On the west coast, even winter storms have become a tourist attraction.

6. From Working the Land to Working the View

AT SOME time in the night, the power has gone out. The clock radio is blinking, and the surge protector on my computer backup battery is pinging away. We wake to a morning of pelting rain and howling winds, the latter no doubt responsible for taking down a power line somewhere in the area. No power means school will be cancelled and, with my computer on enforced recess, work might as well be cancelled, too. In the stormy days of winter, we have come to accept this occasional inconvenience and are prepared for it. Today, we have even planned to venture out into the elements for a hike. It’s storm-watching season after all, and we know that many people come to Long Beach expressly to experience Nature’s wrath exactly like today’s wet and wild fury.

The stroke of marketing brilliance that turned what might otherwise have been considered a detriment—a winter season that is rainy, windy, and generally grey—into one of the area’s major tourism selling points began in the early 1990s when park staff teamed with Beautiful British Columbia magazine to produce an article on the edgy allure of winter storms. The reprised Wickaninnish Inn, which opened in 1996 in Tofino, ran with the idea. The inn took a creative page from the Rumpelstiltskin tale, spinning wind and water into gold, when it began to promote storm watching to its guests. Now people come to the area from all over the world specifically because of the storms, purchasing specially designed storm-watching packages at the Wickaninnish Inn and other west coast resorts. Guests may be offered raingear and rubber boots when they arrive and even guided hikes out into the fray, though many will opt to view storms from indoors. After all, the main draw is the reckless romance of it, the mesmerizing power of waves meeting shoreline. Massages, soaker tubs, and champagne service with a view help, too.

Typical winter weather on the west coast is a steady march of low pressure systems across the Pacific. Since winds blow from regions of high pressure to those of low pressure, these systems bombard the coast with steady winds. Being able to roll unimpeded across a wide open Pacific also means that these winds often arrive packing stunning strength, sometimes up to hurricane force (greater than 118 kilometres, or 73 miles, per hour, the equivalent of 64 knots) and with the gargantuan waves to match. The lower the pressure the stronger the winds and the bigger the storm.

On this day, when we find ourselves resignedly powerless, the forecast is calling for Beaufort 7, meaning a “moderate” gale with winds up to sixty-one kilometres, or thirty-eight miles, per hour (thirty-three knots). We head to Long Beach, where the broad vista of galloping rollers is thrilling to watch. It’s much safer here, too, than at smaller beaches. The sandy width at low tide gives us room to get off the beach before the surging seas reach the beach logs. Even modest waves can turn logs into deadly bludgeons. It’s important to be wary of such dangers out here, every day really, but especially on days like this. It’s rare, but people have been killed in the Long Beach area, usually swept from rocky headlands where, made bold by the weather’s own devil-may-care antics, they submit to the prospect of an exhilarating sea-spray drenching and instead end up in the path of a mountainous wave. Our children know the mantra, “Never turn your back on the ocean.” And on days like today, the ocean deserves our attention and respect.

It’s exciting, but only to a point. Walking into the wind, we must keep our upper bodies bent low. Even so, the wily, gale-driven rain blasts at our cheeks as if it were sharp needles of ice. After an hour or so of hard trudging, we turn back toward the parking lot. The wind, now at our backs, shoulders us brutishly and sails us down the beach.

We bundle back into the car invigorated, our cheeks tingly and our noses runny. At moments like this, I wonder what some of the early tourists to Long Beach, those who came only in the summer, might have thought of this twenty-first-century attraction to storms. Would they see it as utter madness? Or would they completely understand?

A Destination Is Born

Long Beach’s vacation potential didn’t catch fire quickly, even as a summertime destination, partly because of the remote location and, tied to that, partly because of the relative rawness of its guest-support infrastructure: transportation, lodgings, supplies, and services catering to visitors were in their infancy. Despite the best efforts of the early tourism boosters, Long Beach was still not well known as a holiday spot. Nor was it easy to reach even from the nearby communities of Tofino, Clayoquot, and Ucluelet, let alone other areas of Vancouver Island. These realities dampened early flames, but there was no question that word about this mythical west coast paradise was filtering out.

