The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (10 page)

While the rest of British Columbia—particularly the city of Vancouver, which is one-third Chinese, with healthy Greek, Indian, Jewish and German neighborhoods—has become a polyglot mix, Victoria clings to its English past, having transplanted many habits of the old island in the Atlantic to the new island in the Pacific. In Victoria, Empire Day is a showy holiday for members of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the British Empire, which some less charitable Canadians call the Imperial Order of Dotty Englishwomen. The Royal Commonwealth Society and the Monarchists League also stage a variety of functions which inevitably conclude with tea-drinking and God-save-the-Queen-hailing. When Queen Elizabeth II last visited Victoria a few years back, the town spent thirty thousand dollars to dredge the harbor for Her Majesty’s personal yacht, the
Britannia
. Few complained. On Empire Day this year, the Queen’s representative to British Columbia, the Honourable Robert Gordon Rogers, visited the small town of Cumberland, and ten thousand people lined the streets in a rain storm to see him. He was astonished. Before the stroke of a pen changed him from Mister to Honourable, the former chairman of the board of Crown Zellerbach Company had been called timber baron, forest-stripper, strike-buster, and worse. But as soon as he became the twenty-fourth Lieutenant-Governor for the Province of British Columbia, overnight he was royalty. The Queen’s Rep—he’s played host to Di and Charles, chatted with Philip, and of course exchanged words with QE-2 herself.

The Tweed Curtain: a fuzzy black-and-white picture in the Royal Museum of British Columbia shows the Royal Engineers surveying the boundary of the United States and British Columbia. The line was drawn in 1846 at the 49th Parallel (Polk was now waging war with Mexico, and couldn’t afford to fight the British over wilderness in the Northwest). Lower Vancouver Island, and a little tongue of land called Point Roberts fall below the line. The 282-mile-long island went to Great Britain. Point
Roberts, which is not much bigger than a stadium parking lot, went to the United States; it has essentially become a shopping mall with a border crossing. A dozen years after the border papers were signed, the Royal Engineers were sent out into the forest along the 49th Parallel to find and define this bloody line between Our Way of Life and the filthy Yanks in Washington Territory. In the picture, they are literally cutting and marking the border, a broad swath through the trees. And, while doing so, are dressed in pressed red serge uniforms and funny hats.

For introductory answers as to why this island in the North Pacific still clings to royal fussiness, I look up Molly Ingram, chairwoman of the Monarchists League. Four decades of life in Victoria have not softened the syllables as they march out of Mrs. Ingram’s mouth in the accent of the Empire. A London native, she moved to India just before the war, and served the Empire in a variety of capacities, including espionage work. After the war, like many a British civil servant taking the slow route home to England, she stepped off the boat in Vancouver Island and never got back on. Now, she is the unofficial link between the monarchy and island residents who wish to stay in contact with royalty. A charming woman with a wonderful garden full of roses that blossom year-round, Mrs. Ingram has met the Queen a number of times. “She’s so amusing, the Queen, and we get along quite well.” And just what is the Monarchists League?

“Why, it’s hundreds and hundreds of people here who think the monarchy is frightfully important,” she says.

Every year, on April 21, the members of the Monarchists League hold a dinner in honor of the Queen’s birthday. It’s all very solemn and proper, and there’s nothing funny about it. Aside from the dinner, they meet for cookies and tea and royalty-talk, and try to encourage more education in the Canadian school system about the role of the British monarchy.

“I think it’s frightfully important to keep a sense of Empire, don’t you?” says Mrs. Ingram. Her ancestors, she explains, did foreign duty in India beginning in 1816, and she continues the family tradition in the Province of British Columbia. “To me, the monarchy is all about continuity, which you don’t have much of in the States.”

When I ask her why the personality of Victoria is so different from that of the land just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Mrs. Ingram tries to maintain her politeness. “I’m very affectionate for the Americans, and I happen to like a great many of them,” she says. “But our life up here is
not like that of you people down there because … well, if you’ll excuse my saying so, what you’re all about is money, money, money. Yes? And that’s not us. We live for something more.”

