Approaching, in June 1792, the long tongue of land that separates Vancouver’s harbour to the north from its boating and beach playground to the south, Captain Vancouver met Chief Capilano’s ancestors, who, he wrote in his Journal of Discovery, “conducted themselves with the greatest decorum and civility,” and presented him with “several fish cooked and undressed.” They “shewed much understanding,” Vancouver thought, “in preferring iron to copper.” The welcoming party paddled alongside Vancouver’s ship
as it headed between Homulchesun on the north shore and Whoi Whoi on the south. Twice they assembled their canoes for ceremonial acts whose meaning remained “a profound secret” to Vancouver and his men. Afterward they showed even greater cordiality and respect to the pale-faced newcomers.
The secret was revealed by Qoitchetahl, secretary of the Skwxwú7mesh Indian Council in 1911, who told the city’s archivist his people believed “a calamity of some sort would befall them every seven years… Capt. Vancouver came in a seventh year… When strange men of strange appearance, white with their odd boats, arrived, the wise men said ‘this may be the fateful visitation’ and took steps to propitiate the all-powerful visitors” with the white eiderdown scattered at festival or potlatch houses. As Vancouver arrived, his people “threw in greeting before him clouds of snow-white feathers which rose, wafted in the air aimlessly about, then fell like flurries of snow to the water’s surface, and rested there like white rose petals scattered before a bride.” That painted icon Johnson chose not to be, preferring instead to hail the world from the stage with a “cry from an Indian wife” bidding her husband, go to war: “by birth we Indians own these lands, / Though starved, crushed, plundered.”
It’s not the immensity of Lions but the immensity of Twin Sisters that rules Vancouver’s antlike scurryings. The immensity of trees and the immensity of sisters. Pauline was passionate, spontaneous, and generous; her sister Eva was dutiful, frugal, and practical. They argued and wrangled all their lives about Pauline’s unseemly stage career, about her raffish friends, about her loans to finance recital tours, and about who was the better teller of Iroquois history. Right up until her death, they quarrelled about why she must be buried in a gloomy forest of incessant rain far away from her homeland. They even fought over whether you had to wear a raincoat in Vancouver: Eva said you did; Pauline said you didn’t.
The Seven Sisters in Stanley Park were Pauline’s daily haunt. “In all the world there is no cathedral whose marble or onyx columns can vie with those straight, clean, brown tree-boles that teem with the sap and blood of life,” Johnson wrote of her trees,
“no fresco that can rival the delicacy of lace-work they have festooned between you and the skies.” When she was too weak to walk she drove to the park in an open carriage. There must surely be some trace of them in the Stanley Park forest — women who dare, women who stand for all to see, and one woman especially, who wrote, “I love you, love you… love you as my life. / And buried in his back his scalping knife.”
With my sister I set out along the seawall from Third Beach, the west wind forcing us to double over like question marks. Fortunately the tide is out, leaving a good stretch of bare rocks between us and the crashing waves that have chucked piles of sand and seaweed along the pavement. We hug the edge of the forest seeking lee from the wind till we get to the steps up Ferguson Point bluff. Wind blowing away our conversation and chilling us right through our rain gear, we head across the grass to Johnson’s shrine and burial place not far from Sl’kheylish: standing-up-man rock. The shrine’s rough-hewn stones, enfolded in the shadowy roots of seventy-year-old forest, form a cairn holding a carved relief of Johnson’s face above a pool catching rainwater. And it now comes to me that we’ve made this pilgrimage in a kind of amazing cosmic rhythm during the same week in March that Johnson died one hundred years before.
Inside the forest, our coats no longer balloon with wind, our eyes adjust to the shadowed cavern that spreads in all directions a hundred feet below the canopy. Half a kilometre away, other walkers drift along other trails; at one point several young men stand in a ring smoking pot. They disappear and we are alone again with sword ferns and trickling streams, looking at stumps bigger than four-door sedans. Thick ridges of their growth, laced with moss, still surge up over our heads from the forest floor — the remains of virgin forest. Some have holes in their moss-encrusted bark, reminding me of a story from Skwxwú7mesh chief Khahtsahlano about men cutting down a tree to carve into a canoe. They found a mask inside the tree. He told how they chipped into leaning trunks from both sides, driving in wedges till the weight of the tree pulled the tree down. If in the forest you find trees with holes some way up, these are likely test holes to find out whether the tree was hollow or rotting inside. Or, my sister said, they could be holes for the springboard notches where loggers rammed in planks to stand on while they worked their two-manned saws.
That day we do not find Johnson’s Cathedral Trees. They are not where one website says, where Tatlow Walk crosses a “Bridal Path,” or where another suggests at Bridle Path and Lovers Walk, which in fact never meet. We are lost. The trees are lost.
I wake at night wondering why I’m searching for them. Am I prey to the Lure in Stanley Park, a rock hidden not far from the Seven Sisters, where Johnson tells us the Sagalie Tyee imprisoned an evil-eyed woman who brought disease and sorrow, a rock so powerful it will drive to insanity or death anyone who goes near it? So evil was the power from this rock that the Sagalie Tyee protected people from it by transforming the kindliest, most benevolent of them into a grove of trees to stand as a shield. What if the shield was gone?
A few days later we return with more accurate directions. Although the wind is not as fierce, it is far colder, coming straight from the heavy snow on the Twin Sisters. Even under the canopy we must keep moving to stay warm, pausing just long enough to marvel, in our strange, scientific innocentness of the rock’s lure, at a harlequin pattern of moss coating the trunk of an enormous fir, or the cedar stalks thick as cathedral pillars split from a single root, or wolf-sized burls thirty feet over our heads. Delicate pink-budded shrubs grow out of virgin forest stumps. Or giants grow on these stumps who began their seedling life on a high platform left by the loggers, and now half swallow the old stump in writhing octopus roots.
At last we find seven stumps of the Seven Sisters and a scarred and smudged Plexiglas plaque showing faded grey trunks. Park officials felled the trees in 1956, believing they were a hazard to humans.
Notes
Bàba: the Chinese character for father.
Bù: the Chinese character for cloth.
Chow Lung: Chow Lung worked as a cook for ten years for British Columbia novelist Ethel Wilson (Mary McAlpine, The Other Side of Silence).
Hăi: the Chinese character for sea.
If I, No Reply,: “the Christine who built a city for the giftless” refers to Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies. Italicized passages in the rest of the piece are from Pessoa’s July by Christine Stewart. “Underbridge” is Christine Stewart’s ongoing project that investigates life under Mill Creek Bridge in Edmonton. The piece is also thoroughly stained by The New Science of Giambattista Vico.