Bearing Up and Out

We first washed up on the Sunshine Coast in the fall of 1989. There were about 25,000 people on the Coast at that time, spread out across a narrow 50-mile long strip of land from the ferry terminal at Langdale to the next ferry terminal at Earl’s Cove. When I first saw it, I thought it was British Columbia’s Malibu. And indeed it has proven to be. If global warming is going to to warm the land temperatures here as well as the ocean ones, it will be even more Malibu-like. It was beautiful, wild, quiet, sleepy, slow, and there was always someplace to park if you had to go somewhere, even as there were relatively few places to go to. One movie theater that reminded me of a small Grange Hall auditorium in a small Idaho town, and another that was like a weary, equity waiver theater in L.A. There were three big-enough grocery stores, and nothing remotely like a big box store. It really was small town, rural, out of the rush for nine months of the year, and then in the summer, it got a little jazzy what with the tourists coming in to spend a little time with nature.

I was pushing my cart around the local SuperValue market the other day when I ran into an old quilting friend whom I hadn’t seen for 4 or 5 years. Her 8-year-old is now a 13-year-old, the old job is now the new job, etc. Then she asked me whether I was as discouraged as she was by what was happening to the Coast. Like me, she lives kind of out of the way and as long as she stays home, she noted, it’s pretty much like it always was. But driving in to town forces you to see change on every street, every landmark.

The traffic is one change; another is the fact that you often can’t find a parking place; and a third is that we now have three big chain stores here that we didn’t use to have (London Drugs, Canadian Tire, and Easy Foods, the last of which is sort of WalMart like), and more trying to move in. We have a whole new mall, three or four Dollar Stores, and two Starbucks, and rather fewer small, local businesses. But the biggest change, of course, is the increased population—now 60,000 people--that drives the commercial expansion. And all those extra people are living in new housing.

Ed, who is a regular coastal kayaker, says that when he first started paddling up the coast, there were long stretches without houses, or at least without visible houses (meaning there possibly were small cottages hidden by the trees and bushes). But of recent years, it is just one big, new house after another smack on the beach as he heads north. I’ve been in a few of those houses, and they are like medium-sized palaces. Just down the street from us on the beach there is a house that my neighbor says has 8,000 sq. feet. It is a vacation house for some Vancouver executive. Numerous developments have been, and are being built, with still more—big ones, gated communities, walled communities--in the planning stage. The Coast is not what it once was, and I would be discouraged, like my friend, if I had ever imagined that I would stay here forever. But the changes do lead me to ask myself whether it is time to move on, as my friend is considering doing. It has more and more become a place that feels like it is driven by big money, by a fascination with excess, by the loss of any concept of enough.

There’s still wildlife aplenty around: bears, deer, raccoons, maybe cougars. We never used to see them much, but they’re getting a little more pushy as the wild land where they can avoid us is depleted. Although we’ve always had evidence of bears around, I’d never actually seen one until last spring when I walked out the kitchen door at noon and found one 20 feet away from me, strolling down the driveway. Quelle surprise! It’s been a big change for them, too, but where are the bears to move on to? Closer and closer to more and more people, they risk becoming problem bears. That designation will get them moved on, of course. On to the after life. Last decade’s attraction become today’s tiresome problem.

I suppose that if you invest in a half or three-quarter million dollar house, you probably are not going to be happy to find that it comes with bears at your barbeque or deer in your garden or racoons that mess with your garbage. Those kind of houses expect something a little more disciplined. Those houses didn’t come here for the wild, I suspect.