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Sandhill Creek flows onto the section of Long Beach locally known as Combers Beach.
8. Unknown No More
IN THE summer months at Long Beach, we’ve come to expect that many of our visitors will be keen to have at least one feast of Dungeness crab, a seafood for which the area is well known. We’re only happy to oblige. Unless we’ve had time to go out in our boat and set the crab trap, we do the next best thing: head to the house of a local fisherman when the red crab-shaped for sale sign is out. Either way, I’m always reminded of tales of the days when crabs were so plentiful that people used rakes to scrape crabs out of the tide pools at Long Beach.
One of the most popular spots for catching crab in the past was the Great Tide Pool at the south end of the beach, today near the park interpretive centre. It seems that everyone staying at the beach, whether in a resort or camping or squatting nearby at Wreck Bay, made the trek to the pool when they had a hankering for crab and wanted easy take-out. Today, it is rare to find any Dungeness crab in that tide pool. Still, there is much life to see there and in the other tide pools at Long Beach and all along the west coast’s rocky shores.
When the tide is out, tide pools provide vital refugia—literally, refuges—ideal marine “safe houses” for intertidal animals that can’t tolerate air exposure and changes in temperature or salinity very well.
In tide pools, the line between plants and animals is, at least superficially, blurred. Vibrant green “flowers” are really sea anemones, a marine invertebrate whose chubby petal-like tentacles capture food. Crusty-looking barnacles, which seem as inert as the rocks they affix to, also come alive when covered with water, their shrimp-like animal selves sending out feathery cirri to fan the water for food. Even the walls of tide pools are covered in life. The bubblegum-pink splashes are coralline algae, and the scarlet swatches are a type of sponge, also an animal. Nothing moves too quickly in a tide pool with the exception of sculpins, well-camouflaged fish that dart about like tiny Cold War spies in a B movie. Sit quietly and you might also see a small shell edge sideways as a hermit crab shuffles on, or the spine of a sea urchin rotate in its socket, or a sea star slip, almost imperceptibly, lower into the water. Predator, prey, herbivore, carnivore, scavenger—each member of a tide pool plays a role in maintaining that community’s balance.
It’s hard not to observe a tide pool and see a perfect mini-community, appealing in its apparent orderliness and completeness, at least for that moment. Both time and tide inevitably bring change, however. Sometimes it is subtle. A change in temperature after a series of hot days might be the demise of one species, upsetting the balance of who eats whom and how often. Adjustments are made. Sometimes the change is wrought much more harshly and without warning, like when the sharp claws of a rake scour repeatedly through the tiny landscape or cars race through or fighter planes strafe the waters. Adjustments are also made then, but not without casualties.
In fact, the day-to-day interactions in a tide pool community are constantly shifting in relation to outside influences. In that respect, they are not all that different from human communities.
The Post-War Tourism Vanguard
The intense period of activity during World War II considerably stirred the waters of community life at and near Long Beach. With the war over, the normal course of daily business resumed, but with a difference.
Fishing and forestry breathed life and wages into Tofino and Ucluelet, but now there was a nascent third sector taking form. The early seeds of a tourism trade planted and fussed over for more than five decades had rooted with the hint of finally bearing fruit. It helped that a good percentage of the more than one thousand servicemen and civilians who had “discovered” Long Beach were spreading the word about this stellar holiday destination. One reality remained, however, to thwart those with visions of a burgeoning tourist trade: there was still no simple or direct access to the island’s west coast. The August 12, 1949, issue of Island Events magazine, for example, ran an article called “Long Beach Beckons,” describing Peg Whittington’s “famous resort,” Singing Sands. All you had to do to get there, the writer added, was to go to Port Alberni by car, bus, or train, take the MV Uchuck from there out to Ucluelet, travel by bus from Ucluelet to Long Beach, and then walk from the drop-off down to Singing Sands. Peg would collect the luggage from the bus with her horse and cart.
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Guests to the Singing Sands resort at Long Beach would be met at the bus by Peg Whittington, her dog Posh, and her pony Duchess, who would pull the guests’ luggage to the resort in a cart.
