Through the Valley of Death

I think in the entire time I was on the southeast corner of Vancouver Island the temperature never got out of the range between 59 and 67 degrees.  The cool breeze from the ocean and the deep forest shade seem to do a remarkably good job of constraining the temperatures here.  It was super comfortably cool when I went to bed last night in the French Beach Campground, and my body heat must have kept the car warm, because in the middle of the night I needed to shed a layer to stay comfy.  Normally in the night that extra layer is important to protect from the plunging mountain temperature swings that I have gotten used to accommodating, but this particular night I was sleeping about fifty feet above the sea.

My late arriving neighbors, who were charming and entertaining as they arrived and set up after dinner, had these cute orangish lights that they hung on the awning of their pop-up camper.  Unfortunately, they forgot to turn them off, so when I woke up in the middle of the night to attend to nature's call, they distracted me and made it hard to fall back asleep.  Not that the distraction was real.  When I closed my eyes I couldn't actually tell whether or not I could see them glowing; but they bugged me all the same.  When I woke later in the night they were out, which made me exceedingly and irrationally satisfied.  I have gotten in the habit now of completely striking the campsite so that when I wake in the morning I literally need only slip on my shoes, attend to nature's business, and off I go.  I shrewdly purchased a travel size Febreze yesterday, so now I can give things a shot of freshness periodically to keep the car from becoming something of a frightening assortment of mildewy smells.  Things may be mildewing, but I won't know it!

I was up and traveling back toward Port Renfrew by 6:30, and shortly after 7:30 was turning up the mountain and away from the sea to cross over the hills back to the east side of the island.  It was interesting to note that the Jordan River location where I had snapped a picture of logs being held for something was now completely empty.  It appeared that they had all been scooped up out of the river and were stacked for loading onto the steady procession of logging trucks that were constantly moving about the island.  I didn't see another soul until I had gone up the mountain road a few miles, at which point I was passed by a number of pickups and road construction vehicles coming the opposite direction.  After a bit the traffic coming the other way started to include some recreational types...RVs and folks who looked like they were camping or fishing.  The road was small and wound up through the woods without being too daunting but with the usual offering of lovely views throughout.  The morning clouds, which lay along the higher elevations of the

A very determined cedar tree.

island as well as out to sea a ways, were often sharing the road with me, creating a shifting treatment of grey and white across a mostly grey landscape.  At moments the sun would peak through and the forest would suddenly come to life in shades of gray and yellow, then slowly subside back to its grey morning shroud.

The drive up the west side of the island was a spooky and disturbing affair.  The area has been targeted for clear cut harvesting, and the large sections of land where the trees have been ripped out of the ground and the ground itself is torn and ragged appear out of the fog with increasing frequency.  The presence of the fog, which rendered these fields of destruction grey and lifeless in a cold morning air heightened the presence of death and the sense of wanton destruction.  After a time I realized that while there were extensive areas unharvested and thick with mature forest, and there were increasingly frequent and large sections of blasted and forgotten earth, there was almost no presence of the kind of intermediary sections that would be found, that must be found, if this crazy kind of harvesting is to be sustainable.  Where were the fields of five foot trees, of ten foot trees, of twenty foot trees, of young but maturing pines who were creating new forests whose shade created a complex ecosystem of plants and animals?  All I could see was death and life waiting for death.

It led me to start to do some math as I drove up the road.  If any given parcel of land required a certain amount of time to recover, the harvesting rate had to follow the pursuant formula.  What was the rate of recovery?  Fifty years?  Seventy-five years?  One hundred years?  Surely a stand of trees couldn't be ready for harvesting in less than fifty years, but one hundred seemed excessive.  In my mind, and for the purpose of the exercise, I settled on fifty years, which meant that at any given time, of the available forest targeted for management, no more than 2% could be harvested in any given year.  If you agreed that half of the land should be excluded from harvesting to allow some replenishment of the original old growth forests...well, perhaps that was wishful thinking.  I drove along in growing horror as I tried to puzzle out how much land was being torn up.  Did it look like two percent?  More?  And even if it were, did they just start this recently...because where were the mid-stage forests?  Clearly the harvesting of trees here is nothing new.  A whole economy and culture is ubiquitously dependent on it.  The island seems to be nothing more than a coastal vacationland protecting an enormous logging industry.

