Artists thrive here. Notable gray-on-gray disciples used the shapes and shades of this misty terrain as a springboard, painting the visions of the inner eye. The original inhabitants, too, were an introspective breed. Unlike the Plains Indians, who enjoyed mobility and open spaces and sunny skies, the Northwest coastal tribes were caught between the dark waters to the west and the heavily forested foothills and towering peaks to the east, forced by the lavish rains to spend weeks on end confined to their longhouses. Consequently, they turned inward, evolving religious and mythological patterns that are startling in their complexity and intensity, developing an idiom that for aesthetic weight and psychological depth was unequaled among all primitive races.
A hushed but heavy force hangs in the moisture-laden Northwest air: it defies flamboyance, deflates extroversion and muffles the most exultant cry.
But every summer something remarkable happens in these northern latitudes. The light of day lasts impossibly long. Clouds and mist largely disappear. Sunny days become the norm, not the exception. For those precious 8-10 weeks of summer, the sky's brightness shimmers with unimaginable clarity across every inch of the province, dramatically underscoring its vast size and its majestic beauty. Oh, Canada... !
Michael's variations on a literary theme by Northwest writer Tom Robbins
