Comox Valley Turf ‘n Surf
We were trudging up toward the summit of Mt. Becher, sweating like mules on the Erie Canal, the whole lush Comox Valley and the islands of the Salish Sea spread below us, when we ran into another hiker. She meant business: had the poles, had the layers of fancy apparel and the hey-Martha boots. We compared timelines and ambitions. It was already 1pm.
“We’re actually planning on floating the Puntledge after this,” Jen said.
“Whoa,” said the other hiker. “That is a big day.”
I thought: You said it, sister.
Wait, what? She did say it. She named it. This is not just a big day. It’s a Big Day.
A strange thing happens when you decide to turn a regular day into a Big Day in media res. You switch modes. You start thinking like a reporter. You get out the notebook. You ready the camera. There has to be documentation. There has to be dialogue. It has to become a story, rather than just an experience. The scrim of The Observer rises between you and this moment you had, till a second ago, been unselfconsiously immersed in. That’s both a bad and a good thing. Bad in that it breaks the spell a bit. Good in that it forces you to dial up your attention. And that is, after all, part of the point of any Big Day: to kick open the doors of perception. To nudge you to live this day like it might be your last.
I’m going to skip the Mt. Becher part, except to say that the views were amazing and the footing sucked and there wasn’t much shade. But I recommend it as a taster to British Columbia’s mighty Strathcona wilderness area (which holds a complicated place in my heart, having been the site of a near-death experience thirty years ago). If you have to choose one or the other on a hot summer day, enjoy the mountain from a distance and head to the water. For an iconic Canadian experience it’d be hard to beat wilding down the gorgeous Puntledge River in an inner tube.
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3:30 pm: We hit the Blue Toque in Courtenay and rent three tubes, strap them to the roof of the car and drive up-river to the put-in spot by the fish hatchery. We’d done this once before, years ago. That time, we took the wrong trail to the river. Curiously, nobody else was around. Only a fisheries worker coming off-shift. We hollered to him across the parking lot.
“Is this a good place to put in?”
His face was a mask. He said, evenly: “Depends on how exciting you want the day to be.”
Turned out that if we had put in there we’d have been swept over the waterfall. The place to start was a couple hundred metres downstream.
This time, we got it right.
The river is angry this day, my friend. Actually, not so much. It’s been dry. The river level’s quite low. That makes for lots of noisy water, a lot of choke points. Long rocks alligator up from the surface. They spin you when you hit them. These are class II rapids: you never really feel like you might flip. At worst a standing wave gives you a thorough soaking, and I can’t decide what’s more awesome about that – the relief from the heat or the howls of delight from the little boy behind, running the river with his dad.
In the slower sections, between rapids, time slows. Wedged into your tube, you’re in the perfect angle of repose to appreciate the white clouds on the blue sky, the forest alongside. The trees along the riverbanks here are otherworldly: towering Douglas fir and western red cedars and bigleaf maples. (This community loves its trees. You can nominate specific trees for Comox Valley Tree of the Year – the Garry oak at 950 Braidwood Rd, the flowering cherry at Cumberland Rd and 14th street). Against this spirit, the clearcuts on the surrounding mountainsides seem indefensible.
We’ve budgeted between two and three hours for this. It’s a bit like running a marathon in extremely slow motion. Around every bend there’s some new bit of entertainment: a heron, a seal, a rope swing, a drunk guy with a boom box playing Tragically Hip songs.
You can float the Puntledge in double or even triple tubes. Or you can do as we did and go solo. Solo-ing feels more like life. You’re ride together for awhile, then you drift apart; in the end (if you’re lucky) you come together again. At one point Lila is across the river, too far to be heard, so we mime some interactive games. You’re the fisherman and I’m the salmon being hooked. You’re the matador and I’m the bull. You’re the whale watcher and I’m the whale. It would have been fun to suddenly change roles, reverse the power dynamic, but I can’t figure out how to communicate that from a distance.
Jen, in her mind, is forty years and 4500 km away. As a kid, she and her brother floated down the Credit River, at the family cottage near Orangeville, Ont. The water was often so shallow you walked a lot of it, dragging your little raft behind you. A kid could burn a whole summer that way.
There’s only one thing you really have to do on a Puntledge River float. The Condensory Bridge crosses the lower Puntlege not far from Lewis Park where the ride ends. Below it is one of the few spots on the river where the water is reliably, safely deep. You need to jump.
The sun is already low in the sky as I climb up onto the bridge and stand on the railing. Cars whiz by behind me. Below me only air.
A gentleman, inexplicably wearing a long coat on this warm day, is standing quietly there.
“Is the coast clear below?” I ask.
“Yes sir.”
“You ever done this yourself?”
“No sir.”
I look down, way down, at the water. And realize what a privileged bastard I am. Normally, if you’re on a bridge railing about to jump, things have gone very wrong in your life. Your dreams have foreclosed on you. Your best ideas have come to naught. Your luck has run out. You are raising the white flag. People like me, and maybe you, must acknowledge that we have run between the raindrops. We are blessed.
So you stand there. And you check you pockets for forgotten valuables. And you try to feel the gathered weight of history, of the whole chain of descendents who brought you to this moment. And you see people you love right now, and who love you, bobbing in the shallows, waiting.
And then you’re airborne. Knowing that, for you, today, with luck, the only thing that ends when you hit the water is summer.