A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
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A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
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Chapter II
Three nights later came the moment comparable to that in which the conductor of a waiting orchestra lifts his baton. The crevice between a ship and the dock widened to a broad ribbon of water – the voyage had begun! Silently, out across Vancouver’s tranquil harbour a vast dark mirror for the maze of coloured lights, past Stanley Park, its giant firs and redwoods ranked as when Captain Cook, searching for a Northwest Passage, we sailed past the western shores of Vancouver Island. Was it only this morning when I had stood on that high point among the maples already turning colour, looking down on ships dwarfed now to toys drawing arrows far below on the Narrows? Where tugs, scurried like small waterfowl about the vast harbour, and a barge loaded with timber from the Fraser River had glowed in the sunlight like a great orange cake being towed towards the Lion Bridge? Now we too were passing beneath it, a slender lighted thread on which cars slid back and forth like glittering beads. I wondered what had become of the group I had come on board with, while strolling on the shore of English Bay that afternoon. In a sheltered, sunny niche among the boulders and bleached logs, an elderly man had sat watching two friends playing chess, the smooth top of an upturned log an admirable table for their board. Mountains across the bay were lost in haze, the water sparkled and slip-slapped through the stones and whitened, salty timbers, absorbed and silent, the three sat an making an unforgettable picture. Now the crown on the roof of the Hotel Vancouver flung a long, quivering pencil of green light above the treetops, reflecting in the Outer Narrows. Slowly the myriad lights faded and fell like scattered petals in the waters astern, and the breeze freshened. After long years of war under blackened skies I was to stand again on a ship’s deck at night! Its faint lift beneath my feet echoed by that indescribable lift of my heart at the vision of a mast almost still against the stars. The only sound was the silken rustle of foam and ahead, an unknown landfall. Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
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