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Scenic Corridor
By Katy E. Ellis, Jr.

In Clayoquot, we diesel through Father Charles Channel
as it pummels the shore below Catface.
They’ve each paid thirty-five dollars.
The tourists see everything I want to show them

so I direct their lenses to the aboriginal rainforests,
the perfectly placed eagle’s nest
just shy of Felice Island and the wakes
sports fishermen sprout on their way to Plover Reef.

They tune their binoculars to the crucifix
planted in Kakawis by missionaries
when the Ahousats still lifted their dead
to the trees. It’s my job to point, their job to shoot.

But to the German, the Japanese, the Swede
who came great distances to cross me off their list
of things to do while visiting Canada, I don’t point out
past the forest, after you hike in three city blocks,

there are massive burns in the hillskins
where cedars grew,
salmon sizzle before they’re caught
in shadeless stream beds,

marbled murrelets mourn their eggs in clearcut fringes,
and under clumps of salal, messes of black bear flesh
rot without their hides, their gall bladders carved free—
sold, served and swallowed as an aphrodisiac.

They want to watch whales and I want to give them
their money’s worth. So in Ahous Bay
I show them a mother and calf diving
for plankton, krill, small fish and crustaceans.

Just under surface the long, lumbered length
of a mother grey whale hosts a colony of lice
and barnacles. She blows a heart-shaped plume
of salted mist, sucks lungs full of all we have exhaled

and dives again below. I’ll retell the story
of the Tofino Air pilot’s report of a washed up whale
on Radar Beach. How I lugged whale bones
to the museum grounds.

I’ll remember how after arriving on that beach
the half-rotted carcass moved

between the worlds of sea and sand,

each wave claiming a bite of flesh.

When we return to shore I’ll show the tourists

my flaming radish garden where I buried the whale

and waited until spring to resurrect its whiteness

into the skeleton of empty.