The closer I got to the summit of my drive, the more frequently I began to encounter sections which did, in fact, appear to have been replanted, some as much as ten or more years ago, which was helpful in suppressing my growing sense that the folks with spikes in trees might be more right than I had thought.  As I came out of the fog and into the sunshine at the top of the mountain, the mosaic became even more complex, and after passing east of Lake Cowichan (a recreational hub in its own right) the picture finally came into complete view and I realized that this was an area that had not had recent logging for some time, but that its land was covered by parcels at almost every stage of growth.  Greatly mollified, I turned north when I hit the highway at the foot of the pass and headed for the ferry station.

The whole experience brought into unexpected focus the enormity of the scale of time that exists within the logging industry.  Properly managed, these sections of land need to be replanted and prepared for a harvest that is fifty years or more away.  An amazing idea.

The ferry ride back to Tsawwassen was uneventful, though I found myself musing about the rarity and importance of parental consistency as I watched a young man completely ignore his mother, who threatened various things in an effort to get him to put down his electronic device, which he did not do, nor did she execute her carefully articulated consequences.  Neither seemed very exercised in this ritual, as if it happens over and over again and it hasn't occurred to the mother that if she never does what she says, he'll never listen to her either.

And so a stop for gas wherein I tried to unload all the remaining Canadian currency I had obtained, moved through customs without incident (and in half the promised 40 minutes it was posted to be delayed) and am now in a lovely Extended Stay hotel room where I can cook my own food, clean my clothes, and take a refreshing showers...all compliments of the Expedia discount option.

Random Thoughts Over Lunch on Vancouver Island

Lunch yesterday was on the sunny deck of the Port Renfrew Hotel, where I enjoyed a grilled ham and cheese sandwich along with a robust turkey soup.  The soup started out with lots of ingredients and a healthy broth, but a dearth of seasoning, which I rectified with fresh ground pepper.  Situated immediately in front of the deck was a small marina connected to the hotel opening to Snuggery Cove.  The other place names along here seem to have a strong connection to the early Spanish explorers, beginning with the larger body of water named the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  It’s cool here, even in the sunshine, with the mid-day temperature barely clearing 70 degrees.

As I did this morning, I am enjoying sitting quietly with my book and my lunch and listening to the conversations of those around me.  There is a fascinating group of folk at the next table.  My best guess is that there is a man and his son, Mike, a man and his daughter, and a woman who might be the wife of the second man, but I had not enough information to be sure.  Their accents were remarkably varied.  Mike’s father I was able to place as Irish, though his accent had multiple influences such that I wouldn’t have placed it without some content clues in their conversation.  His son, Mike, had the slightest hint of the British Columbia accent, which is why I’m not convinced they were, in fact, related.  The daughter had a neutral American accent, and she lives within about three hours of here with her father, and possibly with the other woman, who might have been her mother.  That couple both had strong Germanic accents.  Their conversation when I picked it up began with the Irishman declaring that, “The Americans had 11,000 gun deaths last year.  The next two countries were France and Ireland and they only had a few hundred.”  I’m not sure of the accuracy of this, and I imagine he is leaving out a variety of places outside of the sphere of European influence, but the gist of his argument is correct, we kill a lot of people with our guns.  They went on to express various levels of amazement at the American willingness to tolerate guns, culminating in the observation that the Trayvon Martin situation wouldn’t have happened without guns.  Mike observed that, “He would have bashed his head in,” but the Irishman was unwilling to concede that as a given.  He also opined that liberal and conservatives alike in America want to keep their guns. 

I wanted to disagree.  I wanted to explain that many, many Americans are ready to register and limit access to gun.  I wanted to point out that many Americans are only a few generations away from the days when those guns were a fundamental part of their lifestyle as they settled (and stole) the American West and that their sense of fierce individualism is hard to overcome.  I wanted to say that someday we would change.  Of course, none of this was pertinent to their conversation, only mine.  It was interesting to hear their easy condemnation of our attitudes in this area. 

