Michel Drouin’s memoir recounts his youth on the north-east coast of Vancouver Island during the heyday of British Columbia’s fishing and logging industries. The author was a toddler when his family moved from Quebec in 1953 to the small logging settlement of Port Hardy, “past the end of the road” as the book’s title states. Access to the town was limited to boat and plane until the expansion of the Island highway in 1979.  

Personal stories are layered with well-researched descriptions of coastal landscape and community. From the time the author was a boy, he joined his father on fishing expeditions aboard an old wooden boat called the Seagull.  Drouin recounts motoring at low speed past shorelines “mostly steep and rocky and then choked with trees right down to the water line; occasionally a little cove or beach would appear, with piles of driftwood logs piled up there.” (pp. 72-73) The author remembers several place names such as God’s Pocket, once called the Christie Pass, and notes the spot was painted by famed BC artist E.J. Hughes in 1962.

Drouin also helped his father work the logging booms, eventually gaining full-time employment with a forestry company after graduating high school in 1971. Serious dangers lurked on the job and ranged from keeping one’s balance on floating logs to operating heavy machinery.

The great outdoors was not only a work site for the young Drouin but also a playground. He was still in grade school when he embarked on a solo day hike, scrambling along shorelines and climbing cliffs, all the while mindful of a rising tide, the need for food and a throbbing tooth ache. He managed to reach his destination and return home safely, his parents presumably none the wiser. On a more ambitious solo hike in his teen years, Drouin travelled to the Cape Scott lighthouse on Vancouver Island’s northern tip. He describes physical challenges, historic sites and encounters with adventurous residents.

The coming of age narration concludes with the author’s departure from Vancouver Island to explore the wider world. In 1974, Drouin returned to the west coast, residing for several years with his wife and children on Malcolm Island, a small community 43 kilometres south of his hometown and accessed by ferry at Port McNeill on Vancouver Island.

A second memoir by Jon Taylor begins in 1976 when the author and his wife made the spontaneous decision to move to Malcolm Island, taking up residence near Sointula.  Decades earlier immigrant Finns attempted to create a utopian community in the village, their values echoed in the “back to the land” youth movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Taylor was hired as a cook on a fishing boat right away and so begins his chronicles of salty, hair-raising and occasionally thoughtful stories about work aboard a troller along with Island life.  Seasonally employed at a fish camp for twenty years, the author typically worked a seven-to-ten-day shift, returned home for a break then headed back out. Despite family members accompanying him to the fish camp over the years, he observes this type of work life put a strain on marriages, including his own.

Colourful and quirky characters populate Taylor’s accounts. Molly, a single mother, was targeted by the Island’s gossipers but still held her own. JJ, a fisherman, stockpiled a large quantity of randomly selected paperbacks to read on long winter nights. John cared more about the preparation for his boating expeditions than the actual fishing. ‘Old Logger’ was reluctant to abandon his slowly sinking float house until he was finally convinced to move into a seniors’ care home.

More than forty years later, Taylor continues to reside on Malcolm Island, employing his skills as a boat mechanic, expert troller, writer and musician. He fishes in season two and half days on his own troller equipped with a GPS plotter, among other twenty-first century devices.

The author concludes on a philosophical note about the elemental nature of the men and women who catch fish: “We have been there in gales and glass calm, in fog and on star-clad nights, alone and in company with four hundred other boats.  Always pursuing, seeking, hoping.  It is a strange game—as old as man.” (p. 209)

Both memoirs depict a place and time requiring survival skills including knowledge of guns and manual tools and an ability to cope with isolation. One wonders what life was like for  ‘housewives’and girls in the early post-war years.  More observations about settlers’ interactions with First Nations people would also be enlightening.  Curiously, neither author references the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) or United Fisherman and Allied Workers’ Union (UFAWU), both organizations having a significant role in the region.

Trade union politics aside, the emphasis of these writings is on heart and home. Whether regaling the reader with boyhood adventures or humorous anecdotes, Drouin and Taylor are informative, entertaining and contribute to our understanding and appreciation of working peoples’ lives in coastal British Columbia.