IslandLink

Way way back when I lived in Vancouver, and was first seeking to arrange transport to visit my family on the Island, I discovered a shuttle van service that took passengers between the ferry terminal and the small towns up the coast. They were a savvy little outfit with a handful of 8-seat vans and drivers apparently earning a spare buck in a part-time job.

Subsequent years saw the number of routes and frequency of vans improve, and they upgraded to big crew vans with custom paint jobs and everything. When I moved to LA I'd still come up for Thanksgiving every year*, often making the trip from home to LAX to YVR to the Horseshoe Bay ferry to Nanaimo and onto the IslandLink bus all in one day. Checking in to the van with the very down-home sounding driver, with all the college students and hippies, was the moment I really felt I'd escaped the event horizon of LA.

As much as the business undertook service and fleet improvements, it never stopped being a scrappy little local business. The drivers were still odd-job men, retirees, or between gigs (one was an ambulance driver who picked up bus trips on his off days). My destination was on the main route between towns, and once or twice the driver agreed to drop me off more or less at my cousins' house, rather than one of the designated drop-off points. Usually I couldn't remember the exact address (the number's a bit hard to see from the street anyway) but between us we worked out where it was by shared landmarks – "between the Community Hall and the bend at the egg farm" got us close enough, except for the one time the driver actually lived on the nearest crossroad and knew exactly where to stop. And these drivers would actually drop me off, on a rural highway, usually in the dark, because we both knew where we were and it worked best for everyone – they trusted me to know what I was doing, and not sue them; I trusted them not to take advantage of my trust. None of us knew each other, but it was the sort of small-town arrangement that makes a strong case for the social contract.

I've been going back to that address approximately once a year for 18 years now. I have never lived there – never stayed longer than a week, even – but it's been the most constant location in my life, so in a funny sort of way it feels a bit like home, for a given value of home. The easygoing local familiarity of the IslandLink Bus has been part of that for most of those 18 years: if you're on this unpretentious ride, you must be a local, and are treated with the sort of kindly disregard with which locals are treated. I've just booked my bus tickets for Christmas, and am looking forward to the offhand welcome of the bus driver as a significant signpost on the way 'home.' Somewhere I've never lived, I'm made to feel more like a 'local' than most of the places I've legally resided. I know that if I moved there, in a short while I'd probably feel less at home than when I just catch a ride from the boat, but for a few days every year I belong somewhere, and that's worth far more than the fare.


*Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday in October. As Disney movies were usually U.S. Thanksgiving-ish releases while I was working there, their wrap parties were usually held that weekend. I went to the Bolt wrap party, which was fun had giant bowls of prawns, and the Frog party because it was my first film, but after that decided it was more important to go back for Thanksgiving; I missed all the others, which I can't say I ever regretted.

Erratum: It's 18 years I've been going back there, not 22. You should never trust me with numbers, ever.