by Arthur Black
Madeline Island as a secret I can believe. I never heard of it—and I lived in Thunder Bay on the shores of Lake Superior for thirteen years.
But Salt Spring? Secret??? From whom? Salt Spring’s been featured in the travel pages of The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, not to mention the New York and Los Angeles Times. Calling Salt Spring a secret is like calling Don Cherry an introvert.
No, Salt Spring’s well known all right—a little too well known to suit many old-timers. In fact Salt Spring’s newsworthiness has created a kind of perverse subcult on the island. I call them the celeb junkies. These islanders live to report and gossip about celebrity sightings on the island.
For instance did you know that Barbra Streisand was seen sunbathing in a bikini on the front deck of her yacht in Ganges Harbour last summer?
That Stan Lam once blasted a customer at his convenience store who was leafing through the latest issue of the Gulf Islands Driftwood at the news rack instead of buying it? Turned out the mooch customer was Al Pacino.
That a holy mystic from India personally blessed this island from a passing airplane because he sensed a glowing crystal under Mount Tuam? That Robin Williams has a secret hundred-acre ranch in the south end?
Are any of these stories true? Nah. But hundreds believe them. I have a standing offer of a quarter pound of heavenly ash-ripened camembert from Moonstruck Organic Cheese to the first person who shows me incontrovertible proof that Robin Williams ever flew over Salt Spring much less maintains a secret hideaway here—but so far, no takers.
Nope, Salt Spring is a lot of things, but being a secret isn’t one of them. And neither is being a hideout for Hollywood pinups.
When it comes to hams, hustlers, has-beens and hopefuls with big hooters—we do homegrown here. We don’t need to import.
Another Perfect Day in Paradise
One question that I get to field a lot is: “What’s it like to live on Salt Spring Island? Seriously.” This question does not come from other Gulf Islanders, you understand. Folks on Pender and Saturna and Gabriola and Galiano lead a more peaceful and bucolic existence compared to the frenzied pace of Salt Spring with our . . . stop signs and our baristas and our . . . electricity and everything. That’s why other Gulf Islanders don’t refer to our island as Salt Spring. They call it Sodom by the Sea.
We can’t win. To American tourists we’re all loggers or hippies; to Vancouverites we’re dope farmers or Hollywood Norma Desmond–style recluses.
The truth is, as is so often the case, a little more complex.
Trying to nail the essence of Salt Spring is like trying to catch a hummingbird in your hat. It shifts too fast. Zips here, darts there, hovers over yonder.
I could never give you the epic docudrama of life on this island, but I can offer you a snapshot.
Picture yourself sitting at a table, sipping a tall chai latte in the quaint and cosy Café Talia in downtown Ganges. Your perusal of cartoons in an old coffee-ringed café copy of the New Yorker is interrupted by a querulous, high-decibel gabble coming from the branches of a tall maple across the road. It’s a huge flock of crows and they’re cawing and flapping and swooping around . . . another crow. This crow is in distress, fluttering and flapping weakly in the high branches of the tree. Turns out he’s entangled in a plastic bag and it’s obviously strangling him.
What to do? Climbing the tree was out, though one young Tarzan tried it. He just couldn’t get close enough to the bird. So . . . call the fire department; call the Wildlife Centre.
The wildlife rescue people come with nets and ladders but the crow is still out of reach, and now ominously inert. The call goes out for Wayne Langley, a tree-cutting (and -climbing) professional. Langley arrives festooned in harnesses and caribiners and hauling specialized tree-climbing equipment. He scales the tree like a squirrel commando and frees the bird. The bird flies off, picking up a squadron of crow companions, doubtless croaking in fluent crow-ese, “What just happened back there?”
What just happened? Typical day on Salt Spring is all. And Diana Hayes, an island poet who happened to be sitting in Café Talia during the rescue, has let it be known that she was inspired by the event and is attempting a sequel to the Wallace Stevens poem called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” She’s asking people to send her a stanza so that the poem can be a renga.
Me? I’m off to look up that Wallace Stevens poem. And to find out what “renga” means.
