Farewell to a legend at wilderness oasis
Monique Knighton, who has died at 78, and her husband, Peter, provided hikers with soulful sustenance at their isolated restaurant, halfway along the West Coast Trail
The world lost Monique Knighton this past week. We don’t yet know if it also lost Chez Monique’s. Both the 78-year-old and the wilderness oasis she ran with her husband, Peter, were Vancouver Island legends.
For the past quarter-century Chez Monique’s, found halfway along the rugged West Coast Trail, has arguably been Canada’s least probable, most appreciated store and restaurant.
Its isolation allowed it to operate beyond the reach of officialdom: No regulation, no building permits, no business licence, no health inspection, no zoning, no nothing except the most delicious cheeseburger ever and a helping hand for those who needed one as they staggered off the 75-kilometre trail just south of Carmanah Point.
Except now, that helping hand has been stilled. Monique died at Victoria General Hospital on New Year’s Eve, a long history of health problems catching up to her.
“She always gave to everyone but herself,” says her daughter Sandi. “She quite literally gave the boots off her feet.”
It’s uncertain whether Chez Monique’s will reopen when hiking season begins in May, but Peter, also 78, says the family will try: “We’re going to do our best to roll up our sleeves on Monique’s behalf and our own behalf to make it work.”
If they succeed, it will be another chapter in a remarkable story.
Monique was a big-city girl, a French-speaking native Montrealer with Irish and Algonquin roots, when she met Peter in Vancouver in 1984. Peter had worked for a chemical company there for 20 years, but he was born not far from Carmanah back when there was an Indigenous settlement at Clo-oose. (His surname, Knighton, evolved from his grandfather’s Nytom, which itself was an anglicized version of an Aboriginal name.)
How they ended up by Carmanah is a little complicated. Peter once said it had a lot to do with connecting with his dad, who trapped, hunted and fished there. It was also a factor that Peter didn’t see eye to eye with either the federal government or elements of the Ditidaht band, based at nearby Nitinat, so he put some distance between him and them. (Ottawa says the land on which Chez Monique’s sits is a First Nations reserve, but Peter figures all of Canada is a First Nations reserve, so simply calls the place Qwa’ba’diwa, its historical name.)
Monique, Peter and 10-year-old Sandi arrived there on July 1, 1991. “We were sleeping on the beach under a tarp,” Sandi says.
Gradually, they carved out a life: a 12-by-12 cabin, an outhouse, hoses to bring drinking water from the creek. Solar panels eventually brought a bit of power, a garden provided fresh vegetables.
They lived by the laws of nature. Other laws, those of government and the paved, Starbucked world, were irrelevant. “The education I got in the city meant absolutely nothing,” Sandi says. “Life in the city meant nothing.”
Chez Monique’s, which opened in 1993, wasn’t really planned. It just sort of emerged as bedraggled, hungry hikers turned to the Knightons for help and supplies. “I opened a can of pop and they showed up,” Monique once said.
The store is nothing fancy: Plastic and tarps wrapped around a frame of driftwood logs and rough timber, a few tables and chairs at the edge of the beach. But it’s nirvana to hikers emerging from three days on the trail. They wolf down bacon and eggs and stock up on those things they either forgot or ran out of en route: Advil, toilet paper, apples, Tampax, bug dope, water tablets, gaiters, chocolate bars, trail mix, liquor.
On a sunny August day, it resembles a wilderness idyll straight out of Robinson Crusoe. “It was a relaxing environment,” says Monique’s son Dan Millard, on the phone from his home in Missouri.
“You could sit there all day and not feel like you had to pack up and go.”
That idyll is hard work, though. Everything — food, propane for the grill, chests of ice — must be boated in from Port Renfrew, the trip taking 45 minutes to two hours, depending on the weather. It’s either that or seven kilometres by foot up a billygoat trail to a logging road, then a three-hour drive to Duncan or Nanaimo.
When the weather turns, it’s a fight just to survive. Monique would send Sandi scampering sure-footed and shoeless through the rocks and logs to bring in bluelipped, shivering German tourists amid storms that could rage and howl for days. One night, the Knightons sardined 25 hikers into a cabin, stuffed another 15 in the store itself. (Tributes from those they helped have poured into the Friends of Chez Monique’s on the West Coast Trail page on Facebook.) Two years ago, the family lost their boat in a storm, a crippling blow.
“That place, it’s do or die,” Sandi says. “It was always such a damned struggle.”
It took a special sort of strength to maintain the toehold, but Monique had it. “She was feisty,” Dan says.
Peter says Monique didn’t just love the physical beauty of the place, but felt tied to those who had lived there before. “She thought that there was something spiritual.”
Monique herself spoke of its splendid isolation in a 2002 interview: “We have seven months a year where we can be ourselves, with no pressure, and five months a year when we have people.”
That was when the Knightons still lived there year-round. Sandi was the first to leave, being well into her teens when she moved in with brother Dan on the Lower Mainland, where she pursued more conventional education. Peter and Monique hung in for another year or two, but Monique’s health concerns changed things. “She really wanted to stay there full-time, but the doctors said it wasn’t a good idea,” Peter says.
So they would winter on the mainland (Dan notes that his mother recently earned a horticulture degree in the Fraser Valley), returning for the May-October hiking season, often with kids and grandkids in tow.
Last year was hard. Monique’s health was failing, and they almost lost Peter when he tried to save their new boat in a violent storm. The emotion in Sandi’s voice climbs as she describes a hair-raising episode that culminated in her father crashing the boat onto the beach, where she heaved him over her shoulder and away from the crashing waves.
Later, after they took him to hospital, he was found to be suffering from life-threatening sepsis. That was, effectively, the end of Monique and Peter’s time at the store; Sandi ran it for the summer until Peter came back to button things up in September.
Opening it again wouldn’t be easy, but little about the life Monique Knighton embraced was.