South Away Read online

  Copyright © Meaghan Marie Hackinen 2019

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system—without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: South away : the Pacific Coast on two wheels / Meaghan Marie Hackinen.

  Names: Hackinen, Meaghan Marie, 1985- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190086963 | Canadiana (ebook) 2019008703X | ISBN 9781988732633 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988732640 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781988732657 (Kindle)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hackinen, Meaghan Marie, 1985- | LCSH: Hackinen, Meaghan Marie, 1985-—Travel—Pacific Coast (North America) | LCSH: Bicycle touring—Pacific Coast (North America)—Anecdotes. | LCSH: Cyclists—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Women cyclists—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Pacific Coast (North America)—Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC F851 .H33 2019 | DDC 917.904/34—dc23

  NeWest Press wishes to acknowledge that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.

  Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Board Editor: Anne Nothof

  Cover design & typesetting: Kate Hargreaves

  Author photograph: Matthias Rau

  All Rights Reserved

  NeWest Press acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.

  201, 8540 – 109 Street

  Edmonton, AB T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

  1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19

  For my grandmother, Marie Hackinen, who taught me that adventure roams in foxglove meadows and ferned ravines.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One: Ladies Bike Club

  Two: Open Road

  Three: Land’s End

  Four: Not Cut Out

  Five: On the Cheap

  Six: Screw Careful

  Seven: Same Road Thrice

  Eight: Road Models

  Nine: Redwood Green

  Ten: Expectations

  Eleven: Life/Death

  Twelve: Sipping Point

  Thirteen: Life Experience Explorer

  Fourteen: South Away

  Fifteen: Miner’s Refuge

  Sixteen: Cake

  Seventeen: Making It

  Epilogue

  Works Cited or Consulted

  PROLOGUE

  HIGHWAY 1 TAPERED SOUTH OF SAN FRANCISCO as my sister and I closed in on Devil’s Slide. One behind the other, Alisha in the lead. Rubber tires clinging to the crumbling white line at the asphalt’s edge. Devil’s Slide’s reputation for landslides and collisions preceded it—warnings about this treacherous, winding stretch of highway had plagued us since the Oregon-California border. Knowing this, we could have taken another route, detouring inland along the Interstate, but that would have added an extra half-day. Moreover, after sitting on our asses for a week in the San Pablo suburbs—an hour-long train commute from the bright lights of San Francisco proper—we were anxious to hit the road.

  It was November 10, 2009. Ten weeks earlier, I had collected my final paycheque, packed my bicycle panniers, and rolled down the driveway of the house in Terrace, British Columbia, where I’d been renting a room for the summer. I am as fresh and untried as they come, a brand new university grad with a B.A. in Archaeology and no actionable plan for the future. I knew I didn’t want to end up like my mother—or the rest of the content-in-their-mediocrity middle class who populated the Surrey suburbs where I’d spent my childhood—and I knew I wouldn’t survive doing something that I hated. Rather than settle into a career (assuming there was a job waiting for me, which there wasn’t) I had decided to ride my bicycle six thousand plus kilometres down the western coast of North America, from Terrace to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja Peninsula. A month into the journey, my sister, Alisha, had joined me.

  Now, we were careening down the dusty California coastline, halfway to Cabo, the torrential downpours of Washington and Oregon behind us and SoCal’s palm-lined beaches beckoning us south.

  At Devil’s Slide the highway wound further inland, and soon Alisha and I found ourselves on a wooded mountainside, the rock-scree slope topped with deciduous trees whose fire-hued leaves were carried off by gusts of wind. Pale, near-bare branches ribbed over the roadway. Out of sight, a couple hundred metres to our right, the jagged cliffs of Devil’s Slide promontory dropped into the frothing Pacific Ocean.

  A horn honked—aimed at us? My heart slammed. Cars in quick succession, inches from the sides of our back panniers. Like a pair of rabbits that had inadvertently wandered onto the track of the Monaco Grand Prix, we were trapped. Why hadn’t someone thought to lay the road six inches wider? With no place to pull off to let vehicles pass, we’d become hostages to this devil of a mountain.