And that’s what it’s like to live on this island.
Small Differences; Big Problem
Sigmund Freud was a sour old bugger, but a smart guy for all that. He wrote about something he called the Narcissism of Small Differences.
That hits me where I live—Salt Spring Island.
Salt Spring is Narcissism Central; we thrive on small differences here. I was at a meeting once where a guy stood up and suggested a plan to deal with ferry traffic on the island. Somebody else stood up and said how much she resented newcomers coming to Salt Spring and telling us how to fix things. First guy said, “Wait a minute. I’ve been living on this island for twenty years.” The woman replied, “Yeah—on the north end!”
Small differences. People in the know don’t order a coffee on Salt Spring. They order a yerba latte macchiato soy decaf—and then they ask if the soybeans are free-range.
Salt Springers don’t ask you if you want to party, they invite you to the Sacred Wiccan New Moon ceremony or an Ayurvedic Chakra Cleansing Rainbow weekend retreat.
But it isn’t all fun and games on Salt Spring. We’ve got problems. In fact, we’ve got one major problem. Our problem is, there aren’t enough problems on Salt Spring. We’ve got beautiful scenery, majestic eagles soaring overhead, photogenic deer munching the underbrush, no biting insects, hardly any politicians and the mildest weather in Canada.
The catch is—we’re still Canadian. We’re not used to bounty and ease. So we obsess over trivia.
Like, well, like potholes. Everybody who has roads has potholes sooner or later but if you believed the letters to the editor in the local paper, Salt Spring’s been carpet-bombed by B-29s leaving craters big enough to swallow logging trucks. And those photogenic deer? A pestilence! A plague! They’re destroying our rainforest ecosystem!
Not that anyone wants to hurt them of course. That would be bad karma.
Recently Salt Spring got its first four-way traffic stop. Two main roads intersect at right angles. Motorists are required to come to a halt, then proceed, using the well-known four-way stop procedure. Not exactly chaos theory or advanced metaphysics, one would think. The stop signs went in last year. People are still debating them.
And smart meters? Jeez, don’t be mentioning smart meters over your yerba latte macchiato soy decaf. There are entire schools of theories on that one. The Chem Trail Hard-Liners are convinced it’s a subversive tactic initiated by the military-industrial complex, while the New World Order Enthusiasts are dead certain a coalition of CIA, CSIS and Interpol is behind it.
Differences. Valdy said it first and best. Definition of Salt Spring, said Valdy: A difference of opinion surrounded by water.
We even have the French Question on Salt Spring. The question being: “How did those jumped-up flâneurs get to own the slogan ‘Vive la différence’?”
The French claim it, but here on Salt Spring, we live it! It should be emblazoned on our licence plates. SALT SPRING—VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE.
There’s a thought. We should sue France for copyright. I think I’ll bring it up at the next town hall meeting.
Or maybe not. I’ve only been here fifteen years.
Double Trouble a-Brewing?
There was a significant earth tremor on Salt Spring this week. The epicentre was downtown Ganges but you could feel it as far as Beddis Beach and Fulford Harbour, too. I wasn’t in town when it happened but I got there shortly after and the evidence was pret
ty irrefutable. It was a sign on the side of the building that used to be the gas station. “FUTURE HOME OF TIM HORTONS DRIVE THRU,” it read. “FOR EMPLOYMENT ENQUIRIES CALL 1-888-601-1616.”
Now for a lot of towns this would be welcome news. But we’re talking Salt Spring here. Franchises do not flourish on Salt Spring. We don’t have a Walmart or a Costco or a Best Buy or a London Drugs. A Pharmasave sneaked in but everybody needs a drug store and ours is one where everybody knows the pharmacist by her first name. We had a Dairy Queen for a minute and a half back in the ’90s but it went out of business and was replaced by a flower store. It’s kind of a snob thing. Not having a Taco Bell or a Wendy’s helps preserve the fantasy that we live on a magic atoll that time forgot. But a Tim Hortons? On Salt Spring??