Certainly this kind of adventure wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but Long Beach’s appeal to a growing number of the holidaying public, regardless of the challenges to get there, showed no signs of abating. It was almost twenty years since the Donahues and the Whittingtons had first pitched their respective tents at the beach and then gone on to establish their own resorts. As demand for accommodation mounted during the summer, Camp Maquinna and Singing Sands soon saw more company.
WICKANINNISH LODGE
One of the first couples to add to Long Beach’s resort selection were Nellie and Joe Webb. The couple moved from Duncan on eastern Vancouver Island “up and over the mountains” to the west coast in the late 1940s. The Webbs conceived of a resort that stressed comfort and friendliness over “fashionableness.” They bought the property tucked into the southeast end of Wickaninnish Bay and drew up plans for their new business. They envisioned a modest camp with a cluster of simple cabins where, in such a beautiful setting, little embellishment would be necessary. At Wickaninnish Lodge, imagined the Webbs, visitors could escape their city-weary lives to stroll the vast beach, gaze into tide pools, relax by the fire with a book, or stare out the window all day if they so chose.
The couple acquired a section of the hospital building from the air force base in Tofino after it closed, moving the structure to their site and turning it into the main lodge. In time, they added a few small cabins. Visitors to the resort could rent housekeeping cottages for $25 a week or purchase an “American plan” package, with the resort providing all the meals. A single room in the lodge, with all meals, went for $45 a week. Nellie’s mother, Mrs. Kerr, helped in the kitchen and won over many a visitor with her fine meals and even finer pastries. Of the Webbs, Joe was the more social, always willing to chat with guests. Nellie, though pleasant, always seemed to be working. With her power saw (“Wee MacGregor”) and her horse (Punch) attached to a small cart, she was a regular sight up and down the beach, cutting firewood or gathering seaweed for the lodge’s large garden.
The gracious personal touch of the hosts, the comfortable cabins on the Pacific’s doorstep, and the memorable meals combined to rapidly earn the Webbs a devoted clientele who returned year after year.
Notable among those were Group of Seven artist Arthur Lismer and his wife, Esther. They spent their first summer at the resort in 1951, rebooking the same cabin for sixteen more years after that. The six weeks they installed themselves annually at Long Beach were a precious time for the Lismers and, as Canadian art historian Dennis Reid writes, the coast was an ideal retreat for the famous artist, being “perfectly suited to the increasingly personal nature of his painting, which was dependent upon an intense and intimate familiarity with natural forms.”
Many Long Beach residents today still remember Lismer sitting with his paint box or sketch pad, walking along the beach or swimming. At the end of their holiday each summer, the Lismers hosted a small gathering at the cabin, sharing the season’s work with their summer neighbours.
Near the end of Arthur’s life, Long Beach became the couple’s choice for their only annual retreat. Their last visit was in the summer of 1968; Arthur died the next year.
THE COMBERS RESORT AND LONG BEACH BUNGALOW
The next people to fall in love with Long Beach enough to move there permanently and start a resort were Edgar and Evelyn Buckle and their boys, Neil and Dennis. It was a homecoming of sorts, as Evelyn had visited the beach as a child when her father, Frank Garrard, worked on the coast as a lineman. It took only two visits in 1949 to convince her husband and sons that relocating from Victoria made sense.
Neil Buckle was only twelve when they first arrived in Ucluelet on the Uchuck. A westerly was blowing spindrifts and little bits of paper, rubble, and dust down the gravel road to the dock. Someone was shooting at the crows above the local store. “I could hear the bullet zinging off into the bush,” he later recalled, adding he felt he’d stepped into a Western movie. Any qualms he had, though, rolled away like the fog bank that lifted as the family drove over a hill and dropped down to Long Beach. After helping to unload, the boys were let loose on the beach. “We walked from one end of the beach to the other time and time again,” said Neil. “I just fell in love with the place.”
The rest of the family felt the same way, and by Christmas 1950 they were packing up the last of their boxes and getting ready to make the big trek to their new home near Sandhill Creek and a section of Long Beach locally called Combers.
The Buckles’ plan was to set up a resort similar to the Donahues’ Camp Maquinna, with a few simple cabins. At first, the family lived in a tent and a house that belonged to a previous Long Beach settler while they began pushing in a road and clearing a lot for the house site. Edgar’s early death from cancer in 1954 was a blow and stalled the family’s plans, but Evelyn and the boys persevered and succeeded in completing the house and their resort, which eventually came to be known as The Combers Resort.
