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.

“Past the End of the Road proves to be one rollicking tale of what life was like growing up in the bustling logging, commercial fishing, and mining town of Port Hardy back in the 1950s into the early ’70s. My old bud, Michel Drouin’s engaging autobiography is an insightful and entertaining look into BC’s recent coastal history and the lives of the people who lived up on the inside waters of northern Vancouver Island back during those days.”

“Boom sticks and deer meat, free range kids and spawning salmon, alders and second growth, logging and fishing, old bachelors and young hippies. Life in an upcoast community in the 1960s had a vitality that Drouin captures with his lived knowledge. The author experienced the life from his own infancy to having an infant of his own. Not only did he experience and learn all of the coastal skills, but he also mastered the art of storytelling to bring it to life for us all.”