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One of the main tourist attractions of the Victoria area is Butchart Gardens, a former 50-acre gravel pit transformed into a collection of lush gardens by 100 years of obsessive tending. It is a professionally run enterprise; the staff does a fine job of moving cars and crowds through tight spaces.

The most astounding feature of the entire park is the admission price: $21 per person! To see flowers! Here’s my travel tip for everyone visiting Victoria: skip Butchart Gardens. Buy five postcards of the place instead. You and your spouse have just saved $41. Have dinner on me.

We didn’t know how much it would cost until we’d driven a half-hour to get there, so we proceeded with our plan: a picnic lunch followed by a quick tour of the garden’s highlights.

The picnic was not good. We’d bought “wraps” from a cafe in Victoria. Pictured are the remains of my “no cheese” vegetarian wrap; it not only had cheese (cream cheese, in fact, impossible to remove) but about a cup of ranch dressing. It was nasty. So here’s another handy travel tip for Victoria: don’t eat at “Grabba Jabba.” This was our worst meal in seven days.

Just beyond the picnic area was the biggest hedge in the world. I have not consulted the McWhirter brothers (experts on, among many other things, immense shrubbery), but, believe me, it’s that big — about 25 feet tall, with no external supports.

Gratuitous flower closeup. I have no idea what sort of plant this is.

Pictured is the exotic Aquafina Bush. This is an exceptional shot, included not to suggest that the Gardens are poorly mainained. In fact they’re meticulously, even zealously kept. The dirt patches are raked every day, I’m sure. Beds are plucked of dead blooms. Loose petals are collected throughout the day. This bottle can’t have been there for more than a few minutes.

Nearby (but not pictured here) was the equally elusive Aquafina Bottlecap Vine.

My favorite photo from the entire garden shows a post from the bamboo fence in the Japanese Garden. Neat, no?

The Canadian park service does an amazing job of maintenance on its properties. I have seen a great many regional and national parks in the US and Canada — Zion, Bryce Canyon, Point Reyes, Yosemite, Olompali, Armstrong Woods, Banff, Jasper, Annadel, the place with the microwave tower whose name I can’t remember… but the parks on Vancouver Island are the only two in which most of the public hiking trails are raised wooden boardwalks.

By keeping tourists on a raised path, rangers can be sure the damage to the parkland is limited — fewer crushed plants, less soil compaction, minimal habitat destruction. The trails become slightly more accessible, so a wider range of the population can enjoy the scenery. But the maintenance expense would seem to be a lot bigger. And the liability would seem to increase, too.

We met one of the official park carpenters. He was in the parking lot at the Schooner Cove trailhead, loading a sack with a chainsaw and several planks of wood, preparing to head 1km down the trail to repair a broken support beam. The guys in this crew spend as much time hiking as they do on maintenance. There are 19km of boardwalks in the park, and only three carpenters, one of whom has been repurposed to assist with building a new information shack or something. So the other two guys hike 10km a day just to inspect their territories.

They source the lumber from the forests themselves. Many old-growth cedars were felled in the 1950s but never pulled out, due to the expense. (One would hope that loggers would have had a plan for extraction before knocking down ancient forests, but in fact they did not.) This past eco-crime can now be made right, in a small way, for these wasted trees now provide useful raw materials at the site where they’re needed.

Cedar is naturally resistant to rot, so the the park service doesn’t treat it. Earlier boardwalks (and the ones on Mount Washington) are pressure-treated, but such wood leaches arsenic into the environment. “Live and learn,” as the carpenter said.

Sand dollars are black. I had no idea.

I mean the live ones, not the sterile, dead shells in the wicker basket at the gift shop. The live ones are fuzzy, too.

The shoreline near Comox is home to a colony of sand dollars. I’ve never seen anything like it: hundreds of sand dollars, strewn around the rocks. Most were dead, as far as I could tell.

We picked up a few. Frankly they’re not as nice as the sterile dead ones in the gift shop — these are stained yellow and green from seaweed. We were told these would bleach out after a few weeks in the sun. I hope so. I’ve never made a list of “100 things I want to do before I die,” but “find a whole sand dollar on the beach” would have been one of them. Seriously.