The third family to move up to the beach at the time and develop a resort were the Moraes: Jack, Norah, and their three teenage boys. They, like the Buckles, were from Victoria and had been looking for a change in place and routine. In 1953, they bought a quarter section with a long stretch of beachfront next to Wickaninnish Lodge. They named their business Long Beach Bungalows.
The Long Beach Community Expands
Through the 1950s, not only was the number of small resorts on Long Beach increasing, but so was the size of the community. The Lovekins still had their house on the hill, now being enjoyed by the family’s second and third generations. Many other cabins and permanent homes had been built in the area by then, both along the Ucluelet-Tofino road and on the beach. A few Tla-o-qui-aht families lived permanently at Esowista, and at Schooner Cove were several cabins, including one owned by the Hillier family, passed down from the days when the Hillier brothers helped George Jackson clear land for his “Hesawista” subdivision.
In 1958, Tofino resident George Nicholson summarized the picture at Long Beach this way: “The present settlement of this coming seaside resort comprises about 30 permanent homes, four resorts (with cabins), and 50 summer cottages occupied during the summer months by owners from different parts of the Island and the mainland. All the buildings are partly hidden, for the entire waterfront is still heavily wooded.”
A Road Runs to It
The long-promised road to link the west coast to the rest of the island finally did become a reality. On August 24, 1959, the Vancouver Sun reported that a cavalcade of seventy-four cars loaded with three hundred ecstatic Tofino and Ucluelet residents arrived at Port Alberni, the first unofficial party to drive over the new gravel-and-dust route.
After that initial christening, Highway 4 was officially opened on September 4, 1959. “Highway” was perhaps overstating the nature of the thoroughfare, which as welcome as it was, in no way presumed to be a multi-lane graded and paved route. The highway linked two logging roads, one from the west coast and one from Sproat Lake, to a thirty-kilometre (eighteen-mile) stretch of government-built road in the middle. Narrow in parts, devoid of barriers, and often muddy and pothole-riddled, the route also included a series of steep switchbacks high above Sproat Lake that were especially terrifying to negotiate in the dark or fog. Because the roads were being used for active logging, gates on either end of the highway were closed to public traffic from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M. on weekdays. Just on weekends and holidays was access unrestricted. Not that the hazard of colliding with a fully loaded logging truck barrelling around a blind corner deterred everyone from making a dash for it on weekdays. Forestry crews kept a supply of padlocks handy to replace those hacked off the gates by people not keen on sticking with the new highway’s rules.
RUDE AWAKENING
The early euphoria over improved accessibility soon gave way to alarm among residents about what the open door to their playground heralded. It was great that west coast residents had a road route out, but this also meant that outsiders had an easier route in. Hardly had the dust from that inaugural cavalcade settled than the new reality set in.
Upon seeing the beach, an inordinate number of car-owning visitors had no other thought but to drive out onto the glistening sand and use it as a natural speedway. This wasn’t a new phenomenon, of course, as demonstrated by the first “motorized” visitors to Long Beach thirty years before, and, of course, locals had been using it as part of the Ucluelet-Tofino highway for years. Only now, many more people were showing up to blast across the beach and grind doughnuts in the sand, and the cars they drove were much faster and more destructive than old models. Wrote Vancouver Sun columnist Alan Fotheringham in a June 30, 1961, piece: “I drove the length of the beach, most of it at 70 mph... When the tide is out and the hard-packed sand stretches a half-mile, you can hit 100. No other beach this side of Daytona can make that statement.”
Residents watched, both amused and appalled as tourists tore up and down the beach and through the surf, often becoming swamped at the mouth of Sandhill Creek or mired in the wet sand. Many cars were so hopelessly stuck or their transmissions seized up with salt water that the owners just left them. To this day, every once in a while, especially in winter when storms and high tides have scoured the beach, a corroded chassis emerges from the sand.
Meanwhile, longtime residents of the area struggled to adjust to the flood of newcomers wandering not just on the beach but on their properties. Hardly two months had passed after the road opened that the Lovekins, Peg Whittington, and other beachfront locals found themselves dealing with uninvited visitors knocking at the door looking for water, a toilet, a phone, or help to rescue a vehicle stuck in the sand. At wit’s end, the Lovekins resorted to putting up a barbed-wire fence along the front of their property to preserve their privacy.