On a completely different note, they also discussed the fact that Germans, Brits and Aussies don’t tip well because they have a hard time recognizing that people in the service industry in North America are paid like slaves and need the tips to survive.  The implication is that in Germany, Britain and Australia, service industry folks make a living base wage.  News to me.

As I look across the bay at the forested slopes of the mountain opposite, I see, as I expected, a mosaic of recently harvested areas checkerboarding the view.  On the drive down the coast from French Beach to Port Renfrew, I had passed several areas of this type that came close to the road, and I assumed that the entire area is being managed in a rotation of clear cutting.  When you look into the lush forest by the road, most of the trees are of a similar age, with a few enormous stumps sitting in tattered splendor in amongst them.  No doubt the original old growth forest was clear cut back in the nineteenth century, and since then this raping of the forest is managed carefully.  I say raping because it has the harsh imagery of angry violation about it, but I use wood all the time.  That wood comes from somewhere.  To be fair, the areas not currently cut clear are covered with hundred foot trees and lush vegetation, and my campsite is surrounded by trees some of which with a trunk diameter of over three feet.  I am looking forward to seeing the old growth redwoods later in the week.

Perhaps we are moving to a better place where we manage rather than use and discard, but if so it is a slow process and more than just attitudes need to change.  Somehow the basic cultural paradigm of use has to change.  My little effort to use or have less stuff falls well short of what is eventually needed.  I think about my step-mother Pat, who only travels with efficient public options like the bus or train, and contrast it with my own habits or the norm in society.  With this trip alone, on which I have now traveled over 9,000 miles, I am probably using enough gas to power a small town, Prius or no.

Funny moment in Steinbeck’s book about use and reuse; in describing the American town of 1960 he observes that it is like a, “like badger holes ringed with trash.”  He correctly predicts that we are going to have to find a way to use and reuse the boxes and detritus that accompany our growing consumerism.  In this, he is critiquing and criticizing; but what is amusing is that two pages later he notes with pride that he has found a useful item to facilitate cooking on his travels, “the aluminum, disposable cooking utensils, frying pans and deep dishes.  You fry a fish and throw the pan overboard.”  A different concept of disposable even than we are trying to escape today.

The drive up the coast was quite lovely, and the whole area reminds me of the drive to the coast on highway 26 from Portland.  The forest on either side is deep and green, with mossy trees and an explosion of ferns and foliage.  The Strait of Juan de Fuca is visible through the trees from time to time, and in several places the road bursts out along the shore itself.  I have reached a new place regarding my driving through these places where I am not so concerned with my speed as I normally find myself.  Partially because the metric speed markers are less intuitively meaningful, but also because the appropriate speed changes so markedly from one moment to the next, that I find myself easing into a peaceful and symbiotic relationship with the road and the scenery so that we all flow along and enjoy each other’s company.  Occasionally, someone with an agenda or destination will come along, and I happily ease into a pullout to let them by.  On other occasions, I encounter a slower RV or truck, and sometimes they will let me by.  Sometimes not, which is, I confess, annoying, but some things are immutable.  I lose this when I am trying to cover longer distances using wider roads, but I like this tempo, which I have found most accessible here in Canada.

Another thing about Canada!  They have shifted to using coins for denominations under five dollars, with a two dollar coin, a one dollar coin, and the usual assortment of smaller coins.  Many places round up or down and give you a nickel rather than pennies, but the best part are the names for the coins.  The loon on the dollar coin got it nicknamed, the Looney.  But even better is that the two dollar coin is called, the Tooney.  I think you can make the connection from there!

I am in complete awe of Steinbeck’s writing.  Here is a man who, by his own confession, takes no notes or written record as he moves through an experience, and yet his description is so vibrant, his recollection of the details of the folks he met and talked to so real and believable.  Could he really remember these things that well?  Or, instead, is his creative process engaged such that he reconstructs these memories as he wishes or thinks they were.  We know so much about the brain and how it actually constructs and retrieves memories.  Perhaps by not taking notes he frees himself up to remember his experiences in ways that support the creative elements of his writing.  In any event, I find myself stunned by the quality of his travel narrative.

