God's Country, Your Backyard (cont.)

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God's Country, Your Backyard (cont.)

Back on the water, we beat a line toward Vargas Island, whose flat profile emerges through layers of fog. Vargas is covered with a blanket of ancient cedar, hemlock, and spruce. Wright steers us alongside Vargas toward a headland marked by gnarled shore pines and, a little farther, the explosions of foam on black rock that announce the open ocean. Struggling with the triple forces of tide, wind chop, and rolling swell, I make increasingly ragged strokes, remembering my guide's blithe warning about rogue waves that can wall up and slam you onto the shoal.

Before that happens we come about, heading back to the quieter end of the island and the snug harbor of the Vargas Island Inn and Hostel. Owner Neil Buckle greets us on the gravel beach and helps us carry our boats onto the lawn of the quasi-Tudor manse he and his wife, Marilyn, built on land homesteaded by his grandparents. We settle in the kitchen with the Buckles as Larry, the handyman, comes in with a bucket of Dungeness crabs fresh from the trap. By seven, we've cracked the last of the crab claws. By eight, we've basked in the sauna, plunged into the cove off the gravel beach, and are dead between the sheets.

Our main goal the next day is to reach Hot Springs Cove, about 20 miles away at the northern reach of Clayoquot Sound, where simmering natural hot springs spill into Pacific waves. The trip involves a grueling paddle against the current, so I'm a little relieved when Neil suggests we first hike to Medallion Beach, where rumor has it a giant redwood log has washed up. He wants to track the beast down and haul it back to the diesel-powered sawmill in one of his outbuildings. A boggy, overgrown, corduroy path brings us to the beach about an hour later. We pore over the debris deposited by the powerhouse tides, looking for Japanese glass-ball fishing floats that still wash up here, but find nothing more than driftwood logs and a Taiwanese butane cylinder. Then Neil discovers the redwood drift log, a profoundly weathered, ten-foot-long, four-foot-thick chunk of a thing.

"Impossible!" I blurt out. The nearest redwoods grow a thousand miles south of here, and currents along the west coast run from north to south.

"Well," Neil says with a shrug, "I don't think anyone dumped it here. And there is a current that comes up in the fall..." He digs his pocketknife into the mysterious, talismanic castaway log. "You could sure make something nice out of this."

Unfortunately, I don't have time to wait and see what Neil creates. I'm not one of Vancouver Island's 750,000 full-time residents; I have to make it to Hot Springs Cove and back and then resign myself to planning a return trip and finding new areas to explore, which shouldn't be hard. Within a few hours by car from Victoria there are a half-dozen whitewater rivers, a thousand known caves, and hundreds of lakes rife with salmon, steelhead, and trout. In Strathcona Provincial Park, you can hike to the summit of 7,210-foot Golden Hinde, and be rewarded with views of the Pacific to the west and the Strait of Georgia to the east. Feel like going off the map? Try the sprawling roadless wilderness of the island's northwestern corner. You won't have to worry about grizzlies, but you may encounter black bears, elk, and cougars. Mountain bikers can find superlative logging-road and singletrack routes just about anywhere, from the Pacific shore near Tofino to the rocky shoals of the Gulf Islands. Summer winds draw boardsailors to Nitinat and Nimpkish Lakes, and there's good diving among the scuttled Canadian navy destroyers that have been turned into artificial reefs in the Discovery Passage, halfway up Vancouver Island's eastern shore. Or you can just make sport out of walking the beaches and watching bald eagles head-butt one-ton Steller's sea lions for herring. In fact, that may be all I'll do on my next visit.