Mason - Long Beach Wild: a Celebration of People and Place on Canadas Rugged Western Shore

Incinerator Rock at Long Beach.

WINTER SOLSTICE at Long Beach: what better place to mark the first official day of the dark season? A walk here is an early gift Ive granted myself, time snatched away from my desk and to-do list for the upcoming holiday. I begin at a spot we call Incinerator. The tide is flooding, and because the December 21 solstice brings some of the years highest tides, only a sliver of beach is left between the rising water and the barricade of logs at the forests edge. It will be a quick jaunt.

I see no other cars in the parking lot. And even if there were some, the sixteen kilometres (ten miles) of open, clean sand beach sweeping off to my right and left is more than enough to share. Still, I feel unrepentantly smug. All of this is just for me. In the summer, this section of the beach swarms with people. So today I savour the privilege of having the place all to myself and imagine what it might have been like to be the first one ever to leave wet footprints here.

The waves mark time like a natural metronome. The lightly spritzing rain and steady rhythm of the sea relax me, and I ease into a walking meditation. I know I am not alone in the joy I get from being here. Over the years, wave after wave of people have arrived at Long Beach and been enchanted in the same way I have. They tackle the bumpy, winding, and often narrow road that crosses the mountainous spine of Vancouver Island, finally spilling out of their vehicles at Incinerator, where the forest at last parts to reward the new arrivals with a glimpse of the fabled beach. Children and dogs hit the sand running. Adults follow at a stroll, stretching, gazing up and down the beach and out to sea, tilting their faces back to breathe deeply the briny air.

If Long Beach had a historical and geographic heart, the beach near Incinerator would be it. Before the current highway and the rough dirt road that preceded it, a footpath near here connected the sheltered bay on the other side of the Esowista Peninsula to this wilder, surf-pounded shore. Anyone wanting to get to the exposed coast would land a canoe or small boat on the quiet mudflats in Grice Bay. From there, a trail across the peninsula to the open ocean delivered them here. Thus, for thousands of years, this place was the primary access point to the exposed coast at the Tofino end of the peninsula. And while access options may have changed over the past century, Incinerator remains the place where many people get their first real glimpse of Long Beach.

One might think that the name Incinerator is an imaginative reference to how the powerful force of barrelling waves might burn up unwary swimmers and surfers. Certainly thats a more evocative image than the realitywhich is that during World War II a large incinerator was installed here to burn garbage from a nearby military base.

Today, Long Beach is part of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Creation of the park in the 1970s brought a good sample of the Pacific Coast ecosystem into Canadas national park system. With a boundary extending seaward to a depth of 10 fathoms, Pacific Rim also became the countrys first national park with a marine component. Although Long Beachs iconic stretch of sand is the main draw for the parks 800,000 annual visitors, no less interesting is the areas biodiversity and natural abundance.

In the intertidal zone, where sea and land mingle twice daily, living tapestries of algae and invertebrates entwine. In the temperate rainforests, myriad layers of green vegetation compete and coexist with equal measure in thick, damp lushness. In the squelching bogs and the xeric (dry) sand dunes, Lilliputian plants hold their own against the elements. And in the slick, pudding-like mud of the parks tidal flats, invertebratesworms, shrimp, clams, and morethrive, as do the birds that love them. Grey whales and silver salmon, wolves and cougars, red-billed oystercatchers and rufous hummingbirds, sea stars and sand dollars, banana slugs and their dromedary jumping-slug cousinsall of these creatures and many others populate and feed the Long Beach areas web of life.

No less varied and rich has been the areas human history. Like the flood tides rising across Long Beachs shores daily, people have swept into the area in distinct waves: First Peoples for millennia, followed in recent times by explorers and settlers, miners and loggers, dreamers and schemers, airmen and artists, hippies and surfers, and, in more recent times, tourists. Not only were their lives uniquely supported and shaped by the nature of this wild coastal world, but in turn a lot of what they did left a mark on sand, sea, and land. Even the sober reality of rain (about four metres, or thirteen feet, annually) and thrashing winter storms has never, it seems, been able to dampen the resolve of the people drawn to live in this place. The unvarnished vigour of this land-sea edge has always held an allure.

THIS BOOK focuses on what I call the Greater Long Beach Area, essentially from Cox Point to Wya Point and across the peninsula to Grice Bay. It also touches on the histories of Tofino, Ucluelet, Clayoquot and Barkley Sounds, and other island areas, for events there dictated events at Long Beach. The straight-line distance from Cox to Wya Points is about twenty-four kilometres (fifteen miles), but if one were to walk the shoreline, that distance would stretch to almost thirty-five kilometres (twenty-two miles) along a series of beaches interrupted by rocky headlands. Long Beach proper fringes Wickaninnish Bay and extends from Portland Point to near the national parks interpretive centre, a distance of almost sixteen kilometres (ten miles). The beach at Florencia Bay (also called Wreck Bay) adds about five kilometres (three miles) more. (See map on facing page.)

While the actual size of this area may seem small, looming large are the people who, literally or figuratively, rode in on flood tides and stayed awhile to live, work, or play. By no means have I tried to provide a definitive history of the areathe tales of shipwrecks alone could make a doorstop of a book. Rather, my hope is that the sample of stories and natural history details Ive included here will illuminate both the areas physical setting and the notable human dramas that have unfolded against its backdrop.