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September/October 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Gulf Islands Feature: Grey Nuns Feature: Narwhal hunters The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic Re:Sources

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE In-depth: British Columbia’s Gulf Islands

It’s easy to feel wistful about what might have been when I’m aboard the Spirit of British Columbia, the Vancouver-to-Victoria ferry that weaves through the southern Gulf Islands. Even early European explorers, who found the mountainous West Coast forbidding and gloomy, admired the Gulf Islands. Garry oak meadows give the gentle hills of the islands the appearance of an English garden, and the steely North Pacific bursts into tropical blue-greens at their shores.

For the past 140 years, since non-aboriginal settlement began, the Gulf Islands have been a refuge for adventurers, eccentrics and solitude-seekers. I was almost one of them.

In 1988, when my family lived in Victoria and I was a shy 16-year-old, my mother contacted a real estate agent on the largest and closest of the southern islands, Salt Spring. She dreamt of a waterfront home. True, neighbours said that unwashed people lived in the forest and that the villages were filled with pot-smoking American draft dodgers. Though my mother wasn’t at Woodstock, she’s a free spirit who had variously been an unpublished novelist, a candle-maker and a quilter. So she brushed aside the fears of her neighbours and imagined a quiet, congenial rural refuge of artists and craftspeople. Oh, yes, and it was cheap. She was widowed and had no job, but she was comfortably looking at oceanfront properties.

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