Despite the increased tourist traffic, residents consoled themselves with the fact that it was at least limited mainly to the summer and to certain sections of the beach. For most of the rest of the year, peace prevailed, and the beach had time to recover.
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For years, Long Beach was officially part of the highway system. High traffic, particularly on busy summer weekends, eventually led to the installation of traffic signs, including one setting the speed limit to twenty mph on the beach.
COMMUNITY IN TRANSITION
The community of Long Beach had also continued to grow over the years. By the early 1960s, at least sixty-three adult residents lived there full-time, with summer residents bumping that up to several hundred. The Moraes of Long Beach Bungalows had subdivided their property, and a collection of homes and businesses had been built near the beach and on the road down from the main highway. There was even a post office and a gas pump, and peacocks from Abbott’s Store roamed freely about, as did children and dogs. There were more homes and businesses—a motel, gas station, store, and a few cafés—along the Tofino-Ucluelet highway and even a small school, Long Beach Elementary, located up toward Schooner Cove. A defunct hangar at the airport was home to the very active Long Beach Curling Club. Residents from Tofino, Ucluelet, and Long Beach chipped in $700 to buy it, and volunteers prepared and maintained the ice each season.
Among the original resort owners at Long Beach, faces and operations were changing, too. The Donahues had left the beach and Camp Maquinna, and another couple, Esther and Terry Wilson, stepped in as caretakers of the Lovekin property. Neil Buckle and his wife, Marilyn, took over the cabins Neil’s family had built at The Combers Resort and added several more. The Moraes sold the Long Beach Bungalows to Doreen and Grant Myers. Only Peg Whittington and Singing Sands carried on as before, popular as ever with summer guests, most being longtime regulars. The biggest change in Long Beach’s small tourism sector was the new developments of Wickaninnish Lodge.
The Wickaninnish Inn
As soon as Robin Fells saw the west coast for the first time, he knew he wanted to live there. The Vancouver account executive struck up a friendship, and later a business deal, with Joe Webb. Joe had a vision of expanding his resort, seeing in its place a larger, more upscale facility, but still preserving the relaxed atmosphere of Wickaninnish Lodge. Fells crafted this vision and a business plan that he carried from bank to investor in an attempt to secure funding. Vancouver businessman Jeff Crawford eventually stepped in as a partner, providing $50,000 in financing so the project could move forward. In July 1964, the first guests were being welcomed at the twenty-two-room Wickaninnish Inn, whose restaurant and bar capitalized fully on the property’s most spectacular asset: a panoramic view of the Pacific. The brochures announced, “No radio, No newspapers, No television, No telephones.” Though informality was the inn’s byword, its wall-to-wall carpeted rooms were well equipped and full-service dining facilities fairly chi-chi for the era and location.
Juxtaposed at the opposite end of Long Beach’s accommodation options was its first campground: eighty-nine sites opened at Wickaninnish Provincial Park, which had been established at Green Point in 1962. Camping anywhere along the beach was also catching on, of course, amenities or not. After all, there was nothing like it anywhere in British Columbia. Where else could a family or group of friends pitch a tent or pull their camper right onto a west coast beach?
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The Wickaninnish Inn at Long Beach offered surf casting, clamming, beachcombing, and dancing (“whenever desired”). Its dress code: always informal.
Waikiki North
“Do you know that these West Coast beaches are better than those of the south of France? They are wider, longer and more spacious, generally with colorful surroundings, and the sand is clean and silvery. The breakers can be ‘shot’ or ‘ridden’ just as effectively as those of Waikiki and Australia.”
So wrote west coast resident R. Bruce Scott in 1937 (who must have considered the numbing water temperature too minor to mention). As prophetic as he was, even Scott wasn’t the first to mention the possibility of this new water sport for Long Beach. As early as 1929, Gertrude Jackson wrote about the potential for “surf board riding” in a long plea for a road to the west coast. However, it took until the mid-1960s for words to translate into boards on the beach. Once people started tackling Highway 4, word quickly trickled out about the “new gold” to be mined at Long Beach and Wreck Bay: surf, beach camping, and breathtaking beauty—all in infinite supply and all free for the taking. The bonanza began.
