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Paddling with a Psychic

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Rob-Lyon-100x100Hiring a psychic to help you plan a paddling trip might sound like a nutty idea…and it is. But that’s never scared Rob Lyon away from trying something. In Paddling with a Psychic, he tells us how the experience played out.

 

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“Why is the bottom of your boat painted silver?” the psychic asked me.

“It should be white,” I told her.  “I told Jim to paint it white.”

At that point in time I had yet to see my boat, about to be shipped up from Tsunami Ranger headquarters in NorCal.  I had no idea what color schemes would inspire Jim Kakuk (head Tsunami Ranger) but I’d requested red top, white bottom.  When I got the call from the trucking terminal, I drove down to Tacoma to pick it up.  When I tore off the protective wrapping, sure enough, the hull was painted a silver-gray color.

The psychic, clairvoyant or intuitive (as she refers to herself), was Laurie McQuarie, a nationally recognized, if controversial, sayer of sooth.  I had first heard of Laurie in the early nineties.  A good friend of mine had a close friend, an artist and single mother living in Montana, who’d just suffered a tragedy of the worst possible stripe.  Her brother had flown out to visit in his small plane and taken her three children up to sight see.  They never came back.  My buddy flew out to help with the search and rescue mission.

After a fruitless week of searching the deep, rugged canyons of the Mission Mountain Wilderness, they contacted Laurie.  Soon thereafter, a crumpled plane was found at the end of a box canyon with no survivors, right where Laurie said it was.  Not much later, as I was preparing to circumnavigate Vancouver Island, I remembered Laurie, and thought it might be interesting to get her two cents on my journey.

I sent her a copy of a marine chart of the island and a week later, in a recorded phone call, Laurie foretold a dozen events along my route, mentioned that the trip might take longer than I thought, and sent me a tape of our conversation to take along.

Launching in late July, I left a quiet beach on Lopez Island where I lived, and paddled north through the San Juans.  Days later I entered the Canadian Gulf Islands and made a guerilla camp on Newcastle Island.   Laurie’s first hotspot on my itinerary was Departure Bay, a nondescript mile of water between Newcastle and the big island.  I played the first part of the tape again that night, trying to make sense of it.

“Somewhere around Departure Bay, I want to say, there’s something funny about the water . . . I don’t know whether the water levels are different or deceptive, but I would say be rather careful about going too close to the shoreline at this point.”

I launched that morning, opting to paddle over the shallow reef in front of camp instead of going out around through deeper water.  Ordinarily this would not be a problem on inside waters.  But I didn’t time the wake of a passing ferry and as I crossed the reef a pair of huge waves broke over me.  Splat!  That got my attention.

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I pulled into Black Creek several weeks later after a long open water crossing of the Strait of Georgia.  I had visited Lasqueti Island, feeling right at home with the folksy, bohemian lifestyle, there, and when I left I paddled north to Texada Island to stage for a long six hour crossing back to Vancouver Island in sweltering heat the next day. I was paddling a burdened 20’ double kayak and it was not the fastest boat afloat.  To cool off, I jumped overboard. A school of Dall’s porpoise swam over to keep me company.  I approached the ferry dock at Black Creek finally, tired and sore and ready to kick up some sand.

In the back on my mind were Laurie’s thoughts about this place:  “I’m going all the way up to Black Creek and that might also be a bit of a trouble spot.  I’m assuming that because you’re going in the summertime you’re not expecting unusual storms or anything but there could be something with the weather on the day you’re there that could be unusual.”

It was a beautiful day on the water, a high pressure kind of day, and there was no sign of any atmospheric disturbance anywhere on the horizon. Of course, I couldn’t see far at all to the west as I closed on shore and I was no more than 200 yards from the beach when it hit.

Bam!  It was surreal how quickly the wind came up.  Five seconds from zero to fifty.  I had to hunker down and paddle like a bandit to make it ashore!

I had never seen a storm brew up this quickly.  It was uncanny.  As I struggled to pitch a flapping tent in howling winds, thunder and lightening came along and stayed with me throughout the night.  In the morning it was calm and hot again, without a sign of the storm.

My respect for psychics was rapidly growing and I fast forwarded through my little hand held recorder to see what my future held.  The next prediction concerned Malcom Island, maybe a week away, and it didn’t involve waves or storms.

I kayaked leisurely north, getting stronger and getting antsy for some wild.  It was high summer and I shared the water with all manner of craft, most of them not the self-powered variety.  Once past Campbell River, civilization dropped away.  I approached Malcom Island late one evening in early August, my chart in my lap and busy trying to make sense of what I was seeing.  In the back of my mind was Laurie’s take on the area:  “There might be something different that has changed with the water or the landscaping here, somewhere between Alert Bay and Malcom Island.  I don’t know whether that would mean a natural occurrence or something has been built there and it looks different, but it might seem different than what you would expect.”

What I could see ahead on the island was not at all what was depicted on my chart.  Disoriented, I paddled up a little further and found a huge subdivision built on the shore.  Contractors had terraformed the shoreline so significantly as to render my chart — the land aspect, at least – obsolete.

Chills ran up my spine.