One thing about my writing on this trip, what began as a commitment to find something to write about daily has become a fixation on capturing and collecting my thoughts as I go.  It is surprisingly frustrating to be driving through the countryside or to be sitting at a meal and to realize that such and such an idea is rattling around and needing to be explored and recorded.  While Steinbeck may feel that he, “cannot write hot on an event, it has to ferment,” I find that for me, the moment an event slips into the recent pass it begins to dissipate.  My life is a series of quickly forgotten episodes, rich in their tapestry but always on the other side of a closed door.  I am moving from room to room in an interesting exploration of some strange and wonderful castle, but I rarely have much of a sense of what was in the room before.  This is part of why though I write, I am not a writer.  The gap between the page and my thoughts is too great.

And a thought about exercise.  I find that I am most willing to set forth and walk sometime in the late morning, before lunch but after some kind of morning process of waking.  Exercising has always been a challenge for me and now that my schedule is completely open I find that I am beginning to understand why.  When I wake up in the morning, I do not want to do anything except pee, get my coffee, and settle into some easy activity.  I do not want to walk.  I do not want to run.  I do not want to lift weights or ride a bike.  I want to sit, and drink my coffee.  Later in the morning, but before lunch, my resistance to activity is at its lowest.  Once lunch is past, then the remainder of the day rarely holds that moment of receptivity for me.  The challenge, then, is to create a lifestyle in which I get up, do some things for a bit, and then have a window of sixty to ninety minutes when nothing else occupies my time and I can set about getting some exercise. 

Sooke

Today's entertainment is currently being provided by the patrons of Serious Coffee in Sooke, BC.  Located on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Sooke is a resort town, but also appears to have something of a real fishing economy.  I'm on my way up to a park to secure a camping spot after spending a night in a comfy hotel in Victoria.

There are four older guys chatting about credit cards and debit cards at the moment, and they offer instruction on the fundamentals of change.  One guy, who observes that he needs someone sitting next to him in order to successfully reply to an email, is struggling to figure out if he should use his credit card more, or what it would be like to use a debit card.  "My grandfather used to have mason jars that he buried under the apple tree back in James Bay.  That's only three generations ago!  And, of course, the generation that got screwed by putting money in banks when the banks failed."  The conversations wraps around paying off the bill right away, having businesses just scan your check and return it, which is baffling to them.  One guy uses his debit card all the time, and finally says, "John, I think you should use your debit card," in a very serious tone.  It's a conversation that is mostly light and amusing and reflective that explores the way that things change constantly.  For myself, everything I do is online, and by extension done with plastic.  As the foursome breaks up and leaves, a young women working on her Mac offered the confused gentlemen gentle suggestions as to how he might proceed, to which he replies, "My problem is that if there is any complexity I am lost."

Meanwhile, two french guys taking a break from being on some boat or other are chattering away and laughing at a table nearby as they examine the art on the walls.  A old man with a cane and a tweed jacket drinks his coffee and reads the paper, while two gals appear to be having a business meeting.  Half the patrons are online with their phones and their computers.

I am reading Steinbeck's Travels with Charley again (I started it earlier in the trip but set it aside).  I haven't actually been doing much reading on this trip.  For some reason I have been too distracted by the trip itself to find the interest in doing much reading; however, I find that I would like to have my travels be more informed by some reading, so I have drifted back into it.

Steinbeck observes in his comments about the preparation and planning for travel that, "We find...that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."  He considers the way in which a trip has its own personality.  This has most certainly been true for me with the current journey.  As I ventured out from home, there was a plan and a vision for what would transpire, though, of course, I was prepared to be flexible.  What has struck me so far is the way that there is a natural interplay between the road, my mood, the plan, and the trip itself.  I'm currently near Vancouver, which is a part of the plan as it existed when I began, but the things I am doing, the moments that I value, are a surprise every day.  I hang onto two primary directives...walk, and write.  Beyond those two things I am at the mercy of the subconscious.

A theme that I hung on to before beginning the trip was that this was an opportunity to reset...to reboot.  What is known is that much of what is happening is new and distinct from earlier patterns.  What is not known is how, after the journey ends, new patterns will be allowed to establish.

The Trans-Canadian Highway West

Whew!  Okay, now that all that philosophical bullshit is done, here's the narrative from Saturday morning until I got to Vancouver Island on Sunday.