The earliest of the area’s surfers came from elsewhere on Vancouver Island and from the Lower Mainland. They had picked up the sport in California, Hawaii, and even at other breaks down the coast of Vancouver Island. Soon, a few surfers moved to area where they could indulge in their obsession as close to full time as possible. The surfing buzz was soon out, recalls Bruce Atkey, one of the first members of Long Beach’s surf community. “Here was a place you could surf, camp, and lie naked on the beach.” Atkey often had the waves all to himself, and if he did have company, it was likely Jim Sadler, another surfing original. Atkey had got his start surfing at Jordan River near Sooke, and Sadler at Pachena Bay near Bamfield. It wasn’t long before a few other locals caught the surfing bug, too, including some of the crew building the new Wickaninnish Inn. Suddenly, there were days where surf conditions dictated the project’s construction schedule.
All the early surfers were committed and passionate self-starters who had to make do with limited gear. No local surf shops at the time meant surfers had to travel to California for their gear or get creative with what was on hand. Wet suits were often ill-fitting dive suits, and many first boards were built from plans found in Popular Mechanics. The region’s first surf competitions took place then, too, with the earliest being held at Long Beach in 1966. Along with prizes for the best ride, there were also more unusual categories such as the best surfing scar. It was a modest beginning for an area that is today chock-a-block with surf shops and surf schools and that stages competitions attended by the world’s top surfers.
The allure of the big breakers and wide open spaces that had started drawing surfers to the west coast was captivating another group, too, though their interest had little to do with sport.
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Early to surfing at Long Beach, Jim Sadler was known for his innovative oven-mitt-like hand paddles and his fearless pursuit of big waves. Here, Sadler rides his homemade board in Long Beach’s first surf competition held in 1966.
Turned On and Tuned In: The Flower Children Find Wreck Bay
July 20, 1969. Around the world, more than 500 million people were watching as moon-mission astronaut Neil Armstrong announced to the world, “The Eagle has landed.” Six and a half hours later, he stepped onto the moon’s surface.
Down at Wreck Bay, dozens of people sat at the mouth of Lost Shoe Creek, clustered around Godfrey Stephens’ short-wave radio to listen to the historic event. Fires dotted the beach, the air pulsed with drumbeats, and the smell of wood smoke and dope filled the night air. Peyote buds had been tossed around like candy at a parade during the day, and the beach was primed for a party. Somewhere between two hundred and three hundred people were living at Wreck Bay that summer, and a momentous space trip to this tribe was clearly something to be celebrated in kind.
In the late 1960s, Wreck Bay was a west coast mecca for a new wave of settler looking for a better way of life. It was an era of social and political upheaval. The war in Vietnam raged. The threat of nuclear Armageddon loomed. And movements like women’s liberation and Black Power were changing the everyday life across Western society. In a world that seemed in such turmoil, escape to Wreck Bay seemed a good solution, so that’s what many people, mostly youth, did. Hippies, “flower children,” bohemians, Vietnam war resistors and young vets, draft dodgers, beatniks riding that waning wave all arrived at Wreck Bay like summoned exiles. They shed past identities, last names, and often their clothes. They built shelters in the beach logs, putting up a tent or just a piece of plastic. Some stayed in clusters, others spread out down the five-kilometre (three-mile) beach to find seclusion. Meals were often communal, a sharing of whatever could be cobbled together—like mussels, crabs, fish, and berries, supplemented with rice or oats—though hitchhiking into Ucluelet for a beer and a burger wasn’t out of the question. They played drums and flutes, carved sculptures from driftwood, cast candles in the sand, created poems from the ether, moulded pots from the clay of the Wreck Bay cliffs. A joint, a jug of cheap wine, or a tab of acid was rarely far out of reach.
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At Florencia (Wreck) Bay, Schooner Cove, Radar Beach, and elsewhere in the Long Beach area, people showed great imagination coupled with ingenuity to build their homes. They used driftwood boards, beach logs, beachcombed chains, and other pieces salvaged from the shore, forest, or dump to improvise dwellings.