Eighteen miles south of this toe of the Empire, on the American side of the strait, 150 men have just been given their pink slips from a timber mill at Port Angeles, a Resource Town that’s been through one too many boom-and-bust cycles. Although the town’s setting is breathtaking, in the foothills of the Olympics overlooking the water, nature and man struggle to get along, like a bad marriage sputtering through the hurt phase. Beat-up trucks with gun racks stop-and-go through the Lotto sales outlets. Ministers hold revivals in mobile homes. Billboards block views of the mountains and the strait with promotions for motor-home parks. Logs are stacked high around the port, the transit point for local timber ripped from the rain forest and shipped raw overseas. There is a sense that life is two steps out of reach and moving away fast.

Here in Victoria, the resource rat race is not as obvious. Although one in every two dollars generated on Vancouver Island comes from the forest-products industry, there are no sulfur-belching pulp mills, no clearcuts on the immediate horizon, no trailer-home parks on fresh-cleared stumpland, no drive-through booths for Jesus. Part of this picture is illusory: the interior of the island has been shaved to bare stubs; even sections of Strathcona Provincial Park have been clearcut. But in Victoria the land-scraping is out of view, not unlike the more abusive acts of British imperial rule at the height of the Empire.

This is not the England of Dickens, but the England of Hyde Park and Lord Byron. Double-decker buses cram streets named Royal Oak and Cadboro Bay. There’s a pub and teahouse on every other corner. Clipped accents—real and contrived—thick ankles and sensible shoes are the rule, along with that peculiar British distaste for sweat. It takes me three days before I understand a joke. When a man’s hat falls off, and he looks both ways and says “Excuse me” before picking it up—is that funny? In Victoria, it is.

Of course, there’s a castle on the highest hill in town, a four-story haunt of sandstone and brick with thirty-nine rooms, eighteen fireplaces, a three-thousand-pound billiard table, and chairs with little notches in them (a place for the gentlemen to put their swords). “Those Victorian men were so imaginative then,” says a blue-haired keeper of the Craigdarroch
Castle, which looks like the Gothic home of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in the Hitchcock film
Rebecca
. On this side of the Tweed Curtain, the Resource Barons built great monuments to themselves after stripping the forests and digging up the earth. Craigdarroch is the stone dream of a Scotsman, Robert Dunsmuir. Having exploited the richest seam of coal ever found on Vancouver Island, he tried to build his Xanadu here, but died the year before it was completed in 1890. The British Empire was at its peak then, covering more than nine million square miles with a total population of 305 million people. However, the Empire had a trade deficit, importing thirty percent more than it exported. I culled this information from a hundred-year-old dish inside the castle, a commemorative plate from Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. “Don’t touch, sir,” the keeper scolds me, flashing a frown identical to the scowl worn by the Queen in the souvenir dish.

Walking away from the castle, I look out across the strait at the Olympic Mountains, still puzzled as to how this carpet of Anglo civility was laid over this land of glacial disorder. Some of the natives on this island were cannibals, others fierce warriors, but they are best known as artists, carvers of the totem pole and sculptors of animistic face masks. The Russians, the Spaniards, the French and the Yanks all nibbled at parts of Vancouver Island. It was the British, the apostles of rose gardens and high tea, who nicknamed this place “England of the Pacific,” and sent boatloads of pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, Queen-loving, tea-drinking gentlemen here to settle it. Unlike the American settlers, who brought bibles and guns to their new land, the British immigrants were urged to arrive with cricket bats, carriage harnesses and a library of the classics. In 1853, the same year Winthrop visited the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost of Fort Victoria, the Honourable Charles Fitzwilliam, a member of the British Parliament, was also touring the colony on the Pacific. “The climate appeared to me particularly adapted for settlement by Englishmen,” he wrote.

The monthly mean temperatures of Victoria are almost exactly those of London—both cities average 55 degrees Fahrenheit in May, 60 in June, 63 in July, 63 in August, and 39 in January. But climate alone does not make a cousin. Rudyard Kipling wrote after his visit more than a half-century ago:

To realize Victoria, you must take all that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at Hong Kong, the Doon, the Sorrento and Camps Bay; add reminiscences of a thousand islands and arrange the whole around the Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for backdrop.