  I followed the hitch of Alisha’s hips as she rocked up the slope, the incline so sharp that we were barely making headway; simply balancing, maintaining a straight course among the rush-wind of passing cars, was challenge enough. My ears echoed with the whir of traffic until at last we reached the summit. The woods cleared, our surroundings suddenly arid, barren. Straws of yellowed grass poked between smooth hillside stones to our left; sheer cliffs plunged into violent surf on our right. Once Alisha and I began our descent, I lost sight of the drop, but the snaking guardrail stood as a reminder of our precarious position on the mountainside. My eyes sped along the twisting white line of the highway shoulder. Another blaring horn, and my chest cinched tighter. My bike computer read thirty miles an hour, but traffic streamed past as if we were standing still.

  Abruptly, Alisha’s rear tire leapt into my field of vision. Too close—and still decelerating. I snapped the brake levers. My back wheel locked. Panic.

  “Go!” I shouted. A fast-approaching potato chip delivery truck loomed like an aggressive T-Rex in my side-view mirror. “Go-go-go-go-go!”

  I clipped her from behind, tire against spinning tire. She screamed. A feral, deep-bellied wail.

  I knuckled down on the brakes again. My bike frame shuddered from the force, skidding. Even closer to the guardrail. Eyes fixed on the quicksilver sea, hundreds of metres below.

  Holy shit, I thought. This is where my story ends.

  LADIES BIKE CLUB

  TERRACE, BC

  A DOZEN HELMETED, SPANDEX-CLAD WOMEN GATHER in front of McBike Shop on Lazelle Avenue, road bikes like sleek, ergonomic whippets at their sides. I wheel my steel-blue Norco commuter into the jumble of steel and flesh, bike cleats scritch-scratching against sidewalk cement as women mix pastel-coloured electrolyte tablets into water bottles and complete pre-trip once-overs on their bikes. It’s my first Monday in Terrace, my first outing with Ladies Bike Club. I wonder how I’ll learn anyone’s name when they look nearly identical, tanned knees and trim waists cinched into spandex.

  “You here for the ride?”

  I turn to see a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and sunglasses. A white, pink, and powder blue cycling jersey clings to her torso like a superhero costume.

  “Yes, I’m Meaghan,” then add: “I just mo
ved here.”

  I’m twenty-four years old, and I’ve been in school for sixteen of those years. Until now, that is: June 2009. Less than a week earlier, I boxed my bicycle, a recent graduation present from my parents, and ventured by Greyhound from their home in Surrey—a burgeoning sprawl that fills the gap between urban Vancouver and the cornfields of the Fraser Valley—to Northern British Columbia for a summer position at the museum in Terrace. My official title is Events Coordinator, but as it turns out, I will do everything from interpretive tours to indexing homestead artifacts in the office basement. The salary isn’t generous, but through friends of friends I’ve found a townhouse sublet with two Irish brothers and Margaret, a free-spirited anthropology grad from Little Rock, Arkansas. After my three-month term of employment is over, I won’t return to Surrey.

  “I’m Shannon,” the woman says. “Looks like your tires could use some air.”

  I follow her critical glance to my rear bike tire. Why hadn’t I noticed that on my own?

  Until this moment, I’d held my Norco—a second-hand bike that I’d christened Blue Steel after Ben Stiller’s infamously ridiculous model pose in the film Zoolander—in high regard. She had been carefully selected from an array of Craigslist ads based on all-around utility. With medium-width tires and a sturdy frame, Blue Steel could navigate bustling streets, washed-out hiking trails, and anything in between. She was hardy enough to tackle city curbs, yet could be relied on for those lonely stretches of highway I hoped we’d explore together.