Many of the beach dwellers developed a craft or art to help them generate a bit of cash. In that, Godfrey Stephens and many of his neighbours at the bay had a valuable ally in Norma Baillie, a woman who, before the most recent wave of Wreck Bay “settlers,” had lived there with her children for many summers in an old miner’s cabin. In 1967, she moved to Ucluelet full-time and opened a gift shop and gallery she named “The Wreckage,” which was built for her by Bruce Atkey. Norma often bought the work of Stephens and others, taking their carvings, patchwork clothing, candles, crochet and macramé work, and wall hangings and mobiles made with stone, bone, feathers, and shell. She became not only a pay cheque for many of the young people, but also a confidante, advisor, counsellor, and friend. “Norma would be very motherly to us,” remembers John Genn, who spent a few of those summers at Wreck Bay, “because we were irresponsible hippies. She’d say ‘I’ll give you $80 for the carving, but I’m only going to give it to you $20 a time.’ She didn’t want us to blow it all at once.”
For the most part, tensions were few between the hippies and other residents. Long Beach residents regularly gave lifts to Wreck Bay hitchhikers (including, a few times, the young Margaret Sinclair before she went on to become Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife), and there was, overall, tolerance for different ways of living. Still, flare-ups happened. On one occasion, a local bunch of vigilantes took offence to some hippies squatting in the sand dunes at Long Beach and marched down there threatening to cut their hair. Other residents and business owners were concerned that the hippies were taking over the beaches like they owned them and that their presence—especially when their presence appeared in the nude—might deter “legitimate tourists.” Dave Hardy, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, characterized the testiness as a “conflict between nature in the raw and people in the raw.”
It was easy to love Wreck Bay on a sunny summer day. During the peak years of its time as a peace-and-love haven, up to five hundred people are thought to have been living on the beach at some points in the summer. When fall and winter rolled in, the numbers always dwindled, usually to fewer than thirty. Many of the “summer hippies” drifted away to warmer and drier climates when the weather turned poor or they had school, jobs, and families in the city to get back to. The die-hards who stuck it out year-round were those who fully embraced the idea of living “off the grid.” Two of those were Merlin and Linda Bradley, who had built a substantial home near Lost Shoe Creek. They were one of the few Wreck Bay residents with a young family. Three other full-timers are almost always remembered as a trio: Chris Banke, Paul Jeffries, and Tom Richardson. They, too, built more substantial dwellings than their itinerant summertime neighbours, well away from the high tides and huge seas of winter. To survive, they sold their carvings and art and also picked up short-term jobs like working on boats during the fishing season.
More than forty years later, people who experienced those heady days at Wreck Bay talk of them mostly with fondness, as a time when they and hundreds of others were swept up in a grand experiment, trying to find a new way to live in a world that seemed hopelessly fractured and dysfunctional. “It was the healing of the place that really attracted us,” one former beach dweller recalls of the time. “There was lots of change in the world and lots of experimentation, but the beach rejuvenated us.”
Mayhem at the Tide Pool
“Six near-drownings, a water-damaged late model car, beach sand sleighing... have all contributed to an extremely busy full past week,” reads a report by one of the provincial park’s summer naturalists in 1968. The undertow on the rocks off Green Point (where Dick Whittington died in 1946) had almost caused the drowning, and the car in question had sunk so quickly that the water was up to the dashboard before the driver and his two young children could escape. The “sand sleighing” mentioned by the naturalist referred to an activity where a rider clung to a log or upturned car hood tied by a rope to a car driven at high speed down the beach. “Occasionally driftlogs or slight depressions in the sand send the rider sprawling,” the report continued. Sand sleighing later evolved into “pallet surfing,” with cars now towing riders who stood or kneeled on a wooden pallet and “surfed,” again at breakneck speed. Weaving in and out of the many pilings that still stood in the sand after World War II only added to the thrill. If a hard fall didn’t injure you, being struck by oncoming car traffic on the beach might. Just two years before, an eighteen-year-old Vancouver boy was hit by a car and killed while strolling the beach.
Long Beach and Wreck Bay had become the focus of a growing but bittersweet love affair between the environment and the public. Here, however, was a textbook example of a system cycling wildly out of balance. The passions and pressures were mounting, and before long something was going to give.