Hand in hand, through the 1920s and 1930s, dogged promotion and gradual road improvements slowly but surely drove a shift in attitude about Long Beach both from within the community and from without. Gradually, “working the land” made room for “working the view.”

A trip to Long Beach was a special treat for residents of Ucluelet, Tofino, and Clayoquot. Dorothy Abraham, from Tofino, wrote, “… we would spend the night on the beach, build a huge fire to keep the cougars away, bake potatoes and clams, and sleep in holes scooped in the sand.” These visitors are taking in the view from Schooner Cove.

The Jacksons’ “House on the Hill”

One of the best records of the early days of tourism at Long Beach can be found in George Jackson’s two journals. Jackson moved to the coast in 1924 to work as a lineman. He rented a house that sat on land that was first pre-empted by Walter Dawley and later became part of Charles Harvey’s ranch. Jackson’s wife, Lucy, and adult daughter, Gertrude, split their time between Victoria and Long Beach. Both Charles Harvey and Jacob Arnet had moved on by this time, but feral cattle still roamed the Burnt Lands, beach, and forest. Three horses and the Jacksons’ own cattle grazed in the field in front of the house, where the Long Beach parking lots now sit. The Jacksons kept hens and had a large vegetable and flower garden. Jackson also hunted and foraged. His journals detail, with a gourmand’s care, meals of venison, duck, wild mushrooms and cranberries, clams, fish, and occasionally even wild cattle.

Jackson maintained the telegraph line from Long Beach to South Bay, toward Tofino, and a spur line up to Cannery Bay, location of the Clayoquot Sound Canning Company. Because his home was a switchpoint on the line, it became a frequent stop of Long Beach settlers or passersby wanting to send a telegram, pick up their mail, or drop in for a chat, a cup of tea, a meal, or even a night’s rest. For that last purpose, the Jacksons had erected two guest tents set on wooden platforms at the back of the house.

Between January 1, 1927, and May 22, 1929, Jackson made a journal entry almost every day. Most were terse—for example, “Rained all day” or “Johnnie Johnson dead in Victoria”—but all the bits collectively provide a detailed picture of life in the Long Beach area at the time. Jackson was a keen observer of his surroundings, noting not only the daily weather, growth of his cabbages, and laying prowess of his hens, but also the activities of his neighbours, including the native people who regularly came to their land at “Hesawista” (now Esowista) to gather clams and berries or hunt sea lions or deer. At times, he also reported snippets of news from town, received through passersby and through the calls or wires that came to his home. If any unfamiliar boats or people were in the area, Jackson noted that in his journal, too, acting as de facto border guard on the remote stretch of coastline. On April 19, 1927, for instance, he wrote, “Three American boats still anchored in behind Box Island, have been there five days now. Probably bootleggers waiting for Mother ship so they can load up.” It’s very likely they were bootleggers. Prohibition was in effect in the United States, and it was common knowledge that rum-runners were working off the west coast.

From his two-storey house on a slight rise above the beach and close to the trail to Mud Bay, George Jackson and his family had a panoramic view of Long Beach and all that went on there. Horses belonging to Jackson and his neighbours ran semi-wild on Long Beach.

Especially colourful among the many colourful settlers at Long Beach was Charlie Hughes, who pre-empted land there in 1925. Hughes was well known for his suit made of burlap sacking, his penchant for walking barefoot and wearing animal skins, and the house he shared with his beloved goats.

Within a couple of years of settling in at their Long Beach home, the Jacksons’ guest book began filling up with entries made by friends and tourists visiting from both ends of the peninsula. The most frequent callers were their friends the four Hillier brothers from Ucluelet, who came to the beach to hunt deer and waterfowl. Bill Hillier was the lineman from Long Beach to Ucluelet; Bert and Pete worked a trapline in the area (catching mostly raccoon and mink); and George Hillier ran a fishing boat, the Manhattan, which he sometimes anchored down near Box Island and then popped up to the Jacksons for a visit.

