The Sunshine Coast

There is a moment on the Horseshoe Bay ferry — about twelve minutes out, when the city has disappeared behind you and the mountains are close enough to read the treeline — when something in your chest unclenches. You didn't know it was clenched. It always is.

That moment is the Sunshine Coast. Not the destination — the transition. The ferry is not a ferry. It is a decompression chamber. It is the thing that makes the Sunshine Coast feel like travel even when you live there. You cannot drive to it. You have to earn it with forty minutes of water and weather and the particular silence of a car deck at dawn.

I have lived in Roberts Creek for years. I have made that crossing hundreds of times. And I still feel it — that unclenching — every single time. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

"The Sunshine Coast is not a compromise. It is a choice. And most days, it is the best choice I have ever made."

The Trail Behind Your House

Cliff Gilker Park, Roberts Creek, BC — the trail that is always there

Cliff Gilker Park is five minutes from my house. It has been five minutes from my house for years. I have walked it in every season, in every mood, in every kind of rain that the Sunshine Coast can produce — and it produces a remarkable variety. There is the soft coastal drizzle that barely registers. There is the sideways November rain that means business. There is the brief, violent summer downpour that smells like hot cedar and disappears in twenty minutes.

Every time I walk it, I see something I haven't seen before. A shelf fungus the size of a dinner plate. A banana slug moving with the unhurried confidence of something that has been here since before the concept of urgency was invented. The way the light comes through the canopy at 8am in October, when the angle is exactly right and the whole forest goes gold for about forty seconds.

I used to fly to places to find this. I used to pack bags and book hotels and sit in airports eating bad sandwiches in order to arrive somewhere that felt like this. And it was there, sometimes. In the forests of Kyoto. On the trails above Portimão. In the parks of Paris that nobody visits because they're too busy at the Eiffel Tower.

But it was also here, the whole time. Five minutes from my house. Free. Available every morning. Not requiring a passport or a departure gate or a middle seat between two strangers.

The Coffee in Gibsons

Gibsons, BC — the harbour, the notebook, the coffee that earns its keep

There is a particular pleasure in sitting in a small coffee shop in Gibsons with a view of the harbour and a notebook and a cup of something that was made by someone who cares about it. The fishing boats are out there. The mountains are behind them. The rain is doing whatever the rain is doing. And you are here, in this specific place, with this specific cup, and nowhere else in the world is exactly like this.

That is the thing about the Sunshine Coast that people who don't live here don't understand. It is not a lesser version of somewhere else. It is not "like the south of France but cheaper" or "like the Pacific Northwest but quieter." It is itself. It has its own light, its own pace, its own particular quality of morning that you cannot find anywhere else on earth.

The untraveller's task is to notice this. To sit in the coffee shop and actually be in the coffee shop, rather than planning the next trip or scrolling through photographs of places you wish you were. To look out at the harbour and think: this is it. This is the thing I was looking for. I found it. It was here.

The Ferry as Ritual

One of the unexpected gifts of living on the Sunshine Coast is that every journey off it is an event. You cannot nip to Vancouver for an hour. You have to plan. You have to catch the ferry. You have to commit. And this commitment — this small inconvenience that residents sometimes grumble about — is actually a profound protection.

The ferry keeps the Sunshine Coast the Sunshine Coast. It keeps the pace slow. It keeps the development modest. It keeps the people who are here the kind of people who chose to be here, who decided that the crossing was worth it, who understood that the inconvenience was the point.

When I am on the ferry, I am neither here nor there. I am in transition. I am in the water. And in that in-between space — with the mountains on both sides and the sea beneath me and the city behind me and home ahead — I feel something that I used to only feel in airports. The particular aliveness of being in motion. Of going somewhere. Of having left and not yet arrived.

The Sunshine Coast gives you that feeling every time you leave. And every time you come back, it gives you the other feeling — the one that is harder to name. The one that is something like: yes. This is where I live. This is mine.

"You don't need to go far to go somewhere. You just need to pay attention."

Five Things to Do on the Sunshine Coast That Feel Like Travel

The Best Day Ever Was Already Here

I am writing this in Roberts Creek. It is raining. The forest outside my window is doing what the forest does — absorbing the rain, converting it into something green and alive and indifferent to my schedule. A raven is making a sound that I cannot describe but that I associate with everything good about living here.

I am not in Paris. I am not in Kyoto. I am not on the Amalfi Coast. I am in Roberts Creek, British Columbia, on the Sunshine Coast, which is accessible only by ferry, which has a population of about 30,000 people spread across 180 kilometres of coastline, which has no traffic lights, which has more artists per capita than almost anywhere in Canada, which smells like cedar and salt and something else that I cannot name but that is unmistakably here.

And I am having a very good day.

That is untravelling. Not a consolation prize. Not a compromise. A choice. A practice. A way of being present in the place where you actually are, rather than the place you wish you were. The Sunshine Coast makes this easy. Most places do, if you pay attention.

The world is complicated. The flights are expensive. The news is heavy. And somewhere in all of that, the raven outside my window is making that sound again. I am going to go outside and listen to it. I suggest you do the same, wherever you are.