  But here, in the gathering of performance bicycles on the pavement in front of McBike, Blue Steel stands out like an awkward dinner guest who didn’t get the dress code memo. Her cheap plastic pedals and mountain bike handlebars look clumsy and uncouth in contrast to the skinny tires and titanium seat posts around her.

  “I’ve been cycling about a year now,” I say, eager to wheel conversation away from my bike. Like most people, I’d cycled as a child, but had given it up in my early teens. I’d hit the pavement again a year ago as a way to strengthen my right knee after a snowboarding injury. I’d still undergone surgery—torn ligaments don’t mend themselves—but had returned to cycling soon after. Aside from croquet and swimming, cycling was one of the few activities that my physiotherapist had deemed safe.

  Shannon’s eyes zip from Blue Steel to me: board shorts, skate shoes, and an oversize T-shirt that I’ve scissored the sleeves off to increase airflow. Looking back, I’m now able to see what Shannon and the rest of women from Bike Club saw—I was green as a paint chip, a total beginner.

  “We ride about forty kilometres,” Shannon says. “Think you can handle that?”

  “Sure.” I’d pedalled forty clicks. Once. Mostly downhill. “I’m doing a bike trip in September,” I say, the words ballooning up before I can tether their strings.

  “Where are you going?” asks a lean, grey-haired woman of about sixty. Her no-fat-to-spare physique gives the impression of a well-maintained machine.

  “First I’ll meet my sister at Shawnigan Lake, Vancouver Island.” My sister is living there, I explain, in a treehouse at an Ecovillage. “Then, we’ll head south down the Pacific Coast Highway to the Baja Peninsula.”

  I say this casually, as if cycling down half a continent is the most natural thing in the world, but Ladies Bike Club is not fooled. For a moment, there’s only the sound of metal on cement; shifting cleats.

  “Which route?” someone asks.

  I’ve been poring over maps for weeks, so I know there are a couple of ways to reach Shawnigan Lake from Terrace. You could travel east on Highway 16 toward Prince George, then jog south down Highway 97 and the Trans-Canada to board a ferry to Vancouver Island from the Lower Mainland. In contrast, I’ve decided to ride west along Highway 16 to Prince Rupert and sail the Inside Passage ferry south to Port Hardy on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. I’ve never travelled this way before, and the route allows for a side trip to Haida Gwaii by way of an overnight ferry from Prince Rupert, if I have time.

  From Port Hardy, I’ll pedal the Inland Island Highway south, first through high timbers then into agricultural land and the more populous centres of Campbell River, Courtenay, and Duncan. By late September, I’ll meet Alisha in Shawnigan Lake and the two of us will continue south, ferry hop from Victoria across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Port Angeles, and twist 2,600 kilometres down the Pacific Coast Highway—Highway 101—until we reach the next international border at San Diego. We know little of the road on the Baja-side of the line, but we assume there is one, and that’s good enough for us. We’ll return to Canada for Christmas, or when our money runs out. Whichever comes first.

  “And neither of you have cycled long distance before?” Shannon says.

  “No.”

  Both Alisha and I have plenty of experience camping, however, going back to those long weekends when our father took us to the wind-tumbled beaches of Vancouver Island. And neither of us minds the hardship of physical endeavour: We both played rugby in high school, spent ten-hour days carving powder at the local ski hills—Grouse, Seymour, and Cypress—during the winter months. Over the course of the summer in Terrace, I hope to increase my stamina and learn basic bicycle maintenance. The bigger issue, I suspect, is going to be scraping together enough money to live off of while Alisha and I are on the road.

  Shannon shrugs. “You’d better go inside and pump that tire up.”

  TWO BY TWO, WE PEDAL WEST on Highway 16, the Yellowhead, past the here-and-then-gone outskirts of Terrace, billboards for motels and pubs peeling sinewy slivers of paint. Shannon, the club leader, calls encouragement as the Skeena River churns brown with spring runoff alongside us.

  “Cadence, people, keep that cadence up,” she shouts. “Legs should always be spinning.”