I left Starbucks and gathered the location of the local car wash from a helpful road maintenance worker.  He directed me to an area which he referred to as the Compound, a term I am beginning to realize is used here in Canada to refer to any separate area or building that has a unified purpose.  In this case, the compound in question is the business end of running the tourist town that is Banff.  You have to go back out of town, turn left, and go over a rough railroad crossing, after which you will be on a street that has the plumbers and other businesses that the managers of Banff don't want anyone to think about when they are spending their gazoodles of money on main street.  Tucked there in is a self-serve car wash.  Perfect! 

The car cleaned, my clothes cleaned, my Tevas no longer odorous, my hair washed, and in a better

frame of mind I headed for Sulphur Mountain, home of the Banff Gondola.  Said Gondola takes you from 5,200 feet to 7,486 feet, from which point you can walk along the ridge to a slightly higher overlook.  The higher overlook is the site of a metereological station that Norman Sanson hiked to every week for something like fourty years.  The hike over to the Sanson station was easy, but there was an extension that diverged from the developed path and wound around the summit below the station that I walked down for a bit, and then returned back up.  It was a great little walk.

After that adventure, it occurred to me that while I couldn't afford the Banff Springs Hotel, the golf course might have a twilight rate worth pursuing.  The course is on my punch list of golf courses that I hope to work on someday, and since I was here...well, what the hell!  They did have a twilight rate, though it was still high enough to give me pause, but I made a 3:20 tee time and headed out to find the camping site that I had reserved for the night.

When I arrived at the campground there was a loonnnnggg line to get in.  Not being a fan of long lines, I ran up past the line and turned around to come back to the other side of the office.  I asked that clerk if there might be a better time of day to return as I had a reservation and so would prefer not to spend so long waiting.  She said, "I can help you," and boom, I was checked in.  Not sure if this will be true for all my camping at Canadian parks, but while the site was more expensive than US parks, it was very service oriented.  Definitely a good place to camp.

This waterfall is situated just below the Banff Springs Hotel.  What I noticed was that the rivers and streams in the mountains here all have that grey opaque quality that I only saw previously when I was in Alaska at the Copper River.  The grey color is caused by the rocky silt that comes out of the glacier melt in the mountains.  I think its interesting that in the Rocky Mountains in the US, this silt is absent...which suggests to me that the water in the Rockies in the US are predominantly from snow melt (and so clear) rather than from glacial melt.  Not sure why it's different here and in Alaska.  Something to check on, I guess.  It also occurs to me that the Green River, which runs into the Colorado, while clear does have a green tint to it that is not far off from this grey color, but I'm color blind.

I drove down to the Banff Cave and Hot Springs park to check it out and put it on my list of things to do the next day.  Then, a quick stop at the Banff Springs hotel to take a picture and use an ATM, and then off to the golf course.

It was lovely to play a round of golf.  I had some feelings of guilt for the splurge, but that's why they call splurges guilty pleasures, yes?  At first I was playing as a single, but after about six holes I caught up with three other guys who were there on business (nice place for a business meeting!)  The course was in excellent condition and provided a challenging but manageable layout.  What makes it a world class, bucket list course is not really the course itself, as I have played courses that made better use of the terrain or offered more extraordinary design, but the environment is not to be matched.  Banff is a strange place as a natural park.  It is very developed and commercial, yet the way that the mountains explode out of the ground around you and surge skyward is nothing short of miraculous.  Everywhere you go, if you

look up there is an enormous mountain looming over you.  As usual, I hit some great shots and had a string of stupid holes.  My biggest problem was that since I was playing at 5,000 feet and hitting the course clubs, distances were difficult.  After hitting over several greens I finally realized that I could hit a 56 degree wedge 110 yards, which is a really long way.  Interesting that the course measured distances in yards, but everywhere else in Canada things are metric.

After the golf I headed to the campground and enjoyed a quiet evening waiting for dark to settle in and to get to sleep.  Amazingly, I slept until almost eight Saturday morning, which is the first time during this journey that I slept in.  Its been a hard couple of days and I think I was tired.  Of course, the fact that I got up and peed at 3:30 in the morning, so I wasn't pushed out of bed by nature's call in the morning may have had an influence on that. 

