Reaching the Ocean Is Not the Same as Reaching the End

“The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

                                                                                            

Beyond Horseshoe Bay, British Columbia

 

For years, the Pacific Ocean has been the simplest way to describe where we were going. When people asked about the Trans Canada Trail, we often reduced the journey to something understandable: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Cape Spear to Victoria on the west coast, Newfoundland to British Columbia. The actual route has never been nearly that simple, of course. It has wound through cities, forests, rail trails, roads, shorelines, mountain ranges, river valleys and communities we had never heard of before arriving. Yet the oceans have remained the two great geographical markers holding the journey together in our minds, and today, standing in Horseshoe Bay and getting on the ferry, the western ocean became something no longer imagined. The Salish Sea stretches out in front of us, framed by mountains and islands, ferries moving across the water and coastal communities scattered along the shoreline. After more than four years of walking west, there is something almost difficult to comprehend about finally standing at the edge of the continent and looking out across the Pacific side of Canada.

 

We have already had a version of this feeling in Vancouver yesterday. Walking along Sunset Beach, we stood on the sand beside the Pacific Ocean and realized that, in one very real sense, we had accomplished what we set out to do. We had walked from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. The impossible thing had become something we were physically standing inside. Yet even then there was a complication, because we knew the journey was not actually finished. The Trans Canada Trail does not end where geographically some might expect it to end. From Vancouver and Horseshoe Bay it moves onto the water, following the Salish Sea Marine Trail before reconnecting with land on Vancouver Island, where the route continues south toward Victoria and the formal western terminus. So here we are at the ocean we spent years trying to reach, still with more to go.

 

There is something oddly revealing about that distinction. Destinations become very powerful in the imagination, especially over a journey this long. For almost 14,000 kilometres, the Pacific has represented completion. When we were cold in Quebec, overwhelmed by heat in Manitoba, exhausted in Saskatchewan, crossing Alberta or working our way through the mountains of British Columbia, the coast existed somewhere ahead. Reach the ocean and, in theory at least, you have arrived. Except arrival is not as simple as that. There is the place you imagine reaching, the place where geography tells you that you have arrived, the place where the map says the route ends, and the much less precise moment when something inside you accepts that the journey is actually over. Those moments do not necessarily align together.

 

Vancouver and Horseshoe Bay make that especially clear because the Pacific is real in this journey in a way it has never been before arriving. We can smell the salt water, watch ferries moving between the islands, feel the damp coastal air and look west across a seascape we spent years approaching from the other side of the country. There is no denying that this is an arrival. At the same time, there is equally no denying that in a couple of days we still have to continue hiking because the Pacific Ocean isn’t actually quite the end of the journey. And because of that, the old measurement of progress no longer works quite as neatly. For much of the Trans Canada Trail, every kilometre west removed a small piece of Canada from the distance between us and the ocean. Now the distance to the ocean is effectively gone, but the journey continues. We have reached the geographical idea that sustained us for years without reaching the formal end of the trail.

 

Perhaps that is why arriving at a long-imagined destination can feel stranger than expected. You imagine some internal switch will change when you finally get there, that the years of effort, uncertainty and effort will resolve themselves into a clear ending. Instead, life remains stubbornly continuous. You reach the place, look around, take photographs, find something to eat, and begin thinking about what needs to happen tomorrow. The extraordinary and the ordinary sit beside one another. Reaching the Pacific should feel enormous, and it does, but at the same time we are still looking at maps, checking routes and working out how to continue across Vancouver Island. The simple reality is that the practical requirements of the journey do not disappear simply because we have reached the coastline.  Even beyond Victoria and the Pacific terminus of the TCT, it turns north to the Arctic.  And so, at the time when we reasonably could say to have completed the trail – the next parts of the route begin to stand out all the more.

 

We have reached the Pacific – and yet we have not finished the Trans Canada Trail between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  For years forward progress has meant moving west across the continent on foot. Now the land itself has run out beneath us, and the next section of the journey lies across the water. After thousands of kilometres of putting one foot in front of the other, continuing will require ferries, water routes and eventually another stretch of trail on Vancouver Island. That feels strangely appropriate for a journey that has so often resisted neat definitions. The Trans Canada Trail was never simply a footpath leading from one ocean to another. It has been roads, rail trails, city pathways, wilderness routes, ferries, rivers and water trails stitched together across the country. Perhaps then we should not be surprised that reaching the Pacific does not provide the clean ending we once imagined.

 

For tonight, however, I think it is enough simply to recognize where we are. The Atlantic is almost 14,000 kilometres behind us – we have walked that far! We are on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and in a couple of days we will continue across the Salish Sea and toward Vancouver Island, with the formal end of this east-to-west journey still waiting somewhere beyond.

 

Reaching the ocean, it turns out, is not the same thing as reaching the end.

 

See you on the trail.