October Ferry to Gabriola

At the end of October in 2005, I went looking for the remains of Malcolm Lowry’s shack outside of Vancouver. I had just finished October Ferry to Gabriola, Lowry’s last novel, published a decade after his death. In it, the Llewellyns, stand-ins for Lowry and his wife Margerie, live in a fisherman’s shack on the beach of a place called Eridanus. I had learned from the short biography in Lowry’s Selected Poems that Eridanus was a fictional name for the Lowrys’ home in Dollarton Harbour, northwest of Vancouver, near where Indian Arm breaks off the Burrard Inlet, across the water from the Parkland Oil refinery. A photo in Lowry’s Selected Poems would help me find where the shack had been. In the photo, Lowry stands at the edge of the water near his home at low tide. There is an island in the background and behind that, the mainland. I knew the shack would be gone but I planned to walk along the beach and line up the horizon with the photo. Unless the mountains had moved, I’d be able to find the spot where his shack had stood. I left my home in the Downtown Eastside. The weather was Vancouver in autumn; rain had been falling for three weeks and would fall for four months more. I passed the PNE grounds and went up the steep slope to the Second Narrows Bridge. Suddenly high over the inlet, I could see a forested point far to the north that I assumed was my destination. On the other side of the bridge, I turned onto the Old Dollarton Highway. The road changed from smooth, new pavement to a rougher grade. It led into the woods, running parallel to the curve of the shore.

*

A friend had recommended Lowry to me only a few months before. I hadn’t been able to find a used copy of his better-known Under the Volcano, so I ended up with October Ferry. It became a favourite right away and is a book I’ve returned to every couple of years since. This is partially because of my attachment to the characters—the Llewellyns’ search for a place in the world to be happy together is immensely relatable—but also because it takes place where I grew up. The book has become a balm for homesickness and at the same time a reminder of why I moved thousands of kilometers away. October Ferry to Gabriola opens with Ethan and Jacqueline Llewellyn on a Greyhound bus, travelling from Victoria to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. They are at the top of Malahat Drive, heading toward Duncan on a road I’ve driven a thousand times in my life. Duncan was where I grew up. I lived in Victoria for five years before moving to Vancouver and spent enough time in Nanaimo to relate to Lowry’s opening epigram for the city: “Nanaimo hath murdered sleep.” It can be disappointing to read an author’s writing about a place you know well. It’s more common to find little things that give them away as tourists than it is to find true understanding. Lowry, writing and endlessly revising his book about the West Coast over the course of 12 years living in a shack on the edge of the ocean, understands the place in a way that is still relevant over 50 years later. He saw the conflict between nature and civilization that makes the West Coast such a frustrating place to live; there is beauty everywhere—the changing tides, wildlife, mountains, forests, and weather that can go from storm to sunlight in minutes—but the cities that have developed around it are as restrictive as they are hollow. The Llewellyns are going to Nanaimo to catch the ferry to Gabriola Island. They have been evicted from Eridanus; their home (technically a squatter’s shack) had been called an eyesore by the same city that had just approved the expansion of the oil refinery across the water. Forced to find a home quickly, they had moved to Vancouver’s West End, then in the process of gentrification. The old working-class houses  torn down to make way for a five-lane road to Stanley Park, which at the time the city was considering turning into a golf course. Their new landlord, part of the push to make the neighbourhood “good,” calls the police on any action even remotely unusual. After two years at Eridanus, the Llewellyns are oppressed by the city; they see an add for property on Gabriola and a chance to recapture the peace they had lost at Eridanus. The bus from Victoria to Nanaimo is not direct. It stops in every little town along the way. These towns were all established as points of extraction of the natural wealth around them—every one a fishing town, a logging town, a mining town. By Lowry’s time, their decline had already begun as those industries became more mechanized and the resources depleted, leaving a population living in a place without purpose or identity; the towns persist because of inertia, but are culturally empty. The people the Llewellyns see are all “bereaved of their backwaters by rumours of boom”—they are all thinking of better things elsewhere and feeling trapped where they are. Outside of one of these towns, the Llewellyns are stopped by a train dragging away trees pulled out of the forest they were just driving through. In Lowry’s time, all the woods were second growth. By the time I was growing up, most of the woods were on their third of fourth round of reforestation. Walking through these woods is—aside from being trespassing—a sterile experience. They lack a proper underbrush and the animals seem too shell-shocked to return to the place they were evicted from. Nature, in BC, is not what you think it is. From a distance, it tricks you by appearing vast and abundant, but within it, you can see it for what it is: a tree farm.By the time they reach Nanaimo, the trip has put Ethan in a bad mood. He is looking for a home to replace the old one in Eridanus, but he begins to realize that his paradise might never have been how he chooses to remember. The beauty there was often interrupted—oil slicks from the tankers, their home endangered by logged trees loose on the water, an ever-expanding oil refinery across the way, not to mention the editorials in the local papers about how he, his wife, and all the people who lived there were no better than common criminals—dodging taxes, living without rent. He worries that even if he finds what he’s looking for on Gabriola, it will be the same as Eridanus—an illusion of freedom.Nanaimo in October is a depressing place. The city itself is new. It is in a constant state of tearing down the old and replacing it with a “modern” development, but the damp weather covers everything with mold and moss so that the buildings look decrepit within a year of being built. The heavy fog over the bay cuts off any view of the mainland; the city itself cuts off any view of the forest around it. And if you’re stuck there, waiting for a ferry, there is nothing to do but find a place to get a drink and settle into the feeling of wanting to escape to a place that only might be better.

*

I had lost sight of the water and there were trees on either side of me when the Old Dollarton Highway turned sharply west, which I knew meant I was getting close to where Lowry lived. Just before the curve, I saw a sign that said Cates Park. I pulled in. A short, newly paved road took me to a parking lot near the water. Across the Burrard Inlet, I could see the oil refinery.I parked and opened the Selected Poems. The refinery was not in the background of the photo; I assumed the shack must be around the point, closer to Indian Arm, taken facing north. I walked to the concrete stairs that led to the beach. The tide was in, the steps ended in water. I went along the edge until it joined up with a gravel path. A sign let me know it was called Malcolm Lowry Walk. My search suddenly foolish, I went on.A short distance into the woods, there was a break in the trees and a large rock with a plaque on it commemorating the fact that the Lowrys lived nearby. I could see the island from the photo, but the angle was wrong. I walked farther along the path and ducked into the woods a few times, walking to the water. Eventually, I found a spot where the background in the photo seemed to line up with the landscape.The shack was long gone, of course. The forest was sparse, second growth; not the towering trees in the photo. The shoreline had been filled in with boulders to protect the park from erosion. Across the water were houses. Lowry had worried the land around his shack would become a golf course or RV park. What had happened seemed worse to me. The nature the park had preserved was not nature.I went back to the plaque and read it again. It spoke of Lowry’s achievements as a writer and how the beauty of the area inspired his work. It said he was “compelled to leave in 1954,” without mention that the threat of the city evicting him kept him from returning. And it closed with a word in scare quotes that can’t possibly have been intentionally ironic—it said this was his “paradise.”