Please excuse the lapse in our Sunshine Coast coverage while Meilang and I had to dash off to California to welcome our new grandson (!) into the world. Apologies, especially, to all the wonderful Coasties who helped make our visit so memorable. Now that we're back in Canada, we'll resume our travel series and review some of the Powell River Film Festival screenings.
Once the Powell River Film Fest hit its full stride, we chose (a little wistfully) to move out of our Boxwood garden paradise so as to be closer to the heart of the action.
And what could be more central than the Old Courthouse Inn, kitty corner opposite the Festival hub at the Patricia Theatre? This meeting of two Avenues – Ash and Marine – was once the Times Square or Champs Elysées of Powell River. Its neighbourhood, Townsite, comprised the original, paternalistically planned settlement that grew up around what was once the world’s largest pulp and paper mill.
The mill still sprawls out into the harbour at the bottom of Ash Avenue, but with its capacity – and payroll – now drastically curtailed. And, now that Powell River has repurposed itself from a factory town to a recreation, retirement, educational and telecommuting Mecca, its demographic and commercial centre of gravity has shifted southwards to the trendy Westview suburb.
Which left many of Townsite’s grand old public buildings underutilised if not outright abandoned. But not for long, judging from our new digs at the Old Courthouse.
Right up until 1980, the grand, gabled, quasi-Tudor heap of a building housed – as its name implies – an actual, functioning courthouse, along with ancillary Provincial functions like the police HQ and jail cells. The hotel's eight rooms are still labelled according to their erstwhile forensic functions – Judge’s Chambers, Jury Chambers, Sherriff’s Office, Police Station and such, not to mention the original Courtroom itself.
Each room is individually decorated with an assortment of mid-20th century tchotchkes, and the geegaws spill out into the hallways.
Bric-a-brac midden. Photo: Old Courthouse Inn
Mercifully, none of the rooms is labelled “Jail.” That part of the building, the basement site of the old cellblock, once housed enough gloom to spawn a bumper crop of ghosts. But it’s now been converted into a sunny breakfast nook, Edie Rae’s Café, named after the mother of the Inn’s new co-owner, JP Brosseau.
Edie's image, in black-and-white blow-ups of 1950’s glamour poses, decks the café walls and beams down upon the window table where Leo, her husband of nearly six decades, now sits alone for his daily breakfast (“or two or three,” according to son JP; regular hotel guests are entitled to just one complimentary – and sinfully lavish – breakfast apiece).
Edie Rae herself used to regale guests in person until her death in 2015. Sadly, she died just a few months short of JP’s marriage with his business and romantic partner, Kelly Belanger, so Leo had to escort the two grooms down the aisle on his own.
It was one of Powell River’s first same-sex weddings – a testimonial to how far the place has evolved since its old mill town days. Further evidence of newfound sophistication abounds in the ongoing gentrification of the historic district.
Plans are afoot for an indoor climbing gym, a coffee-roaster, a tap house, a nightclub, a Farmers’ Market, a cheesemaker, a pizzeria and ice-creamery. It’s all to be housed in a disused 40,000 square foot shopping mall on the site of Powell River’s original Chinatown.
The mall, as well as the Merrie Olde English-style Bank of Montreal branch across the street and the stolid, brick Federal Building up the block, have been bought up by West Vancouver software millionaire Steven Brooks as part of his vision to “revive and reinvent” the Townsite heritage district.
First fruits of this passion project are the award-winning craft beers of Townsite Brewing Company, hand-tweaked by Cédric Dauchot, the only certified Belgian brewmaster West of Québec.
You can sample Dauchot’s wares in such august Vancouver establishments as The Alibi Room or Cascade Room. Or in Townsite’s own cozy Tasting Room, right after your tour of the brewhouse in the erstwhile Federal Building just down the block from the Patricia Theatre.
Some brews are simply too delicate to transport in bulk, so can only be sampled in situ. For instance the draught-only Suncoast Pale Ale. Or, if you happen to be in town on a Thursday, don’t miss the brewery’s weekly Keg Night, when seemingly half the town turns up in the Tasting Room to see what newfangled concoction Dauchot will roll out next. The week we were there it was a Meyer lemon-infused lager.
Townsite Brewing Company rolls out the barrel for Powell Riverites. Photo: Lew MacDonald
But perhaps the most site-specific brew in the Townsite line-up might be the aptly named Bois Sauvage (tr. “Wild Woods”), fermented with nameless, idiopathic, endemic wild yeasts that Dauchot somehow manages to lasso out of the very air of Powell River. Townsite Sales Director Michelle Zutz hails it (with forgivable partiality) as a kind of “wheat-based champagne,” perfect to accompany the Sunshine Coast’s famous “creamy, delicate” Okeover oysters.