  Not ten minutes from town, we glimpse the vast wilderness that stretches north to Alaska—the 160-kilometre-long span of Highway 16 between Terrace and Prince Rupert is a well-known scenic drive. Prior to leaving home, I’d looked forward to exploring it. In the few days I’d been in Terrace, this fascination had already surfaced in my new job at the museum. I was assigned the task of guiding visitors through a series of cabins, each set up to exhibit a certain aspect of early pioneer living. I always became especially animated when we visited the Trapper’s Cabin, barely lit and deliciously cool, where I pointed out beaver, wolf, and bear pelts. No matter how many times I entered the cabin, a stuffed wolverine, perched with its lips peeled back, one clawed paw outstretched atop a chest of drawers, caught me off guard. I yearned to see these creatures in the rugged woods outside Terrace.

  Now, I am finally out there, tunnelling through the endless wild land, but all I catch from the corner of my eye is a shadowed blur, splashes of new-growth green. Shannon drifts from the front to the rear of the pack, giving mini-lectures on technique and reminding us to check our bike computers and heart rate monitors, neither of which I’m equipped with. I try to match revolutions with the woman next to me, while simultaneously avoiding the rear tire of the bicycle in front of me. Sensing the potential to initiate a domino-style pileup, I back off, falling to the rear when we begin our first ascent. Soon, my legs are spinning like demon-possessed eggbeaters—how much longer until we take a break? This is nothing like my leisurely commute to the Skytrain for class.

  A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, I’d wrapped up my last undergrad course at Simon Fraser University. I’d blown off commencement to move to Terrace, not that I’d planned on attending. The thought of self-congratulatory twenty-something-year-olds and their misty-eyed parents was gag inducing, to say the least. Graduation is supposed to be a cause for celebration, but in my case, it just tossed up that looming, unavoidable question: What will you do with your life?

  I’d gone to university because my parents expected me to, and I suppose I took on a full slate of sciences for the same reason. But flunking first-year calculus and chemistry made it painfully apparent that I wasn’t going to be the next Marie Curie. In haste to declare a major, I chos
e archaeology without much thought. Fortunately, I soon realized that I’d landed in the right place; the study of people and lifeways held more appeal for me than chemical formulas and quadratic equations ever could.

  Once in the groove, I pushed forward, assured that landing a career would be the next logical step in life’s progression. Now that I’d graduated, however, I had to face facts: employers weren’t crying out for gals with a degree in ancient history. Austerity had hit museums hard, and fieldwork jobs were predominately seasonal, requiring relocation to remote communities. Some of my classmates had already made plans to pursue graduate studies, but further formal education was the last thing on my mind. Something in me was ripe for adventure and needed to get out and see the world.

  Looking back, I can tell what I really wanted to do was grow up and test my wings in solo flight. Right up to this move to Terrace, I’d been living (rent free and tuition paid) in my parents’ basement, where the walls of my room were painted the same sky blue that I’d picked out in fifth grade. After living there almost my whole life, I’d realized that Surrey was definitely not the place for me. I’d grown to detest the suburbs, their mirror-image cul-de-sacs of high-mortgage houses in dull, community bylaw-approved shades of taupe and beige.

  Although I recognized that mine was a life of comfort and privilege, I also knew that I was deeply, secretly sad. By the time my final year rolled around, I felt desperate for change. If life is a journey—and I realize that this is a tired and clichéd metaphor but I’m going to use it anyway—I wanted to jump ship. I had no idea where I was going, and I wasn’t sure what form my personal revolution would take. All I knew was that it had to be something I chose because I wanted to do it now. The big questions could be kept at bay a while longer.

  AT THE TOP OF A HILL Shannon signals for us to wheel off on the gravel pullout. Women produce Larabars and bananas from back pockets of cycling jerseys. I down my water, spilling a third of it on my shirt. Next time, I’ll bring two bottles, maybe even spring for fancy electrolyte tablets.