We saw tiny crabs, too. The big ones were long gone — at low tide, all the locals swarm the sandbar with nets and hip-waders. Crabs are free food. I got the sense that there is an under-employment problem in the area: jobs exist, but don’t pay too well. Our B&B hosts supplement their rental income by tending gardens and smoking salmon.

Inland from the sandbar, the beach exposed by the low tide had dried into a crust of seaweed and sand-dollar shells. It was other-worldly, a sort of smeary green that crunched underfoot. Actually it looked like a chemical spill, even though it was completely natural.

We picked our way across it, attempting to crush as little of the native fauna as possible. Every few steps, we’d hear a squirting sound and see a geyser of water erupt nearby. Our hosts explained that these are the result of Geoduck clams retracting their necks in response to the threat implied by our approach. Had we dug into the sand at the site of those eruptions, we’d have found a big clam ripe for the chowder pot. Assuming we weren’t already choking on sea-meat, three meals a day.

We missed an exit from the highway, and ended up in town. I asked the clerk at a Subway sandwich shop: “How do we get back on 19 North?”

“You mean Highway 19?”

“Yes, Highway 19, north.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t remember the name of the place. Starts with a ‘C’. Colfax, Kotex, something. But it’s north, that way [pointing north]. If you could just tell me how to get to Highway 19, that would be great.”

“Cumberland?”

“Erm, no, I don’t think so.”

“Campbell River?”

“No. Look, it’s north of Nanaimo, which is that way [pointing north], right? We have to go past that.”

“North?”

“Yes, north.”

“Or south?”

“North. The other direction from Victoria.”

“Oh, north! That way [points north].”

“Yes, thanks. Any idea where Highway 19 is?”

“Just turn right there, then take the second right.”

The moral of this story is, never ask for directions from a person who says they can’t put spinach on your sandwich “because it’s reserved for the salads.”

I don’t usually write about books I didn’t like, but I’m making an exception in this case because I was so surprised by how little I liked it. In fact, I didn’t like it a lot. I finished reading the story because I hate to leave one unfinished, but in this case I was no happier at the ending than I’d been at any point prior, except in the sense that having read the book I could be especially certain of its lack of redeeming qualities, thereby ensuring that I’d be unlikely to ever read it again. It’s a depressing story about depressing people who squander some miraculous opportunities and manage to learn not much of anything. On the last page, in the last paragraph, I at first misread a line and for a moment believed one of these losers had fallen out of a window. This would have made an abrupt and stupid ending, but not significantly more so than the alternative: they live ever after, just as unhappily as before. Serves them right, the bunch of wankers.

How To Be Good is told from the perspective of a joyless, deluded woman who is stuck in a bad marriage with a joyless, deluded husband and two snotty kids. She believes that because she’s a medical doctor she is a good person. We’re told this at least six times over the course of the woman’s extended internal monologues, which comprise about 50% of the text. This is the theme of Hornby’s book: exploring what it means to be “good.”

The woman’s husband, according to her, is a bitter and hateful man with a talent for complaining about, basically, everything. It’s a small talent but it got him a job writing a regular column for the local newspaper, in which he points out all the things around town that bother him and why.

He undergoes a spiritual awakening and a not-believable personality shift. Or, he becomes Ghandi, I’m not sure which. He quits his job, begins giving away the family’s food and money and possessions, invites a homeless person to live in the house, etc. Practically overnight he changes from a relatively typical middle-aged male, if an especially selfish and mean one, to a saint-in-training. He’s now sensitive enough to apologize for being a lousy husband — or even more telling, he stoically endures a face-to-face meeting with his wife’s lover, in a scene that is as well-written as it is ridiculously imagined. (Are uncomfortable confrontations a hallmark of Hornby’s work? I was reminded of the scene in High Fidelity where Rob is confronted by Ian/Ray in the record store. Both scenes were uncomfortable-making, but the one in High Fidelity was funny.) But for all that new intuitive and self-examinatory skill, does he at any point realize that he’s gone way off the deep end? that it’s quite lunatic to cook a meal and then suggest driving it across town to feed the homeless? that his rantings have split his family in two, alienating his son and wife, as well as turning his daughter into a faux-pious little turd? No, no, no, no, and no, respectively.

The best thing I can say about this book is that, unlike Hornby’s other two novels, it won’t be made into a movie any time soon. Or if it is, it will star William Hurt, be filmed entirely in someone’s living room, and it will suck.

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