Beaches

It doesn’t really snow on Vancouver Island’s west coast. Rarely does the thermometer even dip below freezing, a fact that helps account for the giant conifers. All of this makes December the perfect time to find work as a tree planter, and that is what I did. A buddy had secured a place to live that figured to be marginally more comfortable than the beachside accommodation I had previously experienced. My new digs were an old one-room schoolhouse across the harbour from Ucluelet, which, along with Tofino, bookends Long Beach. Located in the hardscrabble settlement of Port Albion, the school featured a roughly partitioned kitchen heated by a barely functional wood stove. The boys’ and girls’ cloakrooms made for two bedrooms, with another makeshift sleeping area adjacent to the kitchen.

Does it seem peculiar that life lived at a near constant 9°C nevertheless struck me as heaven? Indeed, I still can’t figure out why I cashed in my earnings on a 1966 MGB with rusty rocker panels in May, just as winter’s pitch-dark skies and ceaseless torrents gave way to summer’s exquisite perfection, and drove back to Saskatchewan.

My attraction to Long Beach did not end there. One summer some 20 years later, I made a homecoming excursion with my family while contemplating a move from Saskatchewan to Vancouver. Our young boys played in the surf, and my wife Jessie and I carefully watched them from a strategic spot within the visitors centre in what was by then Pacific Rim National Park Reserve — the strategic spot being a bar. The sun shone, the birds flew, the boys splashed, the microbrews disappeared, and just like that, a difficult decision was made simple.

And now we are back. As it happens, Jessie and I are about to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and on this trip, we will be summering not in 1974’s superannuated schoolhouse or 1990’s musty motel but at the Wickaninnish Inn, a renowned luxury seaside resort. In revisiting my past and this now famous beach, I’m hoping to learn what sparked the transformation from local secret to global hot spot. And something even more important: can a place that is now so thoroughly discovered still possess the soul that endeared it to us in the first place?

THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY THING about a Clayoquot Sound beach vacation is not the sand and surf, though they are stunning, indeed. The most extraordinary thing is what surrounds the beach. One day in 1974 when I was tree planting on a mountainside behind Ucluelet, I happened upon a cedar stump that I paced off at six metres across, about the length of a 1950s station wagon. Were that tree still standing, it might rival Canada’s largest, a title now held by a red cedar near Bamfield, just across Barkley Sound.

Often, these ancient cedars look like massive candelabras, a condition caused when the leader trunk dies and successive side branches take over. As pure Gothic set dressing, the cedars are rivalled only by shore pine, a nutrient-starved relative of Jack and lodgepole pine that arrives with a Latin name — Pinus contorta var. contorta — that describes it perfectly.

Much like its tropical equivalent, the temperate rain forest of Vancouver Island’s west coast is impossibly lush, with fat mattresses of moss strewn across the ground and trees growing on trees growing on trees. To this out-of-control science experiment can be added an all-world collection of ferns, which are of sufficiently prehistoric appearance that one expects at any moment to see a stegosaurus crashing through the trees.

To be clear, there are no dinosaurs in the area, but there are some pretty big mammals. Back in the 1970s, when attempts at late-night ride-catching or boat-borrowing failed, I had to hike the 10 kilometres around the harbour from Ucluelet to our schoolhouse home, and on a couple of occasions, I found myself sharing the deserted Port Albion stretch with black bears, which graciously ambled off into the woods so that I could pass. This time around, as Jessie and I drive up the main highway, a mother bear and two cubs don’t even pay us the courtesy, scarcely looking up as car after car swerves to give them a wide berth or screeches to a halt for a closer look. The bears are drawn to ditches and roadsides, especially in the spring, where they munch on the brilliant new growth of grass and other plants, much to the delight of camera-toting tourists who come expecting to capture whales and leave with a bonus catch.