The Hillier brothers were great friends of George Jackson and spent a lot of time at Long Beach where they would come to check their traplines and hunt deer or wild cattle.

The Hilliers were one of the first families to have a vehicle on the coast despite the dearth of passable roads. When they first received their car, they were happy enough to drive back and forth along a stretch of road in Ucluelet barely half a kilometre long. A car was a novelty in those days, so even a spin as limited as that was a source of amusement and interest. And the Hilliers, like most west coast residents then, held out hope that they would one day have local roads that they really could drive without fear of bogging down in muck or landing in a waist-deep mud hole. At least by 1923, they could drive the rough road that finally connected Ucluelet to Long Beach.

The Good Roads League and other area associations did not let up in their calls for an improved road, especially one that would link Ucluelet and Tofino. The group had a minor, if ironic, victory in 1926, when federal surveyors erected a sign near Tofino’s village dock: the Pacific Terminus of the Trans-Canada Highway. In fact, Tofino’s road petered out in the bush a few kilometres from town. And, as local resident Walter Guppy observed, “much of the road wasn’t suitable for wheelbarrows or decently shod people.”

The announcement foretold some break in the stonewalling, however, for in the summer of 1927, several road crews were indeed busy at work surveying, laying gravel, digging ditches, and measuring bridge sites. In the Depression era, road building provided relief work for unemployed men, mostly from the city. Several camps at Long Beach offered opportunities for men to work in exchange for relief wages (at times as low as 20 cents a day) or in lieu of paying taxes. Most of the men worked only with picks and shovels, which made for slow progress. Large machinery that was brought in helped, but even it was tested by the area’s hardscrabble terrain. An entry in Jackson’s journal in July 1927 reports the arrival of a five-ton tractor and grader, which in short order got stuck.

By August, the first vehicle to attempt the sixteen-kilometre (ten-mile) drive from Tofino to Long Beach set off. It was a government road truck, and it got just over the halfway point before being mired in the mud.

CARS, PLANES AND A SUBDIVISION

In May 1927, Jackson learned that the ranch property he and his family had occupied for three years had been purchased by a Mr. Lovekin of Riverside, California. Word that the ranch at Long Beach was about to change hands meant that Jackson would have to move on, but he had time to plan. With his friend C.J. Ayliffe of Port Alberni, Jackson arranged to purchase a property that lay adjacent to the Hesawista (Esowista) Reserve.

The two men took possession in October 1928, and over the next months, Jackson, often with the help of Pete Hillier, worked on clearing sections of the land. Ayliffe and Jackson then subdivided the property, which they, too, called Hesawista, and put the lots up for sale. (The first one, Jackson recorded in his journal, went to a George Anderson for $275.) The Jacksons also built a cabin on one of the properties, as did Pete Hillier, who received two lots in exchange for his help.

Settled into their new home, the Jacksons were soon hosting visitors again. Indeed, with a road of sorts finally punched through the forest linking Tofino and Ucluelet to Long Beach, the family received more guests than ever. And any reference in the guest book to the matter of “The Road” now meant a road that would link Long Beach to Port Alberni, and thus to eastern Vancouver Island, which in turn would mean easier access to the mainland and beyond. Almost immediately, duelling values over the fate of Long Beach emerged. Two entries from the Jacksons’ guest book illustrate the divide:

[A] Motor Road from Alberni to Long Beach. What the West Coast needs more than anything. September 3, 1929

I only hope that the road never gets through to Long Beach, otherwise the place will be cluttered with a lot of millionaires, hot-dog stands and chocolate bar papers. September 6, 1929

Most guests continued to write effusively about the beauty of the place (often moved to poetry), but in these new times, some people saw the beauty as secondary to the natural speedway the beach provided. (“A wonderful place to drive old Henry #9159 along at full speed,” reads one message. “The finest beach I ever saw. A wonderful place for racing of all kinds,” reads another.)