It was good to take my time in Banff, and to have time to write and reflect.  At the same time, it was a really expensive place, even to camp.  After leaving the campground I headed into town to the Starbuck’s, wrote the blog that I posted Saturday morning, and made my way to the Cave and Hot Springs National Park located by the river in Banff.  It is the site of the first national park in Canada, so it is as much a park about parks as anything else.  It was interesting to note in the historical exhibits that Canada has struggled with the tendency to displace and ignore indigenous peoples in the same way that the United States has; though they don’t appear to have engaged in such widespread and systematic genocide as we did.  The hot springs were quaint, and it was here that I began to think about the fact that the most interesting element of the trip is not so much the beautiful scenery I am encountering, as the folks who are there to see it or the folks for whom it is their livelihood. 

I left the park and headed down the TransCanada toward Lake Louise, exiting almost immediately to take the Bow River Parkway, which is the scenic route to Lake Louise.  Once again, the scenery is extraordinary.  Although I was not highly motivated to stop at the various turnouts along the way, one spot boasted a set of falls and the possibility of a hike.  I pulled into the lot, fully expecting to exit stage

left as soon as the crowds deterred me, when a spot suddenly opened up right in front of me.  Time to park and sightsee.  I got out and nosed around the parking lot.  There were people with ice cream, which suggested the presence of honey glazed tourist baited items, but all I could see were a set of highly utilitarian washrooms and an information kiosk.  I could see from the kiosk that there was a nice little hike up to the lower falls of Thompson Creek, so I trooped back to my car, changed into garb more appropriate for hiking, and set off on my way up the trail…which immediately crossed a small bridge to reveal another parking lot and the anticipated tourist trap.  A quaint shop, an ice cream stand, a restaurant claiming to have the best burger in somewhere, I don’t recall the scope of their claim, and oodles of families and folks left, right and center.  I headed up the paved walkway and was soon happily strolling along yet another roaring creek in a dramatic canyon. 

After walking a ways up the canyon, I started to consider strategies for taking pictures of people, rather than scenery.  At this point all I had was my phone, and somehow it seemed socially inappropriate to start aiming my phone at random people and snapping their picture.  Initially, I managed to capture the backs of some very interesting tourists as I contemplated this new challenge.  The first truly interesting shot I got was of an older Asian woman who was sitting on a bunch.  I surreptitiously set up as if to take a photo of the canyon beyond her, and managed to get a fuzzy picture in which she was too small.  I continued up the canyon, eventually reaching the lower falls previously advertised, snapping these furtive shots along the way.  There was a small cave which led closer to the falls and for which folks were waiting in line.  As folks went in, folks came out, since it was a dead end at the falls.  The trio in front of me included a young lady and two young men.  One young man was translating from French to English for the young lady, who appeared to speak mostly French while the other young man spoke only English.  They were clearly together, since they all had cans of Bud Light.  When we reached the front, I took their picture for them, but throughout I was playing the “what’s their story” game. 

On the way back down the canyon, I was amused to have an older Asian man, who was walking slowly in front of me and whom I had no choice but to follow given the narrowness of the path, sit down next to the aforementioned older Asian woman when we encountered her bench.  I was sorely tempted to ask to take their picture, but have not yet hit that point in my comfort level with this idea of taking pictures of strangers.  It is a dilemma, this idea of capturing people along the way.  The larger the camera, the more legitimate the endeavor.  If I had a fancy camera with an expensive lens, they would assume I was some sort of artist or photojournalist, and probably ignore me.  As it is, I might be arrested as a stalker.

A note about bugs and mosquitoes in Banff…they are aggressive.  They appeared the first time at the golf course, where they ambushed me as I stepped from the cart in the shade of a tree by the 11^th green.  They were not always on the attack, but when they were there was no ignoring them.  At the campsite, they were just annoying enough for me to change into long pants and shirt earlier than preferred, and at various times in my walk at the creek they made their presence known.  It was much more like Minnesota than the insects of the Rockies south of the border.  A little more moisture results in more picturesque scenery, but also in more ferocious mosquitoes.

