BECOMING

The Moment Before Flight

The journey begins long before the eagles appear.

For forty-five minutes, the boat hammers its way through the Campbell River currents at speed. On a calm day, calm being relative, your body is thrown hard enough that you begin to wonder whether your bones will reconnect in the same order. In rough weather, the horizon disappears, your stomach follows, and everyone becomes unusually quiet.

The front of the boat offers the clearest view once we arrive, so naturally that is where I want to be. You pay for the privilege on the way there. Wind tears across your face. Goggles stop your eyes from streaming, though they do little for the rest of you. The river rises beneath the hull, drops away, then returns with another blow. There is no graceful way to experience it. You grip the camera, brace your feet and surrender whatever dignity remains.

Then the river opens.

The boat slows, my body catches up with itself, and the sky begins to move.

Eagles appear from every direction. Some circle high above the water. Others fold their wings and fall through the air so quickly that my eye struggles to keep them inside the frame. The king tide has forced herring towards the surface, and for a brief stretch of the season the river becomes dense with opportunity. Wings, water, fish, sunlight. Everything collides, yet nothing feels misplaced.

I had expected the spectacle to be the flight.

The wide wings. The talons closing around a fish. The climb back into the sky.

Those were the images everyone followed.

I found myself watching the moment before.

An eagle rises from the water, but its wings have not yet opened. Its head remains lowered. Water pours from its feathers and breaks around its feet into small, flashing pieces of light. For less than a heartbeat, it belongs fully to neither place. It has released the river but has not yet returned to the sky.

That moment stayed with me.

Perhaps because it was less certain than the flight that followed. Less polished. It carried the weight of effort before effort became grace.

We speak about becoming as though it begins when others recognise the change. The finished work. The open wings. The moment someone finally sees what we have made of ourselves.

But the eagle suggested something else.

Becoming may live in the instant before we appear ready. In the awkward release. In the strength required to leave one element before the next has agreed to hold us.

The river was still pulling downward. The wings were only beginning to rise. Nothing about the moment promised flight, yet everything within the bird was already moving towards it.

I had travelled there expecting to photograph eagles in the air.

Instead, I became absorbed by the fraction of a second when flight was still only a decision.

Perhaps the moments that shape us are rarely the ones in which we soar.

Perhaps they are the ones in which we finally let go of the water.