I had this footage left over from August, a time defined by silent observation. I was living in my car. Each night I would drive out of the decrepit town of Port McNeill and find a logging road to hide away on, and each morning I would return to walk the streets and docks aimlessly. I watched the place living and breathing with a bit of disdain. Pioneered as a logging settlement, not much has changed. A few times I was feeling daring and I asked a handful of different people, "Why do you live here?". The most common response was a shrug of the shoulders and a small smile, like a secret I wasn't a part of.
There is just one highway that goes north along the east side of Vancouver Island. Roadside attractions primarily consisted of signs warning you to watch your fuel level.
The root of my frustration was in the familiarity. Port McNeill reminded me of the Northern Ontario towns that I had come from. Travelling was supposed to bring me to new places. Instead I looked upon a copy of the town, which was 4700 km away, where my dad started his career as a timber-framer, where his brother lived up the street, where we got six feet of snow in the winter and it became a desolate wasteland for the next six months. In the summer it became a tourist's haven with even fewer settler's bones in the dirt than Port McNeill. I didn’t live there for very long. The period of time I’m talking about is formative years, as a preschooler, and yet I am still tethered to it. More so than the place I truly grew up in, which is farther south. Why do I still have a foot in that old community that was never really mine? I struggled to reconcile with the conflicting nostalgia and eventually drove out of Port McNeill without looking back. The journals I wrote in that small logging town are defined by a furious restlessness to leave and confusion at my desire to stay a while longer. For the rest of my life, or something like it...
Months later, after driving across the country back to the same towns I had been haunted by, I reflect on the small smile. There was a warmth in their eyes and in this town that I was blind to as a passerby, a nomad. I kick myself for being so insensitive. I wish to be forgiven by the beauty I had dismissed in Port McNeill.
Maybe this comes full circle, maybe it doesn't. Adding warm hues and film grain to footage does not constitute an essay on my personal arc with a small town on Vancouver Island. But the two feel intertwined.
SHOT ON: Lumix GH5 with the Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8
