In a few months, I will no longer be a Coastal Man. After almost 29 years spent within fifteen kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, I am setting my course for a new ocean, albeit one that dried up some tens of millions of years ago. I will hammer down my proverbial tent pegs right in the middle of that erstwhile sea, and await the tide that never comes in.
In the mean time, I am trying to make the most of my Coastal Situation, and this, of course, means riding aboard as many boats as possible. Last month, I took a ride on the famous SeaBus across the Burrard Inlet to visit what was once a site of great industry, now home to hip breweries and a skating rink. Two days later, while watching the X-Files, I saw Fox Mulder run across this very same pier, even though he was supposed to be in North Carolina. And I said to my wife, “What they say is true: art does imitate life.”
In our latest attempt to wring every drop of ocean travel out of this local ocean, we took a trip last week to Mayne Island, located along the Strait of Georgia that runs between Vancouver Island and Vancouver itself. For a fine price of $55, we acquired two return tickets, departing the mainland at 9:55am and arriving back home at 6:25pm, which, when taking sailing time into account, left us about four and a half hours to mull about on a piece of land that was, until we stepped off the ferry, much shrouded in mystery.
The decision to visit this particular island had much to do with the above-mentioned price and convenient sailing times, and a quick perusal of the tourism brochure we found in the ferry revealed that there wasn’t much else that set it apart from its peers. Luckily, the island, while small as far as islands go, was too large to reasonably cover by foot within the time frame, so even if there had been much more to do, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Fortunately for everyone involved, this trip was not really about doing anything at all. For the most part, it was just an excuse to ride a ferry. Having grown up next to what Wikipedia calls the “largest ferry terminal in North America1,” it is no surprise that I have a “terminal” case of ferry adoration. This has only been augmented by the many novels I have read about men on boats.
The most impactful of these was, of course, Moby-Dick, which, in fact, taught me to love the sea. I cared not a whit about boats or whales or anything of that sort until Herman Melville insisted that I did and always had, after which I did and always had. It became a dream of mine to sail a little and see the watery part of the world. That’s not quite as simple now as it once was, and thus I have to settle for the relative luxury of hours-long ferry rides. This is likely for the best, since I am anything but a hardy fellow, and have a fear of heights that keeps me away from the highest rung of stepladders.
This is why I soon modified my dream to include a nautical mishap, hopefully within swimming distance — and let’s keep in mind that I’m not much of a swimmer — of some bountiful island. Islands have the wondrous quality of being on the sea while also being land, which puts them much higher in my ranking of “things I want to be standing on” than any boat. The initial version of my dream involved being shipwrecked alongside a beautiful maiden who would then become my wife, but as I accidentally met a beautiful maiden under much more mundane circumstances in the meantime and married her, the new version simply involves bringing her along and hoping she too survives the nautical mishap.
Ideally, we would be as lucky as Robinson Crusoe, whose mishap left him with the entire cargo of his former ship to loot for equipment and food. Otherwise, we would likely just die, and while that was once a vital aspect of the dream, the situation has changed to the point where such an end is no longer appealing.
So far, the closest we have come to living this dream — the non-dying dream, not the dying dream — was during a trip to Gabriola Island several years ago. At the time, I was reading Herman Melville’s Typee, in which Melville is stranded (or rather, strands himself) on a deserted portion of an otherwise populated Pacific island, so I was both fictionally and non-fictionally in an island mood. As we walked the silent beaches, I imagined I was a naturalist akin to Stephen Maturin from Master and Commander. I don’t actually know anything about anything when it comes to nature, so all I could do was look at things and say, “I wonder what that is,” which shows that I at least have enough innate curiosity if I ever decide to pursue a more scientific path.
It was during that trip that I decided that I must write a deserted island story of some sort, but that “of some sort” has proven so pernicious to untangle that I still haven’t begun work on the story some three years later.
On one afternoon, we rented a kayak and rowed ourselves around the many small isles that surround Gabriola’s eastern coast. Most of these are privately owned, so one can’t run aground without risking becoming involved in some sort of “Most Dangerous Game” situation; however, there is one small rocky islet about 55m by 120m that no one has found it worthwhile to claim, and on which we abandoned our kayak and set off to do some exploring. After about half an hour spent hopping about from rock to rock, we decided that this would be an ideal location to wash up on after a disastrous nautical mishap, aside from the complete lack of food, water, or shelter.
In my imagination — which my years of schooling has taught me is not a credible source of information — Mayne Island was much like that islet. Those detectives among my readers may have inferred from the aforementioned existence of a tourism brochure and a ferry terminal that my imagination was once again well off the mark.