The earliest cars on Long Beach came via Ucluelet. They were barged up Alberni Inlet and off-loaded at the dock. The beaches of Florencia Bay and Long Beach were part of the early “highway.”

The family’s journals and guest book also record several “firsts” for motorized tourists. The first “foreign car,” as Jackson called it, on Long Beach was a new Dodge “closed in car” driven by John Alexander. Alexander had started his journey in Kalamazoo, Michigan, driving across the U.S. to California and then up into Canada, eventually reaching Port Alberni. From there, he shipped his car to Ucluelet and drove up to Long Beach, arriving there on July 19, 1927. The first motorcycle on the beach was ridden by Tom Scales and J.R. Tindall of Vancouver on August 3, 1929, where the two had little trouble reaching speeds of 145 kilometres (90 miles) per hour. (“The finest speedway ever seen,” they wrote in Jackson’s guest book.) And the first two planes, flown up from San Francisco in a flying time of eight hours, landed on the beach on July 1, 1930.

A road, cars, motorcycles, planes, and a subdivision. In his few years at Long Beach, George Jackson had lived through a significant era of change, witnessing and even participating in developments. But he would see few others. Shortly after the departing planes taxied down the beach and took off in July 1930, Jackson also left for the last time. On September 3, 1930, at the age of sixty-three, he died in Victoria. A simple cross marks his grave in the Ucluelet cemetery.

The Donahues and Lovekins

George Jackson wrote about suspicious boats and rum-runners in his midst a few times in his journal. Had he still been alive and living at Long Beach in 1933, he would have had a rum-runner for a neighbour. That summer, Hazel and Jim Donahue moved to Long Beach. Hazel was raised in Tofino and had been visiting Long Beach all her life. During the days of prohibition in the United States, Hazel’s brother, Stuart Stone, was a rum- runner and captain of the Malahat, AKA Queen of the Rum Fleet. Jim, who had sailed extensively throughout the world, worked on the Malahat for a time. Stuart introduced Jim to his sister, and the two married in 1931. Hazel had put a few hours into her brother’s illegal liquor supply business, too. She was a long distance operator with BC Telephone, but at night she worked out of a Vancouver basement relaying messages to the rum fleet.

In the summer of 1933 (and prohibition now over), the Donahues arrived at Long Beach for a six-month holiday. They had removed the back from their Model T Ford, loaded it with lumber and camping supplies, and caught the steamer to Ucluelet. Initially, they had permission from the government’s Indian Agent to live on the native reserve at Esowista, but they later moved farther down the beach toward Green Point, on the corner of the land owned by the Lovekins. The spot was idyllic but not altogether free: they were charged a rent of 50 cents a month, except in June, July, and August, when the rent jumped to $2 a month.

Jim and Hazel Donahue with Hazel’s mother, Christene Stone, at their Long Beach home. The Donahues originally came for six months but stayed for more than twenty years. In time, they built more cabins and called their establishment Camp Maquinna.

Hazel’s mother, Christene Stone, lived with the couple at first. Apparently, what Jim lacked in skills with a hammer and saw his mother-in-law more than made up for. The large tent they built, about five by eight metres (sixteen by twenty-six feet), soon had a wood floor, partial wood walls, furniture, and a wood stove. Though not much larger than a small guest bedroom by today’s standards, the Donahues’ tent cabin obviously suited them perfectly, because their six-month vacation stretched into more than two decades of residency. They spent their days hunting, fishing, gathering clams and crabs, and endlessly beachcombing. Hazel later recounted some of the treasures they’d found: a wedding ring in a jar of buttons, dozens of bottles with a note inside, many glass fish floats, and, during the war, “rations all wrapped up in waxed paper—sausages in tins, cigarettes with little matches, candy, biscuits, lots of little plastic flashlights.” Once, a little skiff washed in. They fished with that for years.

