tofino

Dates travelled: February 2015; May 2015; June 2015; May 7-9, 2017

Tofino is located on the sparsely-inhabited western side of Vancouver Island. If you’re not from the west coast, you might recognize the name as being sometimes listed on maps of Canada during a weather forecast, and you might see coverage of tsunami scares off that coast. If you’ve heard of it otherwise, it might be because it’s become a high-end tourist destination with extremely expensive hotels.

It’s a bit of a trip to get there, which makes you feel isolated, especially on the beaches if it’s close to sundown. Beaches are why most people travel there, and they are some of the largest you can encounter: the tides sweep wild, dragging back the sand and leaving calligraphic designs, like horseshoes drawn by strong waves. You can sit high up jagged rocks to watch everything come at you.

When I think of beaches, I either think of the movies and people tanning who I can’t relate to, or I think of the beaches near where I lived in Victoria that I normally found spots to be solitary. In Tofino, the beaches near town feel like social spaces. There is a bulletin board when entering at the beginning of Chesterman beach full of community announcements. People walk with their families or friends or dogs, or they go for runs or bike rides far enough from the tide that they won’t get wet. In Tofino, the beach feels like a downtown where people go to socialize and have a bonfire in the evening.

The town is largely inhabited by Australian surfers who presumably don’t stay there their whole lives. The waves there are known for being wilder than California, but obviously much colder. You need a wet suit all year. I’ll never forget the first time I walked onto the beach in February, and it was full of dozens of surfers just as the sun started to set.

I’ve never been surfing, but it has a sort of kinetic philosophy to it. It’s a pretty crazy thing to do, jump on a board and let yourself be tossed by the waves’ force, trying to stay on your feet.

Aside from surfing, people work in the tourism industry, or they grew up in families who used to fish. The town is only 2.5 thousand, which is fewer than the population of some city blocks in Ottawa. Between Tofino and Ucluelet (which is a bit smaller) a 30 minute drive down the highway, there are no other towns closer than a two hour drive away.

Tofino makes you think of edges, and for me that means getting philosophical. An ending implies content within. It also implies metaphysics, and about the more impactful aspects of life, what we live for, the people we love and those relationships.

The waves’ layers is especially obvious here, like a carpet unrolling into a liquid staircase. There are pathways that lead to places on edges. When there is a leaving there is also going somewhere new. The landscape and oceanscape are full of tiny irregularities if you can notice them. And though we normally stare at the ocean and have to shout over its loud roar, every direction is a flavour of beautiful.

There are small islands off the coast of Tofino that you can only get to by water taxi or private boat (or private float plane, I imagine). Those islands – Vargas, Meares, and others – are amazing remote hiking spots. Being on the water, travelling to those places, is a trip in itself.

When pushing away from the shore, you can see the blue mountains as a backdrop, like you’re looking at earth from somewhere like outer space. Some of the best views of that come from highway 4 driving in from the middle of the island, but when making the trip I’ve always been in the driver’s seat, so my ability to take candid shots in motion has been limited.

When people ask me what my dream job is, I always have an answer ready. I’d like to live in the Tofino area and be a remote area social worker, travelling to inaccessible communities to provide outreach, while spending half my time or so from a central location in Tofino with an office where I can focus on community development work. A mixture of front line and policy/programming; a mixture of working with people face-to-face and thinking of higher-level strategies. If I were able to convince someone to create this job for me, who knows if I would actually enjoy it – there ‘s a good chance I’d feel very alone, particularly at the western end of the western-most continent in the world – but that image, spending my weekends or evening reading a book on the beach and making a small fire drinking tea or whiskey, gives me peace.

The town has everything you need – a grocery store, a pizza place, an ice cream parlour, coffee shops, a taco stand a bookstore, and a brewery. The major downside is all that wind, that it rains about 50% of the time, and although it never snows it’s always kind of chilly.

I wonder how long it’d take for me to get fed up with always being wet, always at risk of flood or a tsunami, having to invest in something somewhere else so I had some financial security after an inevitable natural disaster. I wonder how the days would pass, and if I would notice them.

Much of my life has been unpredictable from year to year, though looking in broad strokes I’ve more or less had a path that most people would have thought was reasonable for me. Regardless where my life goes from here on out, I’m pretty confident that I’ll always enjoy at least visiting Tofino and the area, getting lost in thought and how my body is a speck in a speck in a speck that is the world.