While on the ferry, we happened to sit near a pair of women who were heading to some other island (the ferry stops at multiple along the way), and I overheard one tell the other that Mayne Island was the “least friendly” of the Southern Gulf Islands, by which she meant that it had the least public beaches, with the majority of the coastline being private property. This might have discouraged me somewhat, but before I had time to ponder it too much, I witnessed a cormorant sitting on a post outside the window.
This woman, it turns out, was a credible source of information, and we spent most of our trip walking along the side of dull roads — bringing our car would’ve made the trip laughably expensive — amidst a silence broken only by the whirrings and roars of passing helicopters and sea planes. Hearing these sounds reminded me of another dream of mine, which involves piloting a sea plane across the Adriatic.
The one feature of note, which I will now reveal had prompted our choice of island in the first place, was a Japanese memorial garden located about a kilometer and a half south of the ferry terminal. The only interesting trivia I have carried back for you from my trip pertains to this garden: namely, that in the early 20th century, the population of Mayne Island was nearly one-third Japanese, which seems to have been the case for many of the Southern Gulf islands. During the Second World War, all the Japanese people on the islands were removed from their homes and taken to camps closer to the interior of the province, as a precaution against potential sabotage. Almost none of them returned, as by the time they were freed from their internment, all their property had been auctioned off by the federal government.
As a way of honouring their contribution to the island’s history, and as a memorial of their ill-treatment at the hands of our nation, many volunteers contributed to the construction of a traditional Japanese garden on a plot of land once home to a Japanese family farm. The result is quite wonderful, home to a variety of flowers and trees from both North America and Asia, with traditional Japanese torii gates, rock sculptures, and a red wooden bridge that runs across an artificial stream. All the more peaceful for being in the middle of nowhere on an island that is already the middle of nowhere, it served as the highlight of our trip.
With nothing else to particularly interest us on shore, we set out to find ourselves some water. As Melville writes in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged into his deepest reveries — stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.” As the most absent-minded of men, well-packed with reveries of nautical mishaps and sea plane adventures; and, notably, in a region with an abundance of water, it seemed our chances were pretty good.
Within a few hours, we found ourselves at Miner’s Bay, home of about 200 metres of beach and a single wooden pier. This pier, like much of the island, related to my dreams: for one, it was the landing ground for sea planes; and for two, it was the drop-off point for the island’s mail, reminding me of my as-yet-unmentioned dream of being a postman.
We had actually witnessed mail delivery in progress earlier in our walk, performed by a woman in an SUV with a little “Canada Post” sign affixed to the roof. Lacking both the funny van and the uniform, the dreaminess of her situation was far from ideal. However, upon reaching the pier, and thinking of whoever it was that drove the little boat to all these islands dropping off their giant sacks of mail, I realized that that was the true dream. And it was with a small sadness that I realized that by abandoning my coastal paradise, I was also abandoning this newfound dream.
While they may have postal workers, airplanes, and perhaps even boats in Saskatchewan (there are plenty of rivers and lakes, after all), what they certainly do not have are boat-riding postmen, sea planes, and nautical mishaps that leave one stranded on a deserted island. These dreams of mine may be childish, but this is, after all, the land where I have been a child. Perhaps it is only by leaving that I will finally grow up.
Either that, or I can simply adjust my dreams. For example, mail delivery by sled certainly seems feasible in many parts of Saskatchewan, and there’s no reason why a sea plane can’t land in one of their roughly 100,000 lakes. While a monumental nautical mishap may be out of the cards, I could at least tip over a fishing boat. And if my car were to break down in the middle of a long highway, what are the prairies then but a sprawling ocean and deserted island all rolled into one?
As I stood on the deck of our homebound ferry amidst the bitter winds, as the light of the full moon reflected in the boundless waters and mainland civilization loomed into view ahead, it was clear that I was going to miss all this. And yet, when I think upon my daily life, outside of all this recent bustling to see all that Vancouver has to offer, I find that it is startlingly rare for me to find myself anywhere near the water. I don’t, in fact, live on an island, and for the most part, I don’t even live on the coast. Aside from a few annual trips to the beach or the waterfront and the occasional ride on a ferry, I’m a bona fide landlocked landlubber who merely dreams of the Ocean and its wonders.
And if that’s the case, why not lock myself within as much land as possible?2 Why not wrap the ocean purely in dream and fantasy, and reflect on it only as a literary backdrop and a childhood memory? Any time I crave that briny odor or the sound of the roaring waves, I’ve got a copy of Moby-Dick sitting right there on the shelf. My mind is stuffed full of the ocean, of the coast, of the mountains that overlook it, of the sea lions and the cormorants and the seagulls, of the kayaks and canoes and paddleboards and cargo ships and ferries — I’ve got them all in here! And amid that grand ocean of wheat and barley where I must forge my future, I can always cast my mind back to the Mighty Pacific — back home!
Balckwell Rising! 
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