Ideal Okeover pairing. Illustration: John Teniel
On her recommendation, armed with a litre of Sauvage, we headed north to sample this pairing. The Okeover Arm – a narrow inlet reached by a 4-km detour east of Highway 101 – presents just the right combination of salinity, current and tidal throughput to nurture gourmet shellfish.
And oysters are in season all winter long. Unfortunately, tourists are not, so the town’s iconic restaurant, The Laughing Oyster, was still closed when we got there and remained so right into April. That meant the only way to access the precious bivalves is to stumble upon one of the oyster farms that line the shore.
We drive down to the water’s edge on spec, but no luck. All we find is a marina with a few berthed cabin cruisers and unmanned fishing smacks. No one to ask for directions – just a signboard with a topo map of the Malaspina and Desperation Sound Marine Provincial Parks, which unfurl from Okeover across nearly 100 km2 of coast and hinterland.
Captain George Vancouver’s flagship, the 99-foot war sloop HMS Discovery, first broached the Sound in 1792. His aim: to open up a lucrative Northwest Passage sea link between the Maritimes, the Great Lakes and the Pacific Coast. But hopes were dashed – yet again! – when every promising side channel fetched up against nothing but gnashing cliffs. His sense of frustrated desolation lives on in the name he pencilled into his nautical charts for the whole craggy labyrinth.
But, for latter-day seafarers, the Sound inspires far more elation than desperation. “It’s like a salt-water Grand Canyon,” according to California yachtsman Joseph Bower. "Just don’t go in under sail.”
Parsing the signboard map, I can see why: in some spots the gorges are too steep, narrow and convoluted to admit predictable winds. Some sort of small, deft powerboat might be the craft of choice. I tentatively resolve to try it later this year in a folding dinghy with a quiet little electric motor.
To confirm the feasibility of my plan, I check in with a local mariner up the road at the Lund water taxi pier. Eminently doable, according to Ben (aka Benoît) Bouchard; even the electric motor might be overkill. “People go in there for weeks at a time with just a kayak, a tent and a water desalinator.”
Such minimalism, though, is not for everyone, Bouchard adds – luckily for him. Nowadays, he makes a comfortable living as a contractor building lavish aeries for “bazillionaires” who’ve set themselves up with private retreats on some of the flyspeck islands that dot the Sound.
“They’re not all jerks,” he shrugs philosophically. Some are even quite interesting and companionable. Bouchard has now and then enjoyed fine playtimes sharing some of their “fancy toys – personal submarines and such.”
Nowadays, he makes a comfortable living as a contractor building lavish private retreat pleasure domes on some of the flyspeck islands that dot the Sound. When I meet him, he’s winching huge sacks of concrete aggregate onto his own steel-hulled mini-tug to build a new aerie for one of his “bazillionaire” clients.
Still, the latest Goldfingeresque hideaways are a far cry from what Bouchard had in mind when he first found his way from his native Québec to Lund in pursuit of such early passions as scuba diving, guitar-plinking and playacting.
Back in the 1960’s and early 70’s the town had taken on a raffish air due to a sudden influx of war-resisters who had migrated there to get as far as they could from the Vietnam-era U.S. military draft. For many of them, Lund filled the bill. At the terminus of Highway 101, the northernmost “Mile Zero” of the 9,445-mile (15,200-km) Pacific Coast Highway from Canada to Chile, became a Mecca of free love, nearly free pot and communal living.
The scene drew questing young souls (like Bouchard) from all over North America and beyond – much to the consternation of Lund’s more conservative traditional population of loggers, fishermen and retirees. The resulting culture clashes make up the theme of a documentary, The End of the Road, by film-maker Tai Uhlman, herself a born-and-bred Lund communard.
The film premiered as a centre-piece of the Powell River Film Fest (watch this space for reviews). But by now, many of the first-generation protagonists on either side of the culture divide have already grown into their 60’s and 70’s and manage to convene quite amicably on a sunny early spring morning on the terrace of Nancy’s Bakery.
Locals of all stripes seem to agree that nobody can make a sticky bun like the eponymous proprietress, Nancy (who turns out to be Madame Bouchard, married to our dockside mariner friend). We tried one in the interest of science.
Not your everyday cinnamon bun by any means. Some subtle secret ingredient – maybe just a hint of blackberries? We packed an extra few for further experimentation.
Next up in Sunshine Coast travel series: Back from Mile Zero, via the Sliammon Nation.