A.C. and Helen Lovekin’s home, built overlooking Long Beach, became the extended family’s summer residence for almost thirty-five years. The property included a large house, several small outbuildings, and substantial gardens. Today’s Long Beach parking lots were once the fields in front of the Lovekin property.

One day in 1936, the Donahues were joined in their paradise by a work crew that had come to build a summer home for the Lovekins, who, nearly ten years before, purchased the property George Jackson had rented. Although Jackson referred in his journal to Mr. Lovekin coming from California, Arthur C. (“A.C.”) Lovekin had in fact been born and raised on a farm in Ontario and was again living part-time in Canada, in a home in Victoria. His wife, Helen, came from Boston. Lovekin was a successful businessman and over the years worked at a series of jobs and ran several enterprises in California, Hawaii (where he met Helen), and even Nelson, B.C., where, in 1895, he opened an assay office and did some prospecting.

When they bought the Long Beach property, the family had already explored parts of Vancouver Island, including Sproat Lake, where they spent the summer of 1921. It was then that A.C. got the notion of looking for land on the west coast of the island.

The newly built house was a far cry from the tent cabin that the Donahues had constructed and from any other homes on the beach. He hired a Victoria contractor, Robert Noble, who arrived at the beach with his wife, sons, and extended family to construct the substantial home. And unlike other Long Beach homes that had been built largely from logs or salvaged lumber, the Lovekin home used milled lumber. Peter Hillier used his fishing boat to deliver the boards to Long Beach, dumping the loads off on incoming tides. The construction crew gathered the lumber from the beach and wheeled it up to the building site.

Locally, their home was called the “Lovekin Estate,” though the family never referred to it as such. When the work was completed, the property included a large main house, an annex with a bunkhouse and store room, and several small outbuildings to accommodate their family and friends who joined them at their coastal retreat for summer holidays. The arrival in town of the Maquinna with crates and barrels marked “china” or “glassware” destined for the Lovekin home only heightened the cachet surrounding this new kind of Long Beach resident: people who, though well accustomed to a certain level of luxury, were clearly as besotted by the beauty of the place as were their more modestly housed neighbours.

The Lovekins spent about six months a year at Long Beach. A.C. was seventy-four years old by the time the house was ready but still full of energy and enthusiasm that he poured into his new property. He created gardens and soaked up the beauty and glorious solitude. His children and grandchildren came to love the home as well.

The first year he came to live at the house, A.C. met the Donahues, and they quickly became friends. By the time the Lovekins moved back that fall to Victoria, the Donahues had been hired as caretakers of the Lovekin estate and remained so for many years.

The Whittingtons

The Lovekin house was still under construction when Peg and Dick Whittington bumped their way out to Long Beach in Peter Hillier’s truck and off-loaded their crates. It was a beautiful sunny day in August 1936, and the young couple had arrived at their new home, a twenty-six-hectare (sixty-four-acre) lot just to the northwest of Green Point.

Times were tough everywhere in the 1930s, and the Victoria couple had been looking for a new direction. Dick first came out on foot, walking along a rough telegraph trail from Port Alberni to Kennedy Lake. There, he was met by a friend from the west coast, and the pair canoed down to the ocean and spent a few days exploring Clayoquot and Tofino. On his return trip home via Ucluelet, Dick’s route took him down Long Beach. Walking on the huge yet deserted beach, serenaded by the background rumble of waves hitting sand, he fell in love with the place. Back in Victoria, he approached Peg about the idea of making Long Beach their new home.

Peg and Dick Whittington arrived at Long Beach in August 1936, and Peg lived at Long Beach for most of her adult life. She was casual about what they had accomplished, saying that she and Dick had simply worked hard and learned by trial and error—plus, if anything puzzled them, “there were always books.”

