The reason the poem interested me after 30 years was that the "slipping away" references recalled, instead of Virgilian gloom, a piece of slapstick that occurred while I was at the location for which the poem is titled. I’d been both the main actor and the victim of the slapstick, which, while it involved some slipping, had its main items coming at me rather than receding into poetical gloom. The physical comedy of the slapstick didn’t get into the poem, naturally. If it had, and if I’d been willing to engage it as a content, it might have provoked some useful insights. It might also have provided me with a solution to the compositional dilemma that, even then, lyric poetry was beginning to present, but that’s a subject I’ll reserve until I’ve told the story.

I was out on the west coast of Vancouver Island to record some live surf for a quadraphonic musical composition R. Murray Schafer was allowing Bruce Davis and me to help him construct in Simon Fraser’s Electronic Music Studio. To make the recordings, Schafer had entrusted to my care two state-of-the-art Uher portable reel-to-reel stereo tape recorders. The Uhers were good machines, but by today’s standards cumbersome and heavy, using five inch reels of tape and a raft of now-obsolete recording subsystems that can now be fitted inside a ballpoint pen. The Uhers were also fantastically expensive to buy--about $3000 each, if I recall correctly.

I’d chosen Pachena Bay for the recording location because I’d been there before and had heard something attractive in the harmonics of the surf there. The Pachena beach wasn’t a spectacular or very large one, a six or seven hundred metre stretch of sand and gravel a few kilometres south of Barclay Sound and Bamfield. A more conventional choice would have been to go further north to the better-known Tofino beaches and hang out with the hippies. But Pachena was closer to Vancouver, it had a foreshore sufficiently deep for my dimly conceived purposes, and it was angled so that parts of it were sheltered enough from the ocean winds to make clean recordings possible. It was also certain to be clear of possible witnesses, in case I screwed up, and it had that sound I’d heard.

I arrived on site late in the afternoon of a cold spring day, and immediately headed for the water to satisfy my curiosity about the wave harmonics. I’d heard ocean waves in other places, of course, but what I remembered about the surf here was a certain "tambourine" quality--a pleasant rustling complexity at the base of the harmonic. It didn’t take long to figure out the most likely source of it: for 50-75 metres of the foreshore from low tide point, the middle portion of the beach was a spongy mix of half-inch gravel and shells, mostly Little Neck clam shells mixed with some giant mussel, razor clam and what appeared to be oysters--all of which would become percussive in an active tide. Satisfied, I returned to the car and unpacked my camping gear. I carried it to a log just beyond the limit of the beach sand that offered some shelter from the wind and built a driftwood lean-to onto it, tied a plastic tarp I brought over the frame. Then I collected enough wood for a cooking fire and a chilly evening in a sleeping bag, and began to unpack my recording equipment.

My tide book told me that low tide was going to coincide roughly with sunset, and well before the light began to fade I had my two machines set up on a large log that had marooned itself parallel to the waterline midway up the foreshore. With four channels to record, the set-up was quite complicated. I taped four heavy and very expensive microphones onto adapted camera tripods a few feet in front of my log, wound the cords through the strap on the Uhers and pushed the jacks into the recording slots of the machines. Then I climbed up onto the log to watch the sun slip below the horizon and the sea begin its advance up the foreshore. I calculated that I would have ten to fifteen minutes of acceptable ambiance before the incoming tide would force me to dismantle the equipment and retreat 30 metres to the next log, where I would repeat the recording.