Past the End of the Road: A North Island Boyhood

Past the End of the Road recounts a free-range adolescence in mid-century Port Hardy on northern Vancouver Island, at a time when, with no roads south, the town was only connected to the rest of the island by air and sea and the Union steamship was the main mode of travel to and from the sleepy logging village.

Michel Drouin’s frank and humorous memoir recounts the freedom of his childhood in midcentury Port Hardy. When he was twelve, Drouin and his friend rowed a small boat from town ten kilometres across the Goletas Channel for a day trip to the Gordon Group of islands, without even bringing water to drink, as neither he or his friend owned a canteen and “plastic water bottles hadn’t been invented yet.”

Drouin’s adolescence encompassed hunting, fishing, firewood cutting, and more activities that although common at the time are probably foreign to most Canadian children. Although he ultimately prospered, the wildness of Drouin’s youth led to some close calls, such as when the young man accidentally lit himself on fire and he was only able to extinguish himself by running to the beach—“fortunately, the tide was in”—and flinging himself into the ocean.