“We were looking for something and ready to leap at anything that was different than city living,” Peg recalled years later. “Sure we argued it back and forth, pros and cons, and were we crazy or weren’t we, but I was willing to give it a try.”

The $300 the couple brought with them supported them for a year and financed the first house they built. They lived off the beach’s plenty, dining regularly on clams, crabs, and salmon and supplementing that with flour, sugar, and other staples from town.

The Whittingtons’ first task was to set up a camp. They put up their large canvas tent, moved their supplies in, and then grabbed their machetes. They had purchased the lot where Fred Tibbs had built his Tidal Wave Ranch. His house was still standing, higher up on the cliff above the beach. To get to it, the couple had to hack their way up through the wall of salal. It took three weeks. One of them would cut the brush and the other would clear it away. They found the single-room cabin in rough shape. At least twenty years had passed since Tibbs went off to build his islet castle near Tofino. The logs were rotten and wind blew through the walls, but the roof was sound. Dick and Peg cleaned it out, chinked the logs, and installed windows they’d hauled up the hill from the tent. The couple continued to sleep at the beach in the early days of their arrival, but once the cabin was ready, complete with a tiny tin stove, they moved in.

During the first year and a half, the Whittingtons chipped their home and livelihood out of the forest fronting Long Beach. They cleared an area large enough for a new house, dug a well, and put in a garden. Neither had homesteading experience, yet both were apparently well suited to it. They built their first house completely of wood they salvaged off the beach, mostly sawed lumber lost off the decks of passing ships. For the foundation they used rocks and creosoted posts, and for the roof, hand-cut shakes.

As with the Lovekins’ place, the activity at the Whittingtons’ property became a topic of curiosity and conversation. Any visitors to the beach made sure to stop by to see what they were up to. The locals, Peg assumed, figured it was only a matter of time before this brand of west coast living would get the better of the young pair.

“A lot of people came in and took a look because they wondered, ‘Oh, these people won’t stay. Nobody will stay there that long.’”

At the time, the beach was not considered a prime location or a smart investment. It was just too far from anywhere. Walking out to Tofino or Ucluelet along the rough trails could take three hours each way. Plus, it was a time when money was tight. Within a few years of the Whittingtons’ arrival, for example, the property next door at Green Point was listed for $500, and nobody bought it. “There was no money,” Peg recalled, “and [people saw] no future in the beach.” It was a far cry from two decades earlier, when Tibbs had sold his land for $5,000.

From the start, Peg and Dick envisioned building a few cabins as holiday rentals. Once their own home was finished, they started in on building the guest cabins, working full tilt to get them up. A day off was considered a walk to beachcomb lumber. At first, the Whittingtons didn’t have a name for their place, which they were reluctant to call a resort. Nevertheless, they ran a small newspaper ad in Victoria, and adventurous guests began trickling in, arriving by boat at Ucluelet and then getting a ride up to Long Beach. The guest book’s first entry is dated July 1937.

People typically came for a week, maybe two, bringing all their own supplies. Each cabin had a stove, beds, and a few other basic items: “none of the luxuries, but all of the necessities,” Peg liked to say. Every night after sunset there was a bonfire on the beach, and guests from the cabins gathered around the crackling driftwood to visit, while out beyond the circle of light the sound of distant breaking waves filled the dark. In time, the resort was named Singing Sands.

For a few years, most of the signatures in the Singing Sands guest book were from nearby residents—Hillier, Stone, Donahue, Lovekin—but slowly the guest range expanded, reaching to Port Alberni, Victoria, and beyond. Word was beginning to spread about a small resort out there on magnificent Long Beach.

In the summer of 1939, Edith Nelson paid a return visit to her old friends. On leaving, she wrote in the guest book, “Once more unto the beach, my friends.” Whether intentional or not, her entry, playing on Shakespeare’s “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” from Henry V, was portentous. Henry V opens just before the Battle of Agincourt begins during the Hundred Years’ War. Not two months after Edith Nelson waved goodbye to the Whittingtons and headed home, Canada declared war on Germany.

