Did Reaching the Pacific Feel Like Finishing the Trans Canada Trail?

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”


Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, 1843
 

Reaching Victoria, British Columbia on the TCT

 
For more than four years, the Pacific Ocean had been the answer to one of the simplest questions people asked us about the Trans Canada Trail: where are you going? From Cape Spear, Newfoundland, the answer was west. Across ten provinces, through thousands of kilometres of trail, rail corridor, roadways, forest, farmland and mountain, the Pacific remained the great geographical certainty somewhere ahead. We could change routes, lose time, alter plans, stop for weather, detour around damaged trail or spend months away from the pathway altogether in the winter time, but the larger direction never changed. Eventually, if we kept walking, we hoped we would reach the western ocean.

 
While it was ultimately not as simple as walking from east to west in one continuous line, when we finally arrived at Clover Point in Victoria, after roughly 14,000 kilometres of walking and more than 556 days on the Trans Canada Trail, there was no question that something enormous had ended. We had connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada on foot. For years that had been an undertaking too large to imagine as a single experience, so we had reduced it to provinces, daily distances, each step, and whatever piece of trail lay immediately ahead. Suddenly there was no more westward section waiting beyond the horizon. The coast that we had been moving toward since Newfoundland was beneath our feet.

 
Standing there in front of the Trans Canada Trail plaque denoting Clover Point as the Pacific trailhead felt like finishing. I do not think we should diminish that by immediately saying that the destination did not matter or that only the journey was important. The Pacific mattered enormously. There were too many difficult days, too many changes of plan and too many years invested in reaching it for the ending to be treated as merely symbolic. We were relieved, proud, exhausted and, in some ways, still having trouble believing that we had actually arrived and done it. A goal that had once seemed absurdly distant had become a physical place where we could touch the water and where we could stand and reflect.

 
At the same time, the final weeks in British Columbia had already complicated our understanding of what finishing meant. The first complication came in Vancouver. Walking along Seawall in Stanley Park, Vancouver, we found ourselves standing beside the Pacific Ocean before the Trans Canada Trail was finished. For years the ocean itself had represented the destination, and suddenly we were there. We could see it, smell it and stand beside it, yet the route still continued. Horseshoe Bay made that contradiction even clearer. We had reached the coast we had spent years moving toward, but the national pathway carried on across the Salish Sea and eventually we made our way onto Vancouver Island.


Then Lake Cowichan complicated things again. There we reached the Western Terminus, the westernmost point on the Trans Canada Trail, even though several days of walking still remained before Victoria. After years of treating west as forward, we had reached the farthest west we were going to travel and then had to turn east to continue toward the end.  By the time we reached Clover Point, therefore, the idea of a single clean finish had already started to dissolve. We had reached the Pacific before reaching the end. We had reached the westernmost point before reaching the terminus. We had even turned back east while still completing a journey we continued to describe as an east-to-west crossing. The geography had become more complicated than the story we told ourselves, explained to others, or carried with us across the country.

 
Perhaps that is why Victoria felt both extraordinary and yet – on some level – also strangely ordinary at the same time.  For four years, almost every day on the trail had ended with another day waiting ahead of it. A day full of another section of trail to hike, unknown weather to navigate, and logistics to figure out.   Even on rest days, the journey usually occupied some part of our attention because there was always another section to plan or challenge to figure out.   At Victoria – at least momentarily - that rhythm stopped, and there was no next western stage to prepare for the next morning. 

 
That may sound obvious, but after living inside a journey for years, the absence of another day to plan can feel almost as strange as reaching the destination itself. The body understands finishing in very practical terms. You stop walking, the backpack comes off, and there is no need to prepare for another section of trail or need to walk on.  The mind (or at least my mind) is slower to understand and accept what has happened.

 
I think that may have been one of the most unexpected parts of reaching the Pacific. There was no single moment in which four years of experience suddenly arranged itself into meaning. We did not arrive at Clover Point and instantly understand what crossing Canada has taught us. The journey is too large for that. Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia have each been substantial journeys in their own right. Thousands of conversations, landscapes, bird species, setbacks, acts of kindness, frustrations and ordinary walking days are behind us now.   I have no idea how to fit all of them into a single answer or lesson. 

 
Perhaps that is why by evening all that was involved in reaching the Arctic began to dominate our thinking.  The Trans Canada Trail does not only connect the Atlantic to the Pacific.  There is another great line stretching north to another ocean.  While it has always been part of the plan, with the Atlantic to the Pacific portion of this trek completed, we have already begun to turn our attention to imagining what it will require to follow it. 

 
With that said, knowing that we are headed north next year from Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta to Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, does not make Victoria any less of an ending.  Reaching the Pacific is not merely another waypoint in a larger adventure.   When we left Cape Spear in 2019, the Atlantic-to-Pacific crossing was an enormous undertaking in its own right, and reaching Victoria has completed that journey. 

Whatever we chose to do next belongs to another chapter.  Perhaps that is another thing long journeys teach you about endings. Something can be genuinely complete without being the last thing you ever do.  Walking through Victoria to the Pacific Ocean closed one enormous arc of the Trans Canada Trail. We had crossed Canada from ocean to ocean. We have accomplished what we had spent four years trying to accomplish. Whatever happens next can not take that away.
 

Yet finishing did not mean that we were immediately finished with the experience. Perhaps that is because the physical end of a journey and the understanding of a journey operate on different timelines.   The walking can stop on a particular afternoon. Understanding what the walking meant can take considerably longer.
 
So, did reaching the Pacific Ocean feel like finishing?  Yes – reaching Victoria is an ending. We have walked from the Atlantic to the Pacific and completed the first great section of the Trans Canada Trail we had set out to explore. At the same time, that ending is a bit less tidy than we had once imagined.  As we have learned, endings can occur in stages, and arriving physically does not immediately provide an emotion or mental conclusion.   Perhaps that type of understanding begins only after the walking stops.
 

See you on the trail! 

Location: Victoria, BC, Canada
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