Vancouver Island

Two large piers jut into the still waters of the Puget Sound at the edge of the flat farm fields of Delta, British Columbia. Canadian Pacific train cars are arranged along one of them, taking on containers and coal from waiting ships. At the other pier, I stepped into the ferry visitor center to buy a coffee and a breakfast burrito, then boarded the wide steel hull of the ferry to Sidney. Churning up the water at its stern with powerful engines, the large ferry turned around just past the dock and set off.

Large mountains that form the central spine of Vancouver Island loomed in the distance. Before long we came alongside jagged inlets and a cliffy coastline interspersed with homes in the woods. Home to over 800,000 people, Vancouver Island is one of the largest islands on the Pacific Coast of the Americas, larger than Massachusetts.

Greater Victoria, the provincial capital, occupies its southeastern shore, guarded by rocky points and outlying islands. Victoria sprawls for quite a ways in each direction, giving over to new neighborhoods full of retirees in the northern hills along Highway 1 and coalescing as pleasant neighborhoods, clusters of restaurants, shopping centers, and hospitals closer to the city center. The city is tidy and full of good food. Famed for its mild temperatures, brightly lit Chinatown gates, and broad boulevards, Victoria has ample options to eat. I devoured tasty Taiwanese bao sandwiches at one restaurant and a pleasantly salty pork katsu on rice at another.

Ever since the days when the British Royal Navy called it home, the neighborhood of Esquimault has hosted a large naval base. Today, it’s home to the fifteen vessels of Canada’s Pacific Fleet.

BC Transit is good about getting people around the island in double-decker buses. If anything the island’s highways are so extensive you don’t really feel like you’re on an island at all. We followed the buses and local traffic south and west of Victoria, stopping at a regional park to find strange petroglyphs of what seemed like a seal-fish in the rocks right by the water’s edge. In the nearby town of Sooke, with its small businesses and 1970s gas stations, we ate some scrambled eggs at a local breakfast place and pressed on through increasingly remote woods, winding roads, and across small river valleys until we reached the cluster of small businesses in Port Renfrew. A little further on, we reached Botanical Beach at Juan de Fuca Provincial Park.

A short hike through soggy woods leads to Botanical Beach, an area of jagged rocks with numerous potholes carved by the tide filled with anemones, clumps of mussels, and other sea life. Scrambling over the rocks, we found some rock units worn level by the ocean with carved potholes in their midst. Coming around the corner, close to dusk, our eyes were slow to discern a black bear a short distance away. We paused, watching the fuzzy youngster lope away across the beach. Just in case mama was somewhere nearby, we picked up drift wood and banged it together as we made it through the nearly primeval darkness of the path back to the car.

Tech companies love naming things after locations in Vancouver Island. There are for instance Tofino computer chips that take their name from a town halfway up the island's west coast. There are a lot of places to go to around the island. To travel from one end to the other takes over 12 hours. A single freight railway runs through the center of the island servicing remote logging operations and passing by famous but far flung high mountains. Passenger service sadly ended in 2011.

One of the few Vancouver Islanders I’ve ever spoken with at length once helped to lead federal campaigns for the Conservatives on the island. It sounds like a lonesome task. In truth, Conservatives do fairly well at the federal level, representing Abbotsford, Delta, and most of inland BC in the House of Commons. But the province’s legislature has not a single Conservative Party member in it. Instead, it is dominated by the rural social democratic New Democratic Party that also dominates federal elections on Vancouver Island.

Driving up the more urbanized eastern shore of the island from Victoria, I found stunning overlooks of bays with big ships at anchor, a park with re-created petroglyphs, and a waterfall and stream full of dead leaves near a semi-abandoned railroad track. The big firs and cypresses seemed to sag under the weight of moss. Even with the railroad out of service, big leafed stripe maples still grew on the disturbed ground by the trail.

Eventually, we reached Nanaimo, the second biggest settlement on the island. Its downtown is relatively quiet with a lot of independent restaurants, a harbor full of boats, and a couple of taller buildings that look out across the bay. Like Victoria, it seemed to have a few people at loose ends, like one gentleman inexplicably doubled over at the curb staring at the pavement.