In my tent that night, with the waves lapping the beach outside, I played back the tape of Laurie’s predictions. Based on her track record to date, I had decreasing doubt that whatever else she had predicted would materialize.  The Malcom Island entry though, was the last for quite a while.  Not until Nootka Island, a month and a half away, had she anything to say that was keyed to a particular place.  And considering what lay between Malcom and Nootka, Cape Scott and the Brook’s Peninsula, to name a few gnarly points of passage, I took it as a positive omen.

I rounded the fabled tip at Cape Scott on the 16th of August. After a wild, roller coaster week off the island’s northernmost coastline, I finally made Winter Harbour, pretty much a ghost village at this point in time with logging and fisheries on the decline.  Then, as luck would have it, a week or two later I paddled out around the northern tip of the Brook’s Peninsula, accompanied by a pair of Orcas and feeling pretty good about things to date.  I was hoping to make it around the southern tip at Clerke Point that day, but was forced to jockey through surf to get ashore in building seas at the mouth of Amos Creek.

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I woke early the next morning without my usual ablutions.  The wind picked up very early out on the tip, and in light of the horror stories I’d heard from fishermen in Winter Harbour, I packed up quick and headed out around the epic reef that runs a mile out to sea.  I made a wide end-run around vagrant breakers and into the sanctuary of Checleset Bay, and none too soon.  A squall blew in after me like a broom, making Clerke Point look like Waimea Bay on a good day.  Not far ahead though, on a long, white sand beach I would meet up with a bunch of friends from home, my girlfriend among them.

I spent the next ten days slumming on a hot sand beach we nicknamed Malibu North, running around naked and diving in the shore break to cool off, fishing daily to feed everyone, tossing discs and carving totem poles and relaxing so hard it hurt.

And pretty much the last of Laurie’s predictions happened here.

Never out of earshot of the surf throughout the expeditions, I had been plagued with a recurring nightmare.  Nearly every night I woke up panicked to find the ocean flooding my tent and my equipment adrift.  This particular dream began when I guided on the Deschutes.  We would spend week after week camped on river’s edge where I felt compelled to sleep as close to the water as possible, even going so far as to sleep on the water, propping my cot between the seats of my drift boat and figuring it was about as close I‘d get without growing gills.

One night, there on the Brooks, as we were going to bed, I complained (again) to Pamela about the dream. To be so close to the water, it was unnerving to feel this way so often.

Pamela suggested I release the dream from my sub-conscious mind.

“And how do I do that?”

“Just let it go.  Like unlocking a cell and releasing a prisoner.”

I woke up suddenly that night, looked out the open door of the tent and saw a radiant, golden pyramid!  It looked to be about ten feet high with this supernatural glow!  I remember thinking how much it looked like the label on a bottle of Pyramid Ale.

I bathed in the visage for some time, feeling beatified in its presence.  Then, drunk like a pup on mother’s milk, I lay back down and slept.  When I woke again sometime later, it was still there!

And as you might guess, from that point on the nightmares vanished.

What was this all about?  Checking Laurie’s tape again I found a passage that would correspond roughly to this time and place.  Laurie had predicted I would meet up with a ‘powerful spirit of some kind’ at about this point.  She was quite excited about it.

But a pyramid?

Still, the encounter had the mystical gravitas of manning up with an angel or ascended master, definitely weighing in in the ‘powerful spirit’ class.

After I returned home I looked up pyramids in Jung’s Mandala Symbolism.  One of the interpretations spoke of:  ‘unconscious contents pushing up into the consciousness.”  There was nothing about ale.

Two remaining predictions were obviated by foreknowledge of them.  There was some nastiness predicted on the out-outer coast of Nootka Island, so I opted for the interior route.  I wanted to resupply in Tahsis, in any case, and the second was some kind of human nastiness (perhaps the worst kind) around Ucleuet, which I blew right past. The final and over-arching prediction about the trip taking longer than I had expected, didn’t need a psychic to see coming. At the languorous pace I kept I was lucky to make it home in a quarter of a year, let alone a couple of months.

In the spirit of full discourse on the subject, I had three more readings coinciding with kayak expeditions in the next half decade.  Frankly, I‘d been blown away with the reading of the Vancouver trip.  It’d been fascinating to follow the nexus of reality and prophecy as time and space flowed under my hull.  So, I rang Laurie up a few more times in the next few years as I worked the solo bug out of my system.

My thinking was, if Vancouver was good, Haida Gwaii would only be better, so I sent up the requisite charts and had a talk with Laurie before I headed north.  This reading was different.  She wasn’t real clear on whether or not I survived.  Enough said.  I changed my plans and circled Chichagof, a smaller island in the Southeast AK archipelago, that year.  As I recall, the reading of that trip was nothing special.  But it was a good trip and I returned safely.

Not one to be easily denied, two years later I was looking to the Misty Isles again.  Laurie’ predicted all sorts of challenges, but felt confident I’d make it home in one piece.  That was enough for me.  It was another deeply satisfying trip, but as it played out in the field for several months that summer, the reading was meh.  That was the last reading I’ve had.

And finally, as I was about to wrap this up, I Googled ‘Laurie McQuarie’.  And found a site running a scathing denouncement of her, depicting her as a hoax and a blatant publicity hound.

Whatever.  All I know is she nailed that Vancouver trip like a carpenter.