Why would you live on an island? #1

To be continued--

Islands are magical. They involve a journey, not exactly a hero’s journey, but there are boats involved and trials. Once you get there, it’s all worth it, though. Islands are liminal spaces, held between sea and sky. Possibilities crackle like the Northern Lights. All the colours seem more vivid: a particular day, the long glorious summers, life, the universe and everything.

Otter dog, Gowlland Point.

Here on Pender Island, I like to go down to Gowlland Point, at the southern tip, and sit on a log, looking out. On a clear day, a person can see Mount Baker which looks like Fuji in Japan, conical and snow-tipped. Close to shore, currents rip and swirl green. Sailboats have a tough time bucking against the tide there. Directly offshore are kelp beds, which always make me smile as they’re good places for sea life to shelter.

Colours refract from the sky onto the water. Everything seems luminous; at night, a person can see an amazement of stars because you’re away from city lights. The first August my husband and I were on the island, when we were building our house, we brought sleeping bags and Thinsulate foamies to a beach to watch the Perseid meteorite showers.

Ha. We forgot to check the phase of the moon. That night was so bright, I could’ve read a newspaper. The only one who thought it was great was our old dog Otter. I heard her come back up from the ocean three times during the night. She woke me when she shook herself with such gusto the tags on her collar clinked. Ahh! A refreshing dip in the dark. She thought we should sleep beside the sea more often. My husband and I went home feeling gritty and looking rumpled. Who would have thought there’d be such a progression of container ships thrumming through the summer night?

Otter again. She had straight fur, not Kira’s sheep-like curls.

Why you don’t want to live on an island #1

Ah, yes, the journey. It becomes less and less appealing. “BC Ferries welcomes you onboard,” the speakers in the ferry parking lot crackle. It’s not just that what once seemed like a charming 40-minute boat ride into Victoria dulls with familiarity, increasingly often ferries run late, or are cancelled due to staffing issues, mechanical problems with a vessel or weather. It’s appreciably worse than twenty years ago. Last week my ferry was an hour late in leaving Pender. Good thing I didn’t have a medical appointment like an MRI.

Salish Raven

“I don’t know how you stand those ferry trips,” one friend’s children told her. “They’re awful.”

It's a full day’s trip to go even into Sidney on Vancouver Island. I thought maybe it was because I was getting older I was finding it more and more exhausting. Get up at 5:30 to make the early boat in, run around to do whatever medical, dental, or other errands that have forced the trip, wait in the ferry parking lot for an hour and a half for the ferry home, then drive in the gate at home around 3:30.

Last summer, my brother and his wife were staying with me. They are super fit. My brother does 10,000 steps a day every day with a four-year run of success, broken only by one brief spell where Calgary weather went to -40. They are both younger than me, filled with vigour and great health. Did I mention my relatives look great, too?

So in July they did that in and out from Sidney as a kindness for me; I wasn’t feeling well and Kira was massively shaggy and needed to be shorn. There’s a lovely woman on Pender who does grooming, but not big dogs like Kira. She tried it and it hurt her back. So I need to take Kira off-island. “That’s an exhausting trip,” my brother said when they got in. He sounded astonished. “I need a nap.”

I felt reassured that even people in fabulous physical condition find that trip a challenge. When a person is feeling crummy, the journey off the island in the morning and then back in the afternoon, or, horrors, even the evening, involves so much effort it takes several days to recover.

How heroic are you feeling these days? Is there a journey to an island in your future?