I continued down the Bow River Parkway, which, in turn, continued to offer amazing views.  The entire Banff area is striking because the glacial activity which formed the area created these enormous U shaped valleys that are surrounded by dramatic peaks.  It stands in contrast to the Rockies in the US in that our mountains, while having been subject to glaciation, seem to have a more complex set of erosive powers including glaciers, water and weather.  Glacier National in Montana has some of this influence, but it was most striking at Banff.  At Lake Louise I returned to the TransCanada and headed off toward Vancouver.  Before too long I came to the turn off for the Icefields Parkway, which promised a spectacular drive through ice fields to the north of the Banff and Lake Louise area.  I was tempted, but ready to move on to a new adventure, so I let it go. 

The drive from Banff to Vancouver, which I took entirely on the Trans-Canada highway, is beautiful from end to end.  It begins as I describe above, with an ongoing series of valleys surrounded by high peaks.  Each valley has at its end the view of a new set of snow-covered peaks, which as they are approached and the valley turns in a new direction are replaced by a new set of snow-covered peaks.  As I moved through the area that they marked as their Glacier National Park the peaks often contained snow fields that must have been glaciers, given their size and that it is already late July.  In one particular spot there is a large glacial field above the higway to the left that is the largest glacier I have seen since I was in Alaska some years ago. 

One interesting feature of the highway that I still am not sure of the explanation for was located just prior to the large glacier.  There is a series of tunnels through which the highway runs, but the tunnels are open on the river side (away from the peaks on the right of the road).  The ground above these tunnels is not generally particularly rocky or cliff-like, such that it seems like the road could have simply been cut through this area without the need for a tunnel.  I considered the possibility that the tunnel was to protect from rock falls, but most of the terrain was tree-covered.  My working hypothesis at this point is that the tunnels are located in areas where snow slides are most common, but I don’t know.  Have to look it up when I’ve got internet…

After leaving the glacial area, the valleys begin to widen and eventually the land changes to support ranching and farming in the green spaces between the ridges.  I crossed the Columbia River in this area, though I did not realize it until I was looking at the map some time later.  After this point you are following first the Thompson and then the Fraser rivers, and at the times when the road climbed out of the valley and into the spaces not supported by a major flowage the terrain became almost Wyoming like in that it was dry and barren.  Just to make sure that there was yet another scenic element available to the traveler in British Columbia, there is a series of large lakes which appear to be naturally formed by deep chasms in the river valley, though there may have been dams helping to ensure the lakes were formed.  In any event, these lakes created entire recreational areas with marinas and extensive tourism economies.  The areas were very beautiful and ran from the somewhat rustic to lives of the rich and famous.  At the head of one of these lakes a large collection of logs were captured within booms and seemed to be waiting to either head downstream, or to get loaded onto trains having already come downstream.

I spent the night on Sunday in an Econolodge in a place called Kamloops.  It was a serviceable place and I met a family at the pool who were moving to Prince George, which is apparently north of Vancouver.  Sunday morning I headed off again toward Vancouver without pausing for my morning writing session as it seemed that Kamloops would not be likely to support a Starbucks…but I was wrong as there was one of the highway on the south side of town.  Wanting to move along and expecting to write later in the day, I passed it by.  Besides, I already had my coffee for the morning.

After crossing through a space with fewer, smaller mountains the path began to narrow again, and before long the Fraser river valley was once again lined with snow-capped mountains and had a rushing river running dramatically through its narrow valley.  A feature of the road that you won’t find in the US is that at regular intervals are signs indicating the station settings for the local broadcasting station for the CBC, the Canadian version of NPR.  The fact that these signs were provided by the government suggests a stronger support for public radio than we have in the states.  In addition, there are probably more CBC stations here, as there were many times when the ONLY station available was the CBC (and sometimes even that was lost to me).  There were a number of little things like this that unpacked the presence of a stronger central government…or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that there appears to be a stronger social contract here.  There appear to be more laws governing little things, like you have to prepay for gas in BC, it’s a provincial law, and non of the gas pumps have handle locks, so you have to hold onto the pump handle the whole time.  It’s a small thing, but I can see both of these centralized solutions to widespread but inconsequential problems (no pay drive aways and gas spills) having come from a legislature more comfortable with regulating individual behaviors.  On CBC this morning, which I listened to when I could, there was an hour long discussion about whether retailers should have the right to charge a fee for credit card users who used higher fee cards.  It was a strange conversation to listen to, since the answer in the US would almost always be, of course.  To us, a retailer should be able to charge whatever the market would be willing to pay for.  If a retailer charged a fee for cc use, then another retailer could choose not to, which in the end would likely discontinue the practice.  The real issue seemed to be the fact that different cards charge merchants different rates.  I could see us discussing possible banking regulations to ensure that fees match actual costs rather (to prevent gouging) but that would be the end of that.  Amusingly, even with my socialist leanings, I was inclined to think these people who called in were crazy to suggest that merchants should not have the right to charge customers a fee based on the cards they used.  “Why not,” I thought?  I guess I’m at least a little bit of a capitalist.

