Ah the road.  That magical feeling sets in, good music on, a stretch of highway and an adventure waiting.  Meg takes me to Tofino, our maiden voyage.  My faithful dog Babe keeps watch in the passenger’s seat.  Dog is my co-pilot.

We take our time getting there from Galiano and stop along a lake for free camping at its finest.  The view is spectacular.  Mountains just across the lake and waterfalls fill our ears with their roar.  There always seems to be those other things that come with free camping:  beer caps, garbage in the fire pit, and blackberry vines trailing over bush tossed sanitary napkins.  But I am cozy, safe from bears, and warm.

Clearcut after clearcut, silver spears – totems in mangy hills. 
Dry  dry, bone dry, no matter how much rain. 
Clouds hand like saggy eyelids over tired hills, it’s not difficult to imagine its previous lushness, jungly skunk cabbage echo it. 
Valley after valley gone and no effort to hide behind roadside growth.  Eyes see different things in a forest.

That we drive through a landscape that was once as magnificent as the destination is an irony not lost on me.  I stop at a lake, a flurry of words jumble out of my pen, my mind scissors trying to cut a shape of balance, to reconcile the destruction.  The thoughts follow me and the road winds through.  Bridges over named creeks:  Indian, Thunderous, and Log Dump.  I realize the accessibility I enjoy is a by-product of the hunt for trees, and that with out logging I probably wouldn’t be on a spacious highway getting there quickly.  Reluctantly I accept.  This is the way it is.  The trees will grow back, they will be cut again, generations follow.

I pass the entrance to Pacific Rim National Park past signs warning would be bear feeders and beckoning tourist dollars.  Arriving in town I park at the Common Loaf, a trendy, happening bakery.  I open my sliding door, pop out, stretch and am greeted by a surfer dude type.  “Hey nice van man.”

next