29/11/2017
When you pull into the Pacific coast town of Tofino, you leave behind the Canada you thought you knew.
I was still two hours from my destination when I spotted the first sign, handpainted on the side of the highway: surf shop. The words seemed jarring and out of place. They were words I’d seen in Australia, in Barbados, in California and Hawaii. But as I drove the winding two-lane road through old-growth forest, late afternoon sun filtering gamely down through the cover of giant firs and spruce trees, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a surf shop, or anyone surfing for that matter, in Canada before. Despite its three ocean coastlines—Atlantic, Pacific, and a long, jigsaw-puzzle stretch of mainland and island shoreline in the Arctic Ocean—there are very few places in my home country where you’ll see the words surf and shop together.
Eighty miles later along the Trans-Canada Highway, I had passed through the wild, mountainous interior of Vancouver Island, and the road made one last climb before dropping steeply down to the Pacific coast, where the signs started popping up again. SURF SHOP. SURF LESSONS. SURFBOARD RENTALS. I drove through a gauntlet of surf-themed businesses and into the heart of a small town just after sunset, the darkness thickened by the fog off the water. I had arrived in Tofino.
I had never been to the west coast of Vancouver Island before. I grew up thousands of miles away, in Ontario, the wellspring of so many Canadian stereotypes. I raked crackling red maple leaves into giant piles in the fall and shoveled heaping drifts of snow in the winter. I lived in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, on the border with Quebec, and took French immersion classes from age five on. We played hockey in gym class, in the school yard, and on frozen outdoor rinks, and my classmates cheered for the rival Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs in a roughly even split. Every spring, we visited the cabane à sucre on a school field trip and learned all over again about tapping maple trees for their thin, sweet sap, then boiling it down into syrup. We dipped lollipops of hot maple taffy into fresh snow and then licked the cold snowflakes off as they melted.
Then, five years ago, I moved to the Yukon, where I now live what may be an even more stereotypical Canadian life. I socialize with dog mushers and gold miners, live a day’s drive from the Arctic Circle, and watch the northern lights spread across the sky at -40°F. I have a $600 parka, a freezer full of moose meat, and a car that I plug in at night to keep the engine from freezing solid. My experiences left me with a set of firm assumptions about what Canadian-ness looks like—about what life in Canada really is.
It was not this. On every street in Tofino’s compact downtown, aging hippie vans and a motley collection of trucks and SUVs—Delicas and Westfalias, Subarus and Jeeps and old Toyotas—were parked with surfboards strapped on top, their bumpers plastered with stickers: SAVE COX BAY and I’D RATHER BE SURFING. The town’s bike racks were built in the shape of curling waves, and wave patterns were painted into the white lines of the crosswalk on the main drag. Even the pharmacy had a stack of boogie boards sitting out front and wet suits on clothes hangers swaying in the wind.