It’s what you might call a double-double outrage, because if there’s any place that doesn’t need another coffee outlet, it’s Salt Spring. The new Tim Hortons would be right across the street from TJ’s coffee house. And just a couple of buildings away from the Roasting House coffee shop and Barb’s Buns. And not much more than a coffee bean toss from the Talia Café and the Salt Spring Inn and the Tree House café and Auntie Pesto’s and . . . hey, you can get a decent cup of coffee at our grocery store. How much coffee can one island drink?
I asked Busker Bob, one of our more dedicated caffeinatics, how he felt about a Tim Hortons in our future. He looked up at me under hooded eyes, like he was watching a long train of thought pass by and I was the caboose.
“You happen to notice what day the sign went up?” he asked softly. “Yeah,” I said, “It was, uh, Tuesday, the first of the month.”
“What month?” said Busker Bob softly.
“First of . . . Ap-ril,” I said.
“Gotcha!” said Busker Bob.
Well, maybe. But the colours of the sign are Tim Hortons colours and I phoned 1-888-601-1616. It’s Tim Horton’s Headquarters. I spoke to Tara in Customer Relations. She’d never heard of Salt Spring Island, but she told me that’s how the company opens a new outlet—a sign to let the public know what’s going on. And, she added, “We don’t do April Fool’s pranks at Tim Hortons.”
So there you go. I don’t know if it’s a prank or not. But if it is, it’s the best one since the one about the Mount Belcher Spaghetti Tree harvest festival.
Tourism: Blessing or Curse?
Well, it’s finally summer here on Salt Spring and it’s not hard to tell. The tourists are back. We always have advance warning of the tourist arrival. It’s invariably preceded by the Salt Spring grouse. That’s not a bird. It’s the sound of ten thousand Salt Springers mumbling, grumbling and, well, grousing.
“Damn tourists. Can’t get anywhere, roads are clogged. No parking downtown. Had to make a reservation at Moby’s last night . . .”
Ironic thing is, Salt Spring needs tourists like bears need the salmon run. The B&Bs, the hotels, a dozen or so restaurants, sports outfitters, the Saturday market, the Farmers’ Market . . . They’d wither up and blow away without our annual tourist infusion. We have, for better or worse, a largely tourist-driven economy.
Not everyone begrudges the fact. A few years ago a National Post columnist airily declared that Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands could easily accommodate a permanent population of ten or twenty million along with “millions of tourists every year.”
I wouldn’t argue. I’d just invite the columnist to spend a few days in Venice, Italy. That tiny and exquisite city gets sixty thousand tourists. Every. Single. Day. Nearly two million a year. They fly there, they drive there, but increasingly these days they arrive in cruise ships and on ferries. And by ferries I don’t mean the Queen of Nanaimo. These Mediterranean ferries are seven hundred feet long and five decks high. Each one can disgorge five thousand passengers every time it docks. Venice received over six hundred passenger ships last year and nearly six hundred monster ferries. Sometimes they arrive at the rate of ten a day.
And it’s destroying the very thing they all came to see—the city of Venice. Water pollution, noise—the very vibrations of the giant ships rattle the ancient windows and shake the already shaky foundations.
An Italian heritage group reckons that Venice is already handling more than twice the number of visitors it can sustain, with no end in sight. What has been called the most beautiful city ever built is choking to death. It’s not the City of Bridges or the City of Canals. It’s Disneyland with Pasta.
And the Gulf Islands in the middle of a sea of twenty million residents with millions of tourists streaming in and out every year? Disneyland with Doug fir, maybe. Unless they needed to clear-cut for more parking.
I don’t think it’s a place I’d want to visit. And I damn sure wouldn’t want to live there.
Everything New Is Old Again
If we could time travel back and stand at the head of Salt Spring’s main harbour, around the year 1916, we’d be looking at the future site of the town of Ganges. Already there’s a fair clustering of folks here: maybe a hundred settlers of European extraction; some Kanakas from the Hawaiian Islands; a few black refugees from the slave states to the south; and some been-here-forever Cowichan people shaking their heads and wondering where all the funny-looking strangers came from.
