Terroir

The Evolution of a Person in a Place

The first time I found myself in Long Beach, halfway up the Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island, was shortly after my birth, 35-odd years ago. My father was teaching in a rural junior high school in a mill town nearby and the three of us lived in a small wood cabin on a lake.  The road to Long Beach was long and winding and mostly gravel. Those who lived on the  two villages on the peninsula were loggers or hippies or the local Clayoquot First Nations, and the lone sea road connecting the two was lined with uninterrupted massive, ancient forests. Tofino, at the northern end, was where people went to start cooperative bakeries and organic gardens and do yoga and try to live off the land in an inspired ’70s kind of way; Ucluelet was where the resource-industry workers and their families lived.  Over the decades that followed, the generalized ideological concepts behind the two small towns occasionally pitted them against each other, with anti-logging protests and anti-anti-logging protests. Trees have been massively thinned and the road widened and paved.  The hippies and their vegetable gardens have been replaced by foodies and spas and West Coast Art galleries.  The loggers and their families have been thinned by the slow death of the resource industry, and the foodies and spas and West Coast Art galleries have started edging their way in.

Supervising the Waves

Most of my adult life has been spent far away from here, far from where I first started out, far away in enormous cities in Europe and Africa and now in Asia. After university, I was pretty much away and rarely back to the island. However, if my skin could be peeled back like the paper-thin bark of an Arbutus tree (bountiful on Vancouver Island), the terroir revealed (a bit like a nice French grape or  strong Italian parmesan) would be concretely and decisively from here.  When I think of who I am, this is what I see: the waves, the rain, the trees, the mist, the fierce open Pacific, the trees, the ravens, the mist.  As a child, I came up here with my family and we camped in our old VW van. As a larger child, I came up here with friends, whose parents thought it would be a grand idea to celebrate a 7th or 9th birthday in an A-frame rented cabin on the beach. I remember lying awake all night, unable to sleep from the overwhelming roar of the waves and bone chilling moistness of the air. In my teens, I came up with my friends every New Year and we camped in the rain, with puddles forming moats around our tents pitched over huge orange tarps.  We drank cheap local wine and played hackey sack in the rain, like good alterna-teens in the early ’90s. We spent most New Year’s Days in the laundromat in Tofino in our underwear, trying to dry our clothes. One year, my big toe didn’t thaw for a week after. In summer, I sometimes found myself on logging roads, trying carefully to avoid being arrested for protesting the destruction of the surrounding ancient Clayoquot rainforest, along with hundreds of others who fought to preserve the old growth over the years.  As an adult, I’ve pulled all-nighters driving up from Victoria, the provincial capital at the bottom of the island where my family lives, to do yoga at dawn on the beach with friends who thought that would be a nifty thing to do. In recent years, I’ve come up with my parents for a late Christmas gift of a week of storm watching from the comfort of a beach-front suite with a fireplace and free use of enormous rain gear. Annual rainfall here is three meters (no fooling around with mere millimeters here).

Rudolph the Red Nosed Rain Gear

As we speak, a bazillion people are pouring into Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics. Not many tourists have made their way here, even though it isn’t far by air or by ferry.  It isn’t on the easy tourist trail. This is not a place you can casually day-trip to.  There are, however,  many surfers in full wetsuits taking advantage of the winter storm waves crashing on the shores. Long Beach has surf schools that run year round, including one just for women. The hippies and their organic cooperatives have morphed into a large handful of lovely foodie-centric cafes and producers of artisanal breads and cheeses and heirloom vegetables and whatnot. In summer, there are whale-watching trips and in winter there are storm-watching packages at the mushrooming resorts, popping up like cedar-shingled puffballs along the coastal road.  You can still camp, but you can no longer casually show up and pitch your tent on the beach.  Things have changed.  However, the surface changes- the increased comfort level, the increased flow of people, the increased construction and development- have not changed the intrinsic energy and feel of the place.  Like the terroir just millimetres below the surface of my urban, internationalized skin, what remains essential here is still intact: it is still all about the fierce and pounding waves, the cry of the raven, the heavy mist descending over the trees and the strong scent of wet earth. We will continue to change (not always for the best) but the vitals remain constant.