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magazine / so06
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September/October 2006 issue |
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FEATURE - THE GULF ISLANDS
Treasure Islands
Once a backcountry refuge for draft dodgers and hippie farmers,
British Columbia’s Gulf Islands are now home to a new national park reserve and some of the highest-priced real estate in Canada
Excerpt of story by Alisa Smith with Photography by Ilja Herb
It’s easy to feel wistful about what might have been
when I’m aboard the Spirit of British Columbia, the
Vancouver-to-Victoria ferry that weaves through the
southern Gulf Islands. Even early European explorers,
who found the mountainous West Coast forbidding
and gloomy, admired the Gulf Islands. Garry oak meadows
give the gentle hills of the islands the appearance of an
English garden, and the steely North Pacific bursts into
tropical blue-greens at their shores.
For the past 140 years, since non-aboriginal settlement
began, the Gulf Islands have been a refuge for adventurers,
eccentrics and solitude-seekers. I was almost one of them.
In 1988, when my family lived in Victoria and I was a shy
16-year-old, my mother contacted a real estate agent on the
largest and closest of the southern islands, Salt Spring. She
dreamt of a waterfront home. True, neighbours said that
unwashed people lived in the forest and that the villages were
filled with pot-smoking American draft dodgers. Though my
mother wasn’t at Woodstock, she’s a free spirit who had
variously been an unpublished novelist, a candle-maker and
a quilter. So she brushed aside the fears of her neighbours
and imagined a quiet, congenial rural refuge of artists and
craftspeople. Oh, yes, and it was cheap. She was
widowed and had no job, but she was comfortably
looking at oceanfront properties.
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue. top
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