An unflinching example of genuine island life
Your address might change, but that doesn’t mean everything else does, Jules Torti writes.
Between Newcastle and Gabriola Island, less than two kilometres from Nanaimo Harbour, Protection Island’s populace reaches 300 when the barometer is friendly. Come winter, only 150 brave the moody isle, which is only a few football fields in size.
Amber McMillan’s memoir, The Woods: A Year on Protection Island, introduces readers to the motley crew that she called neighbours. All possessing the necessary quirks, dysfunction and tempers for blockbuster reality TV, the community is ripe with online hotheads (who post accusatory messages on the local listserv public forum), busybodies and “blissfully unconcerned” uninvolved ordinaries.
There’s Brad, the neighbour to the right with an obnoxiously loud power tool collection and thankfully deaf wife. To the left there’s Keith who is equally at home baking shortbread cookies or tinkering with broken machine parts and marooned boats — in heels and a skirt, of course.
Seeking a respite from an impossibly lingering and slushy Toronto winter, McMillan, her pillar of a husband Nate and precocious five-year-old Lily pack up a frazzled Ontario life for the magic of Protection Island. Once away from the “haste and blitz” of Toronto, the “gauzy hours and formless weeks” of unemployment, miserable drizzle and chronic obstacles blur the initial promise of contentment in B.C.
As outliers, McMillan and her family struggle to navigate the unspoken laws of the island, especially the Mud Bay dock code (which results in a smashed window and their boat locks being repeatedly cut in the cloak of night). Their tiresome Toronto subway commute begins to pale when faced with a dodgy golf cart for land transport and the semi-reliable Protection Island connector ferry.
The island has invisible rites of passage that remain undefined to newcomers. Logging time on the island and buying the prerequisite golf cart and boat fails to earn them any badges. Just-baked pies are the token remedy for all ailments and flattened beer caps are de rigueur on privies.
For anyone who has attempted a cross-Canada move, packing more potential than belongings, The Woods will resonate. For those who have jumped cannonball-style from seriously urban to an attempt at off-grid life, McMillan’s year on the island will serve as incentive or a 224-page re-evaluation period.
Frustrated with a depleting bank account and zero response from the university that she hoped to land a gig at (versus doing part-time admin work at a gymnastics studio in Nanaimo), McMillan begins to devise “fullstop disaster” options if island life tanks. She uses viable hours at her lacklustre job to scroll apartment listings in Montreal. As unsustainable costs, commutes and meddling neighbours threaten to crush their enthusiasm, McMillan has an epiphany. Protection Island “was the best idea we had of everything Toronto wasn’t, and we weren’t afraid because we had each other.” But, in the same breath, “We changed our situation, and we didn’t change it at all.”
It’s part of the clunky human condition. In the quest for happiness and a sense of belonging, McMillan too believed things would become easier somewhere else.
In the end, mothers know best. McMillan’s mom reminds her “that small communities can be difficult places and you may never belong.” In another tete-atete, she gently prods, “the question is not why is this so difficult, because of course it is, you knew it was going to be hard; the question you need to ask is why you chose this for yourselves.”
For McMillan, who always feels like she’s coming from the wrong direction, her mother’s prudence begins to take hold. And, the year-long romp, whether deemed gen-X escapism or chasing an unattainable dream, is revisited again when Nate is offered a job on the Sunshine Coast. The saga continues, and hopefully will culminate in another book.
If you are toying with the notion of island life, McMillan’s The Woods is necessary and honest research into the pros, cons and headbanging, eye-rolling panorama of life on a tiny island. And, as McMillan’s mother would say, “Just remember, wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”