The south coast was one of the first places deglaciated at the end of the last ice age.
The ancient forests of Vancouver Island are ancient, indeed. Its construction began about the same time those Island trees of childhood memory were seedlings, pushing their first roots down into the decaying bole of a fallen ancestor, repeating the endless pattern of regeneration that had recurred over ten or more of their unimaginably long generations.
Then I stood in the vaulting nave of an 800-year-old cathedral. The only other times I would feel that sudden, deep-shaded sense of sacredness-imprinting itself for the first time upon the virgin sensibility that art critic Roger Shattuck has called “the innocent eye”-occurred years later. My father had taken me on my first real hike into the back country.Ī stand of old-growth Douglas fir on Vancouver Island (Photo by David Broadland) If there was a breeze in the foliage, its rustle was muffled by the dense canopy hundreds of feet above. They towered like the columns of some ancient Greek temple. An occasional shaft of golden light lanced between immense trees. GLOOM AND SILENCE lodged in my memory first. As they are logged, whole ecosystems disappear forever, along with their superior ability to sequester carbon.
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