And those lights up there on the hill—that would be Harbour House, soon to become one of Salt Spring’s fanciest hostelries. In 1916 it’s just a guest house but eventually it will boast two of the best tennis courts in Canada, a salt-water swimming pool and on Sunday afternoons, parasols, white dresses and high tea on the front lawn. All this before the halfway mark of the last century. Not just a high-toned inn—a farm to boot. As a matter of fact Harbour House started out as a farm run by Fred Crofton, an Irish immigrant. He bought one hundred uncleared acres in 1904 and put most of it into cultivation. That’s not all Fred and his wife, Nona, cultivated. By the 1930s the place was overrun by the seven Ds. Fred and Nona had a thing about the fourth letter of the alphabet and it showed in the names of their kids: Desmond, Dermot, Donovan, Dulcie, Doreen, Denise and Diana.
And what a farm those Croftons ran. They grew fruits and vegetables and raised cattle, swine and poultry. More than enough to supply the hotel and a good bit of the populace.
And then, sometime around the mid-1950s, something happened. The world changed. Thanks to refrigeration and storage and cheap transportation, it became—illogically—cheaper to import food from the Okanagan, Washington and California than it was to grow it locally. Bit by bit Harbour House sold off its livestock and poultry.
Wild broom crept into the wheat fields and vegetable patches. The Harbour House farm went fallow. It stayed that way for more than half a century.
I don’t know if there was any direct connection but Harbour House itself kind of went fallow too. It actually burned down a couple of times, and during one of its resurrections back in the ’60s and ’70s it got a little . . . rough around the edges. As a local observer put it: Harbour House went from high tea to rock ’n’ roll. Somebody else said, back then if it was Saturday night and you were looking for a good fight, Harbour House was the place to be.
Well, the good news? Harbour House—the genteel version—is back. The better news? So is the farm. Right behind the hotel—and visitors are welcome to stroll through it—you’ll find the new/old Harbour House farm. They’ve got greenhouses and outdoor raised beds, grain fields, beehives for honey and bigleaf maple trees for syrup—seventeen acres, all organic. And all patrolled by hot and cold running goats. Those goats aren’t for meat or milk—they get a free ride because they actually eat broom, blackberry vines and thistles.
Belinda Schroeder is the person in charge of the Harbour House farm. She’s an organic purist who’d sooner roll naked in a patch of stinging nettle than allow an ounce of herbicide or pesticide on her land. The food she grows there is as pure as food gets. And her primary customers? Guests at the Harbour House Hotel. She says she has no p
roblem delivering thirty pounds of potatoes a day, plus all the fruits and vegetables the hotel can use.
So, in an age of financial instability, economic uncertainty and agricultural dubiousness, a smidgen of good news. A small hotel on a small island that was food self-sufficient nearly a hundred years ago is on its way to being self-sufficient again. The Crofton family doesn’t own it anymore, but Jack Woodward, who took it over about five years ago, said at the time, “I think what Salt Spring needs is some continuity.”
I’d say Salt Spring’s got some. And I’m sure that Fred and Nona Crofton, not to mention Desmond, Dermot, Donovan, Dulcie, Doreen, Denise and Diana—would be pleased.
Part Five
Closed Captioned
for the Language Impaired
Parlez-Vous “Cop”?
If there’s one thing that separates police officers from the rest of us—aside from the fact that he or she wears a gun and can seriously interfere with the way the rest of your day plays out—it’s the way they talk. Particularly when they talk for publication. If, for instance, you or I came across a burglary in progress, we would relate the story something like, “Yeah, I was coming home from lunch when I saw this drunk smash through the glass door at the jewellery shop. The cops came along, he tried to run, they tackled him, cuffed him and read him his rights.”
But the official description would be more like, “The suspect was observed entering the aforementioned premises at or about 1300 hours Greenwich Mean Time. Subject was observed to be in possession of a metal lever-like device, which was used to effect entry and subsequently brandished in a threatening manner. Officers on the scene exited the patrol vehicle and apprehended the perpetrator in order to neutralize the situation and secure the premises . . .” etcetera, etcetera.