Geographic Illiteracy

Matthew, my tatami timeshare/biking guest and I almost come to blows over how little of Canada he's seen, despite being born and raised on Vancouver island in Victoria. Well, I say come to blows, but the reality would have been one of me laying blows upon a hapless Matthew. Worse still was when we were talking about sights on Vancouver island itself. Though he was based in Victoria, at it's extreme southern tip, I thought that--surely--he would have roamed a bit across the island. I called back to my adventure last July, mentioning names like Coombs and Cathedral Grove, and Ucluelet and Tofino. I mentioned Pacific Rim National Park; I mentioned Clayquot Sound. Through it all, Matthew sat with a vacant, scantly searching stare on his face.

"I think I went to Tofino once or twice," he replied.

"Well then SURELY you stopped in Pacific Rim to see the coastal rain forests? SURELY you would have turned in at Cathedral Grove to try and wrap your arms around some of the larges trees in Canada?"

He replied that he hadn't, replied that be was amazed to discover that not only did Canada have rainforest but that they were located so close to where he'd lived all of his life.

My eyes misted slightly as I told him about the Douglas Firs like colossal columns in Cathedral Grove, about the forests of Pacific Rim where the bark of trees was so moist as to serve as soil for ferns and mosses and other trees. Each was a place so full of life that they could serve as archetypes for Nature and Growth and Forest.

He mused that he'd have to put them on a list of places to visit when he got home, seeming to imply that he'd never thought there was all that much to see on Vancouver Island.

In an alternate reality, wherein failure to appreciate beauty naturally wrought was a corporally punishable offense, I could have throttled the guy. He lived within spitting distance of some of Canada's greatest natural wonders, and he'd gone his whole life without knowing they existed. Some people have joked about me moving to Japan and never coming back (and there have been times when I've had fleeting thoughts of it), but the place they should really worry about losing me to is British Columbia.

Though when I come back to visit Canada this summer I will be stopping in BC on a point of business (attending Amanda's wedding), I nonetheless am relishing the excuse to be back in that place--secretly hoping that I had MORE time on the coast to rent a car to go climbing up the sea-to-sky highway along Howe Sound, on the way to the mountain valley of Whistler, or taking that car up through Coombs and Cathedral Grove, over the mountainous hump of Vancouver Island, and down into the mists of the Pacific Rim.

I reigned in my shock and disappointment, and I tried to put it to Matthew straight:

"There is so much of Canada that you have yet to see: so much in your very backyard that is essential and you have yet to experience."

And that is advice that I feel I should perhaps endeavour to diseminate more widely. Even if the only person who ever takes it to heart and actually sees these wonders on Vancouver Island is Saff, I'll feel like it will have been worth it.

You should all go, though: to Tofino and to the Avalon Penninsula and to Peggy's Cove; to Lake of The Woods and to Haida Gwaii. We all seem to spend so much time dreaming about the foreign climbs we'll summit when there is still so very much to see in the country where we lay down our heads to sleep every night. I feel like being so far away from it all in this foreign place has given me more perspective on it; an absence to make my heart grow fonder of its lakes and its trees. As I give my advice to Matthew, my fellow Canadian, in far-off Japan, I can't help taking the advice myself--planning already to practice what I preach when I say "there is still so much to see in Canada."