Tofino
Four nights on a wild Pacific coast, a man who lives in rooms where the weather is the absence of weather, and the cold pool that finally takes one word out of him.
The Country That Comes Through the Window
I had brought her to a country that gets inside you whether you ask it to or not.
The float plane out of Vancouver took the channel low between the islands of the Strait of Georgia and crossed the spine of Vancouver Island in a steady damp climb, the cabin smelling of avgas and the wet wool of a pilot who had been in the rain since dawn. We came down over the inlet at Tofino through a soft slow drizzle, the floats kissing the water without ceremony, the wake behind us folding into the larger movement of the inlet itself. The dock at the harbor was wood blackened by a century of salt. The man who tied us off did it with the small economy of a hand that had been tying off boats since he was a boy.
Her Highness stepped from the float onto the dock in a navy oiled jacket and jeans worn soft at the knee and a cream wool sweater under the jacket, the same sweater she had worn off the plane on a windward island some seasons before. Her hair was loose under a knit cap of charcoal grey. She had read the brief on the flight up. She had packed for a country where the weather did not consult the calendar.
The rental was waiting at the head of the harbor lot, a dark grey SUV with all-weather tires and a half tank of fuel. A woman at the desk inside the small terminal handed me the key and told me the boats to Maquinna ran in the morning if the swell allowed and not if it did not. I thanked her. The number was already in the notebook.
We drove west out of the harbor on the only road, a two-lane that ran along the inlet for a mile and then turned south through second-growth cedar and Sitka spruce, the trunks dark and wet, the understory a layered green I had not seen anywhere else, sword fern at the road’s edge, salal close behind it, devil’s club further back where the canopy closed in. The rain came and went on the windshield in the slow alternation a temperate coast keeps in shoulder season. A bald eagle lifted off a snag a hundred yards in and crossed the road over us and was gone into the trees on the south side.
She watched the forest from the passenger seat.
“It is dripping,” she said. “All of it.”
“It is.”
She turned her face back to the window.
The road came out of the trees at Chesterman Beach and the sea opened on the right, slate-blue under a sky that had not committed to anything, the long curve of the beach running south toward the headland that held the inn, the headland a cedar-and-glass shape low against the rock, set so close to the water that at high tide the swell broke a coin’s throw from the foundations. I made the turn onto Osprey Lane. The lane climbed through cedar so dense the rain ceased under it. We pulled up under the cantilevered roof of the entrance.
A young man came out for the bags. The air at the door was thick with the smell of wet cedar and the older smell of the kelp that had washed in at the last tide and the salt the wind off the open Pacific had been carrying across the water. She stood on the threshold with her hand on the strap of her case and let the air do its work on her face before she went inside.
The Room Above the Rock
The room was on the cliff side on the second floor, a long room with a cedar ceiling and a wall of glass that opened onto the rock and the surf and the strip of beach at the foot of the cliff. The window was the room. The rest was a bed under a wool throw, a stone fireplace laid with cedar kindling and madrone split fine, a low chair angled toward the glass, a desk of unfinished fir, a clawfoot tub set sideways to the window so that a person in the bath could watch the swell come in. The McDiarmids had thought about every line. A man sitting in the chair could see the beach. A woman standing at the glass could see the horizon. The architecture had been built around the looking.
Her Highness set her case down and crossed to the window. The swell came in below us in the long slow heave of the open Pacific, four-foot lines stacked to the horizon, the breaks at the foot of the rock white and clean against the dark of the basalt. A pair of surfers in 5/4 wetsuits sat on their boards beyond the impact zone, small and patient, lifting and dropping with the swell, waiting. The rain on the glass was a fine slow drizzle that did not quite become a stream.
“I can hear it,” she said. “It is coming through the glass.”
“It does that. The window is set close. The weather will be in the room the whole time.”
She left her palm on the glass a moment and took it down. The print of her hand stayed against the condensation, faded, was gone. She turned, unzipped the navy jacket and hung it in the wardrobe of pale cedar that ran along the inside wall, turned the knit cap once in her hands and set it on the shelf, and took the boots off and lined them up by the door the way she has lined them up in every room we have entered together, the toes pointing out for the next time she would step into them.
I unpacked the small bag. I had brought one good thing for one dinner and the rest was wool and oilcloth. A cashmere blazer in a soft loden, cut by my tailor with the easy line he gives me when I ask for something to wear without a tie. Two wool sweaters in different greys, a cream cable and a slate ribbed. A pair of moleskin trousers. Heavy cotton chinos for the days outside. The boots from Scotland, broken in some seasons ago and not yet retired. No tie. No cufflinks. This was not a country that asked to be dressed for.
I had brought a single bottle in a soft leather sleeve, wrapped in a wool scarf so the cabin pressurization had not chilled it past where I wanted it. Old Forester Birthday Bourbon, a bottle set aside for me in Louisville the autumn before, kept for a country that would deserve it. I set it on the desk with two heavy lowball glasses I had also brought, because I did not trust an inn at the edge of a continent to keep the right tumbler for what I was about to pour.
She watched me set the bottle down. The corner of her mouth gave the small private lift.
“You brought the Birthday.”
“For a country that would earn it.”
She did not need to say anything else.
I crossed to the window and stood beside her. The rain had thickened. A second pair of surfers came up the beach from the south end, their boards under their arms, their wetsuits black against the pale sand. They walked into the surf without ceremony and pushed off and began to paddle out through the white. The cold did not show on their faces. They had decided to be in it.
“Tonight we eat downstairs,” I said. “Tomorrow, if the boats run, Maquinna. Hot Springs Cove, ninety minutes north up the sound. The day after, the Rainforest Trail. The last day, the beach for as long as it asks. And if the boats do not run, we do whatever the weather lets us do.”