Eventually, the terrain widened out again, and about an hour outside of Vancouver I was suddenly back in the kind of commercialized version of civilization that I hadn’t seen since I left Denver exactly one week ago.  Another comment about differences in Canada has to do with the highways.  The Trans-Canada Highway, which is the major thoroughfare across Canada, has an extraordinarily wide range of conditions for something of its ilk.  The name would, in the US, suggest a wide boulevard running straight and true through the heart of the nation.  Instead, the Trans-Canada ranges from a very interstate-like divided four lane highway, to areas where the two lanes left to motorists are winding through tight turns.  At one point the speed limit shifted from 100 km/h to 40 km/h within a very short span.  It was pleasant, in that there was a great deal of variety and engagement in the journey.  Also, while negotiating through Vancouver, at one point I was supposed to turn right, “when you hit the highway”.  Of course, I was looking for an on-ramp to a controlled freeway, when suddenly I realized that the light I was sitting at was, in fact, the intersection with the highway.  I took what was no doubt an illegal turn and headed on my way.

One of my challenges at this juncture is that my phone is turned off to avoid international roaming charges.  I could probably fix this and get some kind of affordable service, but until now I was in parks, so who really cared?  Navigating a major metropolitan area, however, is greatly eased by ones smartphone.  On a whim, as I entered Vancouver, there was a sign indicating that 104^th street was the last exit before the toll bridge.  I had no idea where the toll bridge went, so I decided at the very last second to veer wildly off the highway and soon found myself rolling along on 104^th Street or Avenue…not sure which it was.  A series of local and chain establishments wandered by, a hospital, a whole raft of car dealerships, but no indication of where I might be.  I was looking for a likely place to stop and consult my somewhat less than detailed atlas, when a Jiffy Lube appeared.  Eureka!  An oil change would be just the ticket.  I pulled across three lanes of traffic and found my way to the entrance.  The service guys were funny and helpful and had me in and out in short order…complete with a code for a car wash next door and vague directions to the ferry terminal (the ones that indicated a right turn at “the highway”.)  The attendant at the car wash, when encountering the comment, “Beautiful day, isn’t it,” responded by observing he could do without the heat.  It’s 72 degrees out.  Everything is, in fact, relative.

So, once again, the car washed, me washed, and this time with an oil change, I headed for the ferry terminal.  I should mention that up until that morning the ferry terminal had not been on the itinerary.  The whole reason I am in Vancouver was to see a performance of Bard on the Beach here, but it being Sunday, and both performances being sold out, and the next performances not scheduled until Wednesday, I moved on from Bard on the Beach to a suggestion that I check out Vancouver Island…which requires a ferry ride.

After a wrong turn followed by helpful directions from the clerk at Holiday Inn Express in some random suburb of Vancouver (I knew it was a wrong turn when I was suddenly in a tunnel going under the Fraser River…this was not part of the plan) I found my way to the ferry, found my way to aisle 41, and proceeded to have a 90 minute wait for a 90 minute ferry ride.  Perfect!  I have now updated my travel log, uploaded my pictures, and am going to figure out what the hell I’m going to do when I arrive on Vancouver Island.  Possibly a park on the western shore (that was the concept) or maybe a lovely little cottage by the sea?  Not likely…but something will turn up.  I read in one post online that you can camp on the beach, which sounds like a distinctly charming possibility.