The Columnist Manifesto

[Travels in Canada]

Vancouver Island undoubtedly offers some rigorous hiking and backpacking opportunities, but I prefer it for its walks in the forest that feel like you've entered a fairy tale.


You drive past the occasional storybook house (this one reminded me Howl's Moving Castle) and down roads that wind through the forest.


In the forest, the trees look like ones you've read about in Tolkein.


You want to leave breadcrumbs on the path to make sure you can find your way back.


There are magical mushrooms growing on trees...




... Tree Stumps of Unusual Size ...


... Unusual plants and flowers ...





... andfelled trees that were really old.


You cross a rickety "why don't you go first" suspension bridge...


... and this amazing log footbridge with hand-cut steps, that I'm pretty sure is one fallen tree trunk over 100 feet long.


Inevitably, your path takes you down to a beach. It may be rocky or sandy, but it has huge driftwood logs and tree stumps and even the occasional piece of boat.




Don't get me wrong -- I love hot, sandy tropical and near-tropical beaches where you can swim and body surf and sleep in the sun. But I also love cool gray misty beaches.


If we had the technology to podcast smells, I would podcast the smell of this beach. It's a smell so fresh (with just a hint of salt brine) that it made me realize that the beaches I'm more used to -- in populous coastal areas -- are maybe not so nice. I had come to think of beach smell as a sweet, pungent "under the boardwalk" smell. But I eventually realized it's also a nasty-old-plumbing smell and a broken-sewer-line smell. Basically, beaches in populated areas of the U.S. -- Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, lots of the Atlantic coast -- smell like sewage. Undoubtedly because there is sewage and high levels of the kinds of bacteria that gather on sewage.

All the more reason to escape to the Island of Magical Trees.