She nodded. “I will dress for dinner now. Because I want to, not because there is time to fill.”
I let her go to the wardrobe. I poured an inch of the Birthday into one of the heavy glasses and took it to the window and stood with the bourbon in my hand and watched the swell work on the rock below, the surfers small and dark beyond the impact zone, the rain coming through the glass not as water but as sound, the small steady tap of a country saying its name without expecting to be answered.
The Pointe
We took the stair down to the dining room. The Pointe is built out on the headland under a cedar-vaulted ceiling that follows the line of the rock beneath it, the beams hand-adzed, the joinery a slow Pacific Northwest joinery that does not announce itself. Two long walls of glass face the open ocean. The floor is fir. The light was the light of the sea coming in through the glass, low and grey at this hour, the candles on the tables only beginning to matter as the day went.
Her Highness wore a long dress in a deep wet green, the green of the kelp the tide had laid along the beach that afternoon, the green a forest gives when the canopy has held the rain for a day. The fabric was a wool crepe fine enough to fall like silk and substantial enough to hold against the temperature of a room with two walls of glass open to a cold ocean. The hem was at her ankle, the sleeves long and close at the wrist, the neckline a soft scoop that ran from one collarbone to the other and stopped. No necklace. No earrings. A thin silver bracelet I had given her in a city far from this coast, on the inside of her right wrist. Her hair was up in a loose knot at the base of her skull, held by a single pin. She wore low dark boots, the kind that would walk her across a wet cedar deck without complaint.
She had dressed as the place. I have stopped being surprised when she reads a country on the descent.
I wore the cashmere blazer over the slate sweater and the moleskin trousers and the Scotland boots.
The hostess was a woman in her forties in a fine wool tunic over fitted trousers, her welcome the welcome a person gives in a country where service is a craft and not a posture. Her eyes caught on my companion the way a face from a magazine cover catches the eye of someone who has held the magazine, and she did not let on, and she walked us to a table at the corner of the glass where the rock met the ocean closest, a single candle and white linen and a small carved cedar raven the size of a man’s thumb set as a centerpiece, a card beside it with the Tla-o-qui-aht artist’s name. She left us the menus and withdrew.
The swell came in along the rock in the slow heavy way it comes when the wind has been on it for three days, white at the line, dark green deeper out, the horizon a long flat grey with no division between water and sky. A black-and-white seabird I would later learn was a marbled murrelet rode the swell at the edge of the impact zone and did not move.
We ordered. Spot prawns to start, the season just opened, brought in that morning off a boat she had read the name of on a chalkboard at the entrance. Then oysters from Effingham Inlet, two each, raw on shaved ice with a wedge of lemon and a small pour of mignonette. Then for her the halibut from the cold water off Clayoquot, butter-poached, with morels foraged on the road in from Port Alberni and a single spoon of new peas; for me the Cowichan duck, breast on the bone, the skin rendered crisp, with a bramble of nettle and a small puddle of huckleberry. She chose an Okanagan Pinot Gris, mineral in it the sommelier was proud of. I drank water. The Birthday was for the room upstairs, and the room upstairs was where it would stay.
The prawns came alive on the ice. The chef sent out a server with a small dish of melted butter and salt and a wedge of lemon and the explanation that spot prawns held their season four to six weeks a year on this coast, that they ate them raw within minutes of the boat, that the sweetness peaked in the first hour and we had been given them at twenty. He did not labor it. He set the dish down and withdrew.
She took the first prawn, bit the head off cleanly the way the server had shown us, pulled the tail meat out with her front teeth, and closed her eyes. The small private close. She set the tail on the side of the plate and did not close her eyes again for the rest of the meal.
“That is the sea,” she said. “There is nothing between it and us. Twenty minutes.”
I took my prawn. The sweetness was one no prawn keeps after an hour in a refrigerator. It tasted of the cold water at the foot of the cliff below us. The kitchen had not been showing off. The kitchen had been telling us where we were.
The oysters came and we ate them without speaking. The mignonette was a sentence the chef had not needed to write and had written anyway, a small courtesy to the European table. What the oyster required was the cold and the salt and the slow pull of a body of water that had been cold and salt a long time.
The halibut and the duck arrived together. The halibut gave under the fork the color of cream, the morels giving back the rain of the forest they had come from. The duck was rare at the bone, the skin the skin a chef gets when the rendering has been patient, the huckleberry sharp behind the fat.
She ate. I ate. The candle moved in a draft that came through the seal of the window where the seal was no longer perfect. The rain on the glass had begun to slant; the wind had picked up. Out beyond the impact zone the murrelet lifted off the swell and flew south along the line of the surf.
Her Highness reached across the linen and took my hand.
“How was the flight in?” she said.
The question was the smallest a person can ask another. She had moved through the four days that preceded the flight, four days I had spent in a city that does not appear on any of my passports, with the same steady patience she had shown me in a windowless room some years before. She was not asking about the flight. She was asking about the four days. She was asking it as the flight.
I had a sentence ready, the sentence I would have given any other woman on any other evening, true in the way the small true sentences are true.
I gave it. “It was an easy flight.”
She nodded once. She did not withdraw her hand. She did not ask further. She had heard the sentence I gave her and the sentence I had not given her, and she let them both stand on the linen, and she lifted my hand to her lips and kissed the knuckle of my thumb and set it back down with the back of her hand against the back of mine.
“That is what I thought,” she said.
We finished the duck and the halibut as they cooled a degree. Dessert was a small bowl of stewed rhubarb under a sheep’s-milk cream with a single salmonberry blossom set on top, the orange of the petals against the pale pink, one thing the kitchen had walked out to the garden to find for the plate. She ate it in three bites. Neither of us took coffee. The hostess brought our jackets to the door. I paid in Canadian dollars and rounded the bill, and we went up.