The Hope of Salt Spring Island

Dock at Ganges, Salt Spring Island

I came back to Vancouver last Thursday to, amongst other things, watch the World Cup of soccer. Vancouver is one of the two Canadian cities hosting. Toronto is the other. I ran into a bunch of Swiss fans downtown at an Irish pub called The Shamrock, in for Switzerland versus Algeria. One of the Swiss wanted to know why nobody in Vancouver speaks French. I asked who they were going for, Switzerland or Algeria. 

The nationalistic chanting, flags and Canada-themed clothes (hoodies, scarves, jerseys with a maple leaf) and Canada clamor has a way of tiring me out. I don't know how many times I have had to express being Canadian is not achievement -- we were simply lucky enough to be either born here or to have found a way in. Being Canadian is random. There really is no call for us to be a proud of where we were squeezed out on the map. We must be lucky not to have been born into extreme poverty or a rigid society that discounts minorities or the rights of the in-group. I decided to leave the celebration, flags and shirts, beavers and moose, behind for respite on one of British Columbia's Gulf Islands: Salt Spring Island. 

The Gulf Islands are situated between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. Salt Spring Island is closer to Victoria than the mainland. The island, as with the other Gulf Islands, is known for its beauty, with beaches and a laid-back counter-culture atmosphere. Draft dodgers from America, looking to sit out the Vietnam War, often showed there. Mifflin Gibbs, publisher of Mirror of Times, California's first black newspaper, led a group of 800 disenfranchised African Americans to Vancouver Island and Salt Spring Island in 1858. Gibbs went on to become British Columbia's first black elected official. Japanese immigrants started coming to Salt Spring in the 1880s. They worked mainly on farms or as fishers. According to Charles Khan, Salt Spring: The Story of an Island, 77 Canadians of Japanese descent were interred into concentration camps set up by the Canadian government far away from Salt Spring Island during World War II. The land owned by these Canadians was to be held in trust, to be returned later. Seems only one family of Japanese descent ever regained their land on Salt Spring Island.

Getting to Salt Spring is a lot easier now. There is a double decker bus from the Bridgeport Skytrain Station in Richmond to the ferry dock at Tsawwassen. The ride takes 35 minutes. At Salt Spring Island, it was trickier. The city bus from the dock to Ganges, the major town on Salt Spring, comes infrequently and is actually just a van. My sister and I lined up. There were a few Taiwanese people in front of us. When the bus-van finally did arrive, their traveling companions came out of the woodwork and took a place in front of us in the line. I am not really sure if that is cutting in line. I guess it is not. We could not get on the busvan now. The city busvan driver explained every rider must remain seated during the trip. The distance from the ferry to Ganges is around six kilometers. An employee working BC Ferries said we were still lucky because we came on a Monday. She never goes downtown on weekend. "Too much traffic" she explained. The island's population is around 11,500. 

My sister ordered a cab and two travelers from Beijing asked if they could share. I should have asked what they were doing this far from home. They were so amazed I could speak Chinese that we could hardly move on to a different topic. One of the guys has been to Taipei four times. That is not such an easy feat these days; Taipei used to be open to Chinese tourists during President Ma's tenure.  That was in the last decade. I gave that guy the business card for my restaurant in Taiwan. I hope he can visit.

I picked up T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems from the Rotary Club's "Take a book or leave a book" table at the Salt Spring Island ferry dock. I want to quote Eliot as a way of extricating myself from this blog post. I cannot find a verse in what I have read so far of The Waste Land and Other Poems that I care for. OK. Let's do it this way then: "And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!" Afternoon and evening are not really the same thing. If a thing were peaceful, why punctuate it with an exclamation mark? "Smoothed by long fingers." Are you talking about the yellow fog that rubs its fingers on everything in the city again? "Asleep . . . tired . . .  or its malingers." The ellipsis might be the laziest device in writing. You fill in the blanks on the dots I left. If you come up with something meaningful, I truly meant that. "Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me" writes T.S. Eliot. 

This duplex was across the road from where we stayed, up Rainbow Drive into the hills.

Three books for $10 total. One book was claimed from the Rotary table.