The first day we stopped after a short drive in Nanaimo, the second largest city on the island. The Strait of Georgia was lush blue, in the view from the town. One could see the mountains of mainland sB.C. quite use. That evening we used our hotel room key to get a discount at the White Spot restaurant next door.
The next day we headed west over the passes to Port Alberni, a working classs which sits in the middle of Vancouver Island, surrounded by mountain, but is curiously on the ses as well, being that it is at the tail of a long winding sound that cuts deep into the island from the Pacific. Port Alberni is supposedly "the worst place to live in Canada," according to a web article that Red found.
I found nothing obviously wrong with it. Perhaps it seems bad by comparison, because it is the last outpost of "civilization"---the Wal-Mart and Starbucks are to be found here, for example. One is supposed to despise these things after all. At most they are a necessity, but if they are all one has, it is a sign of "blight."
From there the highway continues westward through more steep mountains, roughly follows the aforementioned sound, but also climbing a few low passes in the green forested hills to come upon the shores of inland lakes in their enclosed basins. Another hour like this brings one to the western shore of the island.
There the road reaches a tee junction. Left is the town of Ucluelet on the coast. Turning right, one follows the Pacific down a long finger of land pointing parallel to the coast, carved by the fjords and sounds. One passes through a lovely Reserve de Parc. where the signs are explicit in informing us that it is a rain forest. That's a term with a lot of cache in our culture.
In the preserve are wonderful beaches, visible from the road through a thin curtain of tree trunks that make a zoetrope of the brilliant Pacific as one drives past them. The roadside is crowded with cars of various sizes in a jagged parallel parking arrangement, to maximize the number of visitors to the beach.
After another dozen kilometers, one leaves the Reserve ("Merci pour votre visite!"). By this time one is near the end of the long peninsula along the coast.
One begins to pass many commercial summer resorts with prominent welcoming signs, the resorts themselves obscured by thick trees. At the tip of the peninsula is a little town, an old fishing town that is now a summer tourist hub. It sits on a bluff overlooking the enormous wide lower part of Alberni Sound as it opens to the ocean. One there sees the calm lagoon and the archipelago of tree-topped islands within it, framed by the steep mountains on the other side.
As one watches the sound, which in the July sun was as marvelous in hue as any place on earth, sea planes land and take off nearly constantly, on a permanent self-regulating watery airfield.
Red informed me that the road from here to Port Alberni was completed only in 1973. Here at the tip of the peninsula, is obvious the culture of self-sufficiency by good transported here by boat and plane survives, but with alterations in the wake o the land artery. At the town's marina, what appears to be a Tla-o-qui-aht family unloads multiple Wal-Mart bags from there minivan onto a rusty shopping cart. When it is full, they gentle lower the cart down the steep ramp to a boat at the dock, where the goods will be ferried across the sound to a settlement or house.
Hank Stamper would have been right at home here, I think to myself.
Much of the year, the place is shrouded in mist and fog, the hues of green and blue suppressed by nature's own lightbox of the grey slate skies.
But in July, in good sunny weather. it feels like paradise. On the map, it's called Tofino.
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