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I’ve experienced some unforgettable moments with Hakai Magazine. Unzipping my tent on a beach along the central coast of British Columbia as the morning sun illuminated the fog until it seemed incandescent. Beluga whales frolicking about my boat off the coast of Alaska. The wings of sandpipers roaring over mudflats in undulating flocks of thousands.
This week, however, I was remembering my very first assignment for the magazine, on the history of the coastline upon which our historic office sits, at 1002 Wharf Street in Victoria, British Columbia.
(You can read about it here: scroll down to Our Office.)
I looked at maps of long-buried creeks, now mostly co-opted as storm sewers, which once flowed from inland marshes and lakes through the traditional lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən people and down into the Inner Harbour. I crawled across the rocks, covered in litter and blackberry tangles, below our building’s parking lot to find the corroded mooring rings that once secured the 19th-century Hudson’s Bay Company dock. And I toured our neighboring building, the iconic Empress Hotel, whose basement is a vast, dark field of concrete piers, each one of which, I learned, stands on the trunk of a massive Douglas fir driven into the coastal muck in the first decade of the 20th century.
Now, six years later, when I go to pick up my lunch along nearby streets lined with colorful tourist shops, I always think of the ghost of the creek beneath my feet. I still point out the iron mooring rings to delighted friends and visiting family. When I bike past the Empress every weekend, I envision the buried forest on which the huge hotel rests.
By looking deeper, I found a sense of place, because I found a story. I think our readers did, too.
I’m departing Hakai Magazine this week for a new adventure (hint: it’s book length), and while I am endlessly grateful for the skills, experiences, and friends I’ve found here, I’m particularly grateful for one lesson, which every member of our incredible team has helped teach me in one way or another: storytelling carries a mandate to look beyond the obvious, especially with people and places we think we already know.
We have to ask what invisible structures hold up the facades. Seek out the hidden channels. Dig through brambles for the traces of what’s come before. And we have to listen to what we discover, finding connections we could never otherwise imagine. Those connections are the heart of stories.
Amorina Kingdon
Staff researcher and writer |
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