Vancouver Island

Position: 49°14’39.6″N 124°08’07.9″W

Robin Williams once said, “Canada is like a really nice apartment over a meth lab.” That’s how it feels leaving the lower 48 behind and easing into life north of the border. It’s not so much the pace of life is slower than living with a bunch of addled meth heads. It is. But it is also much more polite and easy-going. My inner socialist puts that down to a combination of factors including universal health care. Compared with its erstwhile British colonial overlords, Canada has all the advantages of America (wide roads and legal cannabis) without the downsides (automatic weapons and impossibly expensive healthcare). Knowing your kids won’t get mowed down at school and you can get your varicose veins taken care of takes an enormous amount of stress out of day-to-day life.

Crossing the border into Canada has never been difficult. We’ve done it dozens of times, but never in an era of imminent threat of annexation by the United States. Nonetheless, like most foreigners we’ve met in the last year, Canadians don’t conflate individuals with their f****d up governments. Our crossing was as pleasant and efficient as ever.

Dingleberry

Once you’re in Canada, nothing much changes. Houses are still built in the clapboarded Craftsman style favoured in the Northwest for the past 100 years. That may be the fault of Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company who ran the Oregon Territory from about 1821 to 1846. The Oregon Territory neatly encompassed the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 ended the discussion of what was British and what was American by drawing a line along the 49^th parallel.

That left Point Roberts as a vestigial dingleberry of the United States hanging off the arse end of British Columbia. But rules is rules. You can’t mess with lines of latitude. I have always wondered if residents of Point Roberts understood they were living in Canada with none of the benefits. That said, I am sure they are as jingoistic as any displaced nationals can be. Much of the local economy apparently centres on selling cheaper American petrol to Canadians. On the other hand, housing is significantly less expensive than in nearby Canadian towns. We only skirted Point Roberts on our way through Tsawwassen to catch the ferry for Vancouver Island. Although, now I feel obliged to poke our noses in on our journey back south.

Good Ideas

For the past and next couple of weeks we’re hanging out a few miles north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Having the good fortune to snag a dog sit with Hoochi in his comfy home right on the beach, we have so far spent our time soaking up the local culture. Most of which, as I mentioned, is very familiar. The twin vectors of locally roasted coffee and microbreweries took about 30 seconds to infect our northern cousins. There is no holding back good ideas, particularly if practitioners can make a living with them. These days established breweries mutate into distilleries. (It’s all those left over carbs that can be turned into ethanol that does it.) The local coffees, beers and gins have so far proved outstanding.

Nanaimo is best known across Canada for its eponymous cake, the famous Nanaimo bar. This unbaked bar is a three-layer confection with a base of coconut crumbs, a layer of custard in the middle and an icing of chocolate ganache. Prior to the bar’s invention, Nanaimo was mostly a fishing port with a coal problem. Some of the west coast’s finest coal was mined in and around Nanaimo for the final decades of the 19^th century. When reserves ran low and labour unrest reduced profits, forestry took over. For a few years a whaling station sat just outside the harbour. When every humpback in the Salish Sea had been caught and rendered down into lamp oil, that industry also went under. The humpbacks, understandably, never returned.

Cool!

These days Vancouver Island remains a place of cool wonder. One of the upsides of a modern, socially forward state is its lack of pretence regarding state services. In America, state services are run as inexpensively as possible, presumably to appease tycoons who see state-run enterprises as both corrupt and a lost opportunity for revenue generation. British Columbia’s provincial parks, for example, are well maintained, free to use, and show none of the signs of neglect we have come to expect in America’s shared, public spaces.

Our arrival coincided with the annual herring run. Each year herring come in their millions to spawn at various points around the island. The sea runs white with milt and roe bringing in wildlife and fishermen for miles around. Through the picture windows of our housesit, we watched a dozen bald eagles happily mingle with flocks of seagulls. Wondering what those big brown birds among the gulls and bald eagles were, we did a little research.

Eagles

Bald Eagles mature at around age five. Until then, their bodies are a mottled mess of dark brown feathers with spatters of white streaking through them. When they mature, they gain their familiar dark brown feathers and white heads. Females are typically about 25% bigger than males. Whether males are hen-pecked as a result is unknown. Twitchers will be conversant with Bergmann’s rule, which states that the further away from the equator you go, the larger in size broadly distributed species become. To underline this observation, the largest bald eagles can be found in Alaska. It also helps explain why the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. (I suspect cow’s milk and Gouda also has something to do with it.)

Walking along the beach we thought we saw an eagle drowning. Instead it was swimming to shore using its big wings as oars. This is fairly common. Because their feathers aren’t waterproof like a sea bird’s, if they aim for a salmon and miss their feathers can become saturated enough they can’t take off again. In that case they will swim to shore and dry out. The one we saw had a very stately and determined look as it breaststroked its way across the bay. It flew off as soon as its feathers had dried sufficiently.

For days after the spawning, pearlescent roe remained trapped in the long loops of bracken and kelp washed in on the tide. A few days of sunshine soon dried them out and they disappeared, leaving only a strong fishy smell. Along with seals and sea lions, herring boats hope to catch mature female herring with their roe still inside them. Don’t fret, there are always far more eggs than even the most determined herring can fertilize. Herring roe is considered a delicacy in many parts of Canada. Fishing licenses are strictly regulated and kept to a 14% harvest rate to support population recovery. Overfishing has been a problem, but herring populations in the Strait of Georgia have held steady for years and there are signs of recovery in other areas.

Hikes

Settling into Hoochi’s dog sit has meant hiking for at least five miles a day on nearby trails. There are hundreds of hikes, long and short, on Vancouver Island. Thus far, each has shown us a different part of the local ecosystem. With so much variety on our doorstep, we’ve had to push ourselves a bit to explore farther up island. That will come. And you, dear reader, will be the first to hear about it. Stay tuned!

Photos

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