Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 9

For much of its life the Sunshine Coast has been a non-place on the map of BC. If you were in Vancouver and said you were from Gibsons or Sechelt, people would assume you were from “the Island,” meaning Vancouver Island. If you said you were from Pender Harbour, they would assume you were from Pender Island, which is 240 kilometres away and a whole different kettle of fish. It’s only lately the TV weatherpersons have begun to include the Sunshine Coast in their catalogue of BC regions, and they have a pretty loose notion of just where this seldom sunny place is. Lately, they take it to be synonymous with Powell River, which most people on the original Sunshine Coast consider a recent (and not legitimate) claimant to the title. TV news often mixes Powell River and Sechelt in with weather reports for Squamish, which nobody but them has ever considered to be part of the Sunshine Coast.

People who live here are used to living with this kind of geographical confusion. We don’t get shirty about it. We’re endlessly patient in explaining over and over just where it is that we live. We accept our fate as the regional equivalent of Togo or Dagestan. At least the oldtimers do. After all, most of them came here to get away from it all, so these daily confirmations of anonymity sit okay with them. They had seen the known world and were glad to be out of it.

As a descendant of one of these oldtimers, I didn’t share that comfortable opinion. Coming from a noplace made me feel like a nobody, and I vowed I’d take the first chance to get away to a someplace and become a somebody. As far as I can tell, every other kid around me felt the same way, and most of them made good on at least the first part of their vow—to clear out at the first chance. I don’t know what happened to me. I got sidetracked. But it helped me to understand when my own kids streaked off to Toronto and New York barely out of their teens.

Now that it’s too late to do me any good, there are definite signs that the Sunshine Coast is finally being discovered. I’m not sure I like it. You can get used to being a nobody from nowhere after sixty-odd years of it. I try to think of some advantages of having a slightly higher profile. It is a convenience not having to carry around a pocket map of BC in order to illustrate where you live. It is vaguely interesting to know that the old homestead where I grew up, and was ashamed of, is now appraised at roughly what it cost to build the Lions Gate Bridge. Too bad Dad turned down a chance to buy it for $1,500 back in 1955.

As the oldtimers could have told us, it is not a very long leap from being discovered by the outside world to being taken over by it. It used to be that when you lined up for your Sunshine Breakfast on the 8:20 from Langdale, you could count on being on a first-name basis with either the guy ahead of you or the one behind you. Now there are days you can read your BC BookWorld all the way across and not be interrupted once. I swear there are even days I don’t know half the people in the noon lineup at the local post office. It seems like the more the world gets to know us, the less we know ourselves.