Twice a day, the MV Coho sails from Victoria to Port Angeles on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The ship was built in 1959 and is conscious of its age. The beige deck chairs seem to be original and a loudspeaker plays ‘50s show tunes for a few seconds with most announcements. Although it has a narrower hull than the big ferry from the British Columbia shore, Coho still manages to pack in quite a few vehicles, sideloading from the dock. The whole process of getting onboard takes about an hour. US Customs and Border Patrol has several officers who live in Victoria that process passports.

I bought a coffee and a breakfast sandwich from the onboard café--repeating my routine from the first ferry--and headed out onto the deck to watch the headlands of Victoria harbor pass by. Back on shore, the green copper dome of the British Columbia Legislature faded out of sight, replaced by a view of a Coast Guard base with a couple of brightly colored rescue ships. Along the opposite shore, condos with walls of windows gazed out at the sea over the masts and superstructures of some small marinas with sailboats and an oil spill clean up vessel.

The Olympic Range loomed in the distance and I watched the big container ships and bulk carriers traveling perpendicular to the Coho bound for the big port cities further inland.

Juan de Fuca, namesake of the Juan de Fuca Strait was actually Greek, but sent to go explore on behalf of Spain. For a long time, his description of the Puget Sound was thought to be a legend until it was rediscovered. Several large columns of smoke rose into the sky along the Washington coastline, signaling the location of paper mills. Although much of the Olympics are federally owned, some portions are private or owned by the Forest Service and used for logging.

Port Angeles has a sizeable spit jutting into the strait with a few large vessels moored at it. Its low-rise downtown has some buildings from the ‘60s and others from the early 20th century. A few spots had vacancies, but most seemed to be occupied by boutiques, affordable indie restaurants, and community-oriented businesses. I devoured a lamb pita at Turnip the Beat, a sandwich shop not far from the harbor, and then we set off into the interior.

For anyone who has a car with enough ground clearance, there are plenty of logging roads to explore in the interior. Thick forests surround Port Angeles on all sides. A few commercial yards with logging trucks and Trump signs line the road out of town. One state highway leads out to the remote northwestern tip of the state at Neah Bay. The more notable US-101 winds its way inland in the direction of the depressed towns of Forks and Aberdeen. Especially along the Pacific shore, the combination of latitude and terrain makes for some of the wettest places on Earth, like the mossy hollows of the Hoh Rainforest.

Crescent Lake is inland, surrounded by tall mountains, and rimmed with a bike path and hiking trails that go through a darkened narrow-gauge rail tunnel. A few homes hug the shore and a single boat plodded across the lake’s placid waters. The clear, still waters of the lake gave little suggestion of multi-cellular life. Steep cliffs plunged into the water by the hiking path, with visibility down tens of feet.

Back along the coast, the area east of Port Angeles has a lot of neighborhoods and small strip malls on a hill slope gently ramping up toward a snow-capped high ridgeline inland to the south. The sun set and the lights of a few restaurants broke through the darkness in Sequim. One of the busiest spots in Sequim is a trendy and somewhat expensive, but very creative cidery. They seemed to have every kind of hard apple cider imaginable, including habanero and spruce tip flavored options.

The road winds through the outskirts of towns like Blyn and Port Ludlow and crosses the Hood Canal Floating Bridge. Some miles to the south in the eponymous canal is the Bangor submarine base, the home base for US nuclear ballistic subs in the Pacific. This relatively flat part of the state is called the Kitsap Peninsula, home to some outlying tourist towns and base activity. Poulsbo is one example. The town is located on the Liberty Bay, astride the peninsula between the submarine bases at Bangor and Keyport. Norwegian themed and full of boutiques, it competes indirectly with the larger Bavarian themed town of Leavenworth on the eastern side of the Cascades.

Follow the road south and you will pass by towns like Bremerton, Port Orchard, the island suburb of Vashon Island, and eventually end up in Tacoma. Going east, the road leads across Agate Point and onto Bainbridge Island, a suburb of Seattle accessible only by ferry.

We queued for a little and then took the ferry across. Cognizant of its daily commuters who probably grow tired of the ferry, the vessel is chock full of explanatory signs about everything from native peoples and salmon to geology and the history of the ferry itself—acquired by the state of Washington from the Black Ball Line that still operates the Coho back in 1951.

Seattle’s towers almost sparkled with light from across the water and the Space Needle loomed on the horizon. Specks of light in the sky indicated a procession of planes coming into Seatac, infusing Washington’s metropolis with added life.