On Hecate Strait, B.C., a storm-wracked beach with a steep pile of driftwood and flotsam that extended into the haunting, moss-draped chaos of forest above the gravel, my hunt began. Bottles and driftwood and fishing floats had been tossed into there by some fierce winter storm. Torpedo-shaped buoys, basketball-sized buoys, plastic buoys, metal buoys, netting, rope, lighters, oil cans, shampoo bottles, a whole plastic hardhat, a car bumper, mangled chunks of aluminum boat hull.
But, goddamn, no glass balls.
Jonathan Raban, in Passage to Juneau, says the West Coast natives were the first to find Japanese glass fishing floats, along with wreck- age with iron and copper fittings and other Asian artifacts washed in on the Kuroshio current and the north Pacific drift. They believed, he writes, that these things floated in from submarine civilizations inhabited by the mythical creatures Komogwa and nazunakas—like a couple of “fat undersea emperors.”
“In effect, the Indians had dreamed Japan into being, but located it, like Atlantis, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.”
Glass balls adrift from a magic kingdom of the sea—how I dreamed of finding one!
LOTS OF PLASTIC, BUT NO GLASS TO BE FOUND
On Princess Royal Island, I poked around in the huge driftwood piles on two beaches, found a yellow roadway sign to pound on like a drum, marker pens and highlighters and driftwood. Found wolf trails, tufts of fur, a favourite howling spot, even a wolf—a real wolf at the end of the beach.
On the Brooks Peninsula, windbound, I searched for glass balls. Found: A plastic fishing buoy with Japanese characters on it, half full of water, bleach bottles, fish floats, blocks of Styrofoam, a jar of salad dressing, plastic water bottles, tide laundry detergent bottles, very little glass and no glass balls.
Saw bear tracks, walked around an island, faced the sun and watched water pound home. Fragrant spruce sap on my fingers. Plastic bottles under mossy driftwood in groves of salal in the middle of the island, brought there by historic storms.
All these things, no glass balls. But by this time it was just an excuse to go walking.
Scrambled over rocks, plants I’d never seen, tidepools of eelgrass and anemone and crab, stagnant pools green with algae, bones, shells of butter clams and moon snails, worn round pebbles, a group of seals lying on the rocks by a large tide pool on the other side of the island. A boomer that, just once, refracted and sent a house-sized pyramid of water straight up with an exclamation mark of white atop, backlit by sun, green as glass. Glass!
This article first appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