Most early English visitors intended nothing more than a stopover on the way home from Empire duty, expecting to find horizontal showers and suicide-gray skies. Instead, they found the Blue Hole, a term used by pilots cruising above the predominant cloud cover. The Olympic Mountains snag the Pacific clouds and wring them till they’re dry, creating a rain-scarce zone over the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula, the San Juan Islands and the lower part of Vancouver Island. So, while it pours 150 inches or more on the Pacific shore, fifty miles away the American town of Sequim gets less rain than Los Angeles. Victoria is at the north end of the Blue Hole. As I look out now at the Olympics, the tips are covered in dense clouds while sunlight saturates Victoria. This is Canada’s Palm Springs; people from all over the Great White North come here to “winter” in a town that is actually farther north than any of the major cities of Eastern Canada.

In the last grip of sunlight, the world is as it would be if every square inch of land had a benevolent keeper. Azaleas, dwarf junipers and the yellow blooms of the marsh marigold crowd the view to the south. The view the other way brings flowering Japanese crabapples near beds of anemone and polyanthus. The land rolls and buckles, rippling color lines in the fading light. Then, the sun drops behind the glass of Brentwood Bay, fifteen miles north of the center of Victoria. A full moon is on the edge of the tree line, sending light back into the lake below, an abandoned quarry pit. From the center of the deep lake, water shoots up, a lavender-colored spray followed by a pair of green bursts and now a rainbow finale. The effect is of a giant blossom, a hydro-flower, unfolding then retreating in the kind of fast-forward used in the old Disney nature films. Other lights come on, spotlighting rockeries in full flower, archways of purple roses. All around, a full 130 acres has been crafted into controlled beauty, offset only by the odd sight of an old kiln stack poking above the trees. It is not the muscled supergrowth of the rain forest, nor the wildflower-meadows of the high country. It is the stamp of the Empire in the land of evergreen.

When the railroads were emptying thousands of newcomers into the cities of the Northwest and the forests and mines were being scraped in
a frenzy, Robert Pim Butchart ran a turn-of-the-century limestone quarry here, from which he extracted material for cement. It made him a very wealthy man. When the quarry was all used up, Mrs. Robert Pim Butchart was repelled by the brutalized landscape left behind; it was ugly and offensive. She set out to remake it, planting poplars and rhododendrons, wallflowers and creeping ivy—anything that would grow and produce lasting beauty in the temperate climate of southern Vancouver Island. Thus began Butchart Gardens, a shrine as pulse-quickening to gardeners as Graceland is to Elvis Presley fans.

The Blue Poppy of Tibet, first planted in North America here from seeds given Mrs. Butchart by the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, leaves an Impressionistic blur against the fountain of bronze dolphins cast in Florence. The poppies are a British colonial legacy, brought back to England by an army captain. I have never seen anything like them. Here, they coexist with a Japanese garden that is a hundred yards from the seashore, and an Italian garden surrounded by fifty-foot-high cypress trees. The mind rushes to overstatement. But this much seems obvious: not even the Tuileries of Paris can compare. Strolling on the grounds, I hear Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, French, Dutch, Japanese. They make the common sound of awe. In transforming this quarry pit to paradise, Mrs. Butchart has proven that the land of the Northwest does not have to be scraped bare to turn a profit.

The lesson seems lost on the rest of Vancouver Island. From the fjords of the east side to the ocean shore of the west, hill after hill has been completely stripped. On this week in midspring, the largest western red cedar in the world has just been discovered in the thin coastal sanctuary of Pacific Rim National Park. The joke around Victoria is that the tree is the only western red cedar left on the island. A marvel, this tree, twenty stories high, as big in diameter as a municipal water tower, sixty-two feet around, more than 2,100 years old. It was a seedling before Julius Caesar was born, an aging giant long before Columbus landed in the Bahamas. There are more of these monoliths hidden in the park, but few people know about them.

Going from the perfection of the Butchart Gardens to the fecundity of the island’s remaining rain forest, I’m struck by this irony between the British view of natural beauty and the native perspective. In Victoria, they have taken virtually every plot of available land and whipped it into a proper, weedless, well-mannered thing of beauty—controlled at all times by the tastes of the master. Much of the rest of the island is a moonscape with stumps. Those groves of old trees still standing and the
unmarred shores of rock and wildflower—the draws of a province which advertises itself to the rest of the world as Super, Natural—have received only belated attention from the government or the garden clubs. “Yes, that’s the old-growth forest,” you hear them say. “And where’s the bloody horticultural identification tag?” The wild becomes beautiful only after it’s shackled, put on a diet of chemical nutrients, and trained to perform on a seasonal schedule.