Even on the remote western edge of Canada, things were about to change.

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The Fog Days of Summer

It is August, the last month of the summer holidays, and heat records may be falling daily in the rest of the province, even on eastern Vancouver Island, but not here on the west coast. While it’s not a place particularly noted for summer heat, we do have sunny and warm days, even through the fall. However, it seems that just as summer begins to take hold at Long Beach, the days of “Fogust” roll in. The fleece jacket makes a comeback, at least in the morning until the fog burns off.

Although it can show up any time of the year, ironically it is in the late summer, just when the days have grown warmer and people’s moods more carefree, that fog typically sneaks in as if hoping to break up the party. It forms when ocean breezes blow the warm, moist air from the Pacific over relatively cooler waters along the coastline. This causes the air to condense like warm breath does on a cool window. The fog further settles at the shoreline because of temperature differences between the land and sea. After days of warm temperatures, heated air above the land rises. The cooler, denser sea air flows in to fill the gap, drawing the fog along with it.

The sun’s heat can usually burn light fog off by midday, but by the time temperatures cool by evening, the fog has usually returned. Heavy fog takes longer to dissipate and may last for days until winds are able to shuffle it off.

While it can be frustrating at times to sit in fog while the rest of the province enjoys the heat of summer, fog performs a valuable service in the west coast environment. Even if it doesn’t rain for a period, the forest remains cool and the air moist because of the forest’s ability to gather the fog’s moisture. As fog condenses on the needles of coniferous trees, the water droplets fall to the ground. The soil, trees, and smaller plants store this moisture like a big sponge. Each evening, the respiring plants slowly release the collected moisture. In the summer of 2003, when Tofino’s reservoir on Meares Island came perilously close to dry each day after heavy use, it filled every evening even though there had been no rain for over a month. That was thanks to fog and forests. Up to 35 percent of west coast precipitation actually comes from fog, not rain.

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Gifts From the Sea

In the north Pacific, ocean currents cycle in immense gyres like water swirling in a wash basin. The Kuroshio and Oyashio Currents in the western Pacific merge to flow across the ocean in the Subarctic Current. This is slow motion movement: water can take two to five years to cross the Pacific, travelling about four to eight kilometres (two to five miles) a day. As it nears the coast of North America, this great river in the sea splits into the north-flowing Alaska Current and the south-flowing California Current. The physics of currents are complex and affected by localized subtleties. During the summer, for instance, a persistent counter-current moves against the prevailing surface current, flowing northwest and hugging the outer coast of Vancouver Island. At the same time, deep-water currents move in their own dynamic, driven by differences in ocean temperature and salinity.

For the beachcomber, currents serve as big conveyor belts, carrying and dropping off treasures and, soberingly, trash from the world’s oceans. It is the cross-ocean currents that deliver one of the most sought-after treasures for a Long Beach beachcomber: glass balls. Lost by the fishing fleets off the Japanese coast, these floats can travel for years on ocean currents, their journeys only interrupted when storms drive the floats ashore.

Residents of Long Beach and the west coast have always looked to the sea as a sort of variety store. Milled lumber, cedar shakes, buckets, brooms, and occasionally even food in the form of ships’ rations have all washed ashore over the years. More recently, lost cargoes of plastic toys, sports equipment, and Italian sandals have kept avid beachcombers busy.

Ultimately, even these treasures are really just garbage, cast or lost overboard. For years, they cycle in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swath composed primarily of tonnes of plastic bits that cover an ocean area about twenty times the size of Vancouver Island. Much of this sort of plastic, mostly in small pieces, winds up on Long Beach or, worse, in the stomachs of sea birds that have mistaken the bits for food.

When Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited Long Beach, he was given a classic west coast gift: a glass ball. The floats come from the nets of Japanese fishers and range in size from that of a small orange to a large beach ball.