Past Journeys

My grandparents and my mother grew up at Telegraph Cove, and I went there for summer holidays with my siblings and then later on my own. I was never a 'real' resident, but I became good friends with those that were, as well as knowing which board on the walkway had a big enough hole to put a finishing line down, where the old tennis courts used to be, how to get behind the mill to the little beach opposite my grandparents' house, the smell of the general store, the heat of the burner on a cool evening, what time the sun went down in July and and how long dusk lasted, the names of the mountains seen in the distance from my grandparents' yellow bedroom, what time the 'Turtle Princess' passed by the Cove, where the trail to Bauza Cove started and where the wooden faces of at least some of the seven dwarves were nailed up on trees behind the house I knew so well.

My time up there was precious, and going to the Cove was the highlight of my summer. We'd leave in early light in our station wagon stuffed with six persons' and one dog's amount of luggage and try to catch the first ferry from Horseshoe Bay, nearf Vancouver to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. There was always a bit of stress as to whether we'd made it, as we were that kind of family. Always worried about being late for the ferry.  We learned that if you worried about it enough, you'd make it.  But you had to worry about it enough to guarantee you would get onboard.  Yes, I'm aware of how that sounds.  But it worked.

We would drive north (always called 'up') along the old and twisting island highway that followed a lovely winding coastline through the towns of Parksville, Qualicum, Fanny Bay, Black Creek, Courtney, and Campbell River among others.  Today there is a straighter, faster highway that bypasses all these towns and cuts the journey time by at least half. But I loved pootling along, each bit of the coast with its own chracater. There would be the long wide bay turned white with old clam shells, and there would be the restaurant up on stilts overlooking the water that I always wanted to eat at but never could because it was too expensive to eat at restaurants.   

One of our favourite markers on the journey was a hotel called the "Above Tide Hotel". We thought this was hilarious as it indicated to us that somewhere there might be a Below Tide Hotel. We would always spend some time talking about this, joking about how it would be furnished. Or perhaps it was really an Above Tide 'Motel' with cars parked on the beach itself, under the Motel, beside dead fish and kelp and old crab shells. As this conversation only happened once a year, it was probably repeated pretty well verbatim every time (repetition was another regular feature of our family life), but we as kids never tired of the image placed in our heads of this evocative place.  We were a simple family.

And then , at some point, out would come the Jelly Bean Travel Game. My father loves games, both playing them and making them up, and our car trips always included a few rounds of things like "I Spy" and the alphabet game and counting Volkswagon beetles, but our hands down favourite was the Jelly Bean Travel Game.

Dad would have purchased a bag of jelly beans somewhere in advance, choosing a bag with as many colour varieties as possible. Red, yellow, orange, green and black were a given, but pink, white and purple indicated what he called "a quality bag".  The game went as thus. While driving, Dad would take one bean of the bag, check its colour and then hide it in his han.  We would take in turn to guess which colour it was. Whoever guessed right got the bean. That's it really. You can't get much simpler than that, but the game held our attention for many a mile. It was relatively random - Dad was also driving so there was no real choosing of colours - we might have 3 turns in a row with a yellow bean for instance. If you had won the bean before, the person next to you got the first guess, and all you really had to do was remember the failed attempts to narrow the field.  Oddly enough we all seemed to end up with a similar number of beans. As we got older the game became a bit more complex.  Dad would have two beans and we had to guess both colours which was much, much harder.  You might have two reds, so you had to be open minded.  Dad would sometimes help us out if the game was going on too long such as telling us one of our choices was right or so on.  Even so, we often ended up with beans that had been in Dad's hand for quite a few minutes, so the sugar coating was not quite as shiny and hard as it had been in the bag.  I don't know why Dad didn't deligated the choosing and holding part of the game to Mom who rarely drove, which would have been quite practical, but that never happened.  Mom was never quite as keen on games as the rest of us were.  Ormaybe she was just smart.

We would generally have a picnic lunch somewhere along the way, and always on a beach. Mock chicken loaf, ice burg lettuce, French's mustard and Kraft's Miracle Whip in white buns.  A tin of Cragmont soda, grape or cream soda if you were lucky, orange or lemon lime if you weren't.  Fruit and a cookie.  Pretty well the same menu every year, ever picnic.  Or at least that's how I remember it.

The stress level would return at about this time. Would we make it to the Turtle Princess on time? The Turtle Princess was the name that we privately bestowed on the ferry.  Its real name was Queen of the North. We called it the Turtle Princes because it had to be the slowest ferry on the planet.  It had to be.  It took more than 3 hours to get 100 km (or 60 miles).  We could have driven that in an hour, if there had been a road.  But there wasn't at that time.  There were just single lane gravel logging roads, which were rough and dangerous, as large trucks loaded with logs had the right of way to come barreling along, spewing gravel and dust and filling the entire road space, leaving nowhere for a station wagon filled with a family to go.

As well as being slower than paint drying, the Turtle Princess was a solo act.  It left the small community of Kelsey Bay at 3:15pm. every day  If you got there at 3:20pm you were hooped. So you can imagine that a family of worriers got a lot of practice worrying about missing that one way of getting to our annual source of supreme happiness.  The alternative was too terrible to imagine.

I think we did miss it once, when I was young enough not to really understand what that meant.  The decision must have been made to take a chance on the logging roads, which was cheaper than going back to Campbell River and finding hotel room for 6.  I don't remember much about that journey, but I do have a memory of sitting on a rock while Dad fixed a punctured tyre and watching one of our hub caps bouncing away across the road and off the other side, rolling down a steep slope of rocks and gravel, landing in a lake several hundred feet in the distance.  That might have been the only time I heard my father swear, as he was wrestling with the tyre exchange as dusk was approaching, and no doubt having to listen to his children laughing and pointing out to him that he was now also missing a hubcap.  I also remember the utter relief we had as we came down the last bit of bumpy gravel road and turned onto the smooth boardwalk, the lights of Telegraph Cove winking in the dark night, and then having cocoa in Granny and Grampa's kitchen before getting settled into whichever room we were assigned that particular summer.