Son of the beach
By Jim Sutherland with photography by Ilja herb
First I was a beach bum, then a proud father watching my kids splash in the waves. Now I am back. Long Beach keeps calling me home.
STROLLING THE ENDLESS PERFECTION of Long Beach,
Canada’s most spectacular strand, it’s easy to become lost in sun,
sand and surf, the holy trinity of summer vacations. To the
west, crashing waves. To the east, emerald-green hillocks
bordering snow-capped peaks.
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But, instead, I am lost in reverie. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, no gathering of the tribes was more blessed than the one
that took place here on Vancouver Island’s remote west coast.
Every summer, thousands of young people turned these
16 kilometres of rippling brown sand into a glorious tent city,
running naked through the waves during endless sunny days,
gathering round bonfires on starry, starry nights.
Several months earlier during those same years, a few dozen others - fresh from Saskatchewan and not entirely clear on the concept - straggled onto the same beach, huddling
inside leaky, tottering shelters of driftwood and polyethylene
as winter’s fearsome winds and torrential rains gradually
ebbed, or perhaps didn’t.
Sadly, I was among the latter group, and while you might think
the experience would have soured me on the area, you’d be
wrong. Indeed, after leaving Long Beach, I headed on a summerlong
circumnavigation of the continent: stranded in northern
Ontario, baling hay on a farm in Prince Edward Island, ripped
off in New York City, camping in a churchyard on Berkeley’s
Telegraph Avenue - the standard 1973 long, strange trip. But
I returned to Long Beach just in time for winter.
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