Christine,

We were in town this spring. You were there too. You came into the bookshop. It was raining. Maybe, it’s always raining. You and the shopkeeper were speaking in hushed but excited tones. Like you were trying to keep a secret that was too good to keep. I flipped through the pages of the book I was holding and tried not to eavesdrop, but that’s a hard habit to kick in the quiet of a bookshop.

As the door closed behind you, the shopkeeper caught my curious gaze and announced with a slight flourish “Christine Lowther. Tofino’s poet laureate.”

It’s easy to tell when the world is trying to show you something, if you’re trying to tune into such frequencies.  I walked out with a collection of your poems.  You were standing in the rain outside the entrance, texting someone on the phone and smiling. I quickly showed you the book in my hand and asked if it was any good,  You laughed, a deep laugh from somewhere good and true and said “Thank you.” I bounded off to the truck and out of the rain. I didn’t want to intrude, and I was shy. You don’t see too many poets in the wild where I am from.  My wife walked across the street for coffees while I opened up the book and landed on “The Road to Mackenzie Beach”

When my wife returned, tears were streaming down my cheeks. She asked what was wrong. I said “Nothing. Nothing at all.” and showed her the poem. Then both of us sat crying and smiling in our truck. The windows are foggy, two dogs sleeping in the back.

You see, our own road to Mackenzie beach began twelve years ago.  We were freshly engaged and arrived on the west coast of the west coast, with a two year old lab in tow.  We fished. Sea-run cutthroat in Grice Bay. We surfed. An actual wave caught on Cox.  We hiked. Lone Cone. And every night we walked the dog on the beach at sunset.  Anyone who has ever walked Mackenzie Beach knows that you end up getting introduced to folks by your dogs. We got to talking to a distinct foursome who stood out on the horizon. A young pup way out front, a couple walking at a measured pace and an old dog trailing behind. The couple told us about Charlie, the old lab trailing behind.  He was seventeen, an astonishing age for a lab, but he had a terminal illness and was on a diet of whatever he would eat.  Grilled steak, ground beef and rice, lately.  They told us about how Charlie loved that beach and they wanted to get him out there one last time. 

At the time having a senior dog seemed a lifetime away to us.

We kept coming back. Steelhead float trips on a river I’ll decline to name. Sea kayaking out to Meares.  The water taxi driver, taking us on a sketchy open ocean route back from Hot Springs Cove, just so we had an opportunity to see the whales.  The whales obliged. A religious experience for those of us who were on the boat that trip. 

Somehow the years rolled by and “Charlie on the beach one last time ” became a sort of lodestar for my wife and I as our own dog entered old age.

She turned thirteen years old when we hatched plans in the spring of twenty-twenty. To come out to the coast again, make sure we got our last beach walk together. But a pandemic put an end to all that planning. The world closed and maybe lost its mind a little in the meantime. As we waited for the world to open up, we got a second pup that next spring.  The year after that, the diagnosis came down, spleen cancer.  They gave her three months to live, that was this past September and we worried that the window had passed us by. But somehow she hung on and that was how we found ourselves in Tofino this spring when you walked into the bookshop. 

This time out we didn’t surf or fish or hike. We mostly just sort of hung out on the beach. A two year old bird dog way out front, a couple walking a measured pace and a fifteen year old lab happily trailing behind. Stopping to smell whatever struck her interest. In between we tried to coax her into eating. She too was now on a diet of whatever she would take, salmon and steel cut oats at the moment.  I am not sure if we did all this for her or for us, but she looked happy walking the level ground with cool soft sand on her pads. Breaking out into a slight trot towards anyone holding a frisbee.  

On our last night there I opened up your book again to that same poem, my headlamp transfixed on the last stanza.

“I don’t think of the beach when i remember him
even though that is where the road led.
There’s a list: spring at last, the warming road,
verges alive with hummingbirds,
the smooth hard curve of the ball thrower,
my protectiveness of him,
his flapping ears as he plodded back to me
with the ball in his mouth.

How he let me feel for
and pluck a thorn that was keeping
him from coming home”

At the same time on my inner stereo the late poet David Berman kept singing “Moments can be monuments to you, if your life is interesting and true”

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, just to say thank you I suppose and to let you know there’s still magic in poetry for those of us still looking.
But mostly as an excuse to get the words down. An act of remembering, or more appropriately, an act of not forgetting.

It’s important not to forget