I started flying over it again in the late 1970s. As a baby and a child I had flown above it all a number of times with my family when Dad logged on the Queen Charlottes and elsewhere.

But those childhood memories aren’t as crisp in my mind like the ones I have from my days as a young man who actually got to see it all from the bird’s eye view.

You could call it “God’s eye view” because that’s how it seemed to me, looking down at the wonderful sight of little wharves, shacks, fishing boats, logging camps, towns and settlements spread far and wide over the Good Lord’s great green, grey and blue creation.

Yup, it was all wonderful to behold after I left college – again – and started working the logging camps. Of course no one ever totally sees it all – other than God that is.

But I got into some camps as far as you can go – up to Stewart and the Nass, as well as Central Coast camps; and as far south as the Sunshine Coast.

Yes, just to see it all like some big wonderful stage, a real life stage that is, spreading out below you like a big dream as you roar over it in a De Havilland Beaver or Otter or a Grumann Goose.

It surely was something so very incredible to behold. Those who missed it really did miss something that is difficult to fully describe. And I only came in on the very “tail’s end” so to speak.

I’m talking about the coast of British Columbia where people arrived from all over the world. There were the Norwegians up in Hagensborg and old Quatsino, the Danes in Cape Scott, the Finns on Sointula, the widespread Chinese and Japanese, and, of course the Scots, Irish, Yanks, Germans, and the predominant English, as well as dozens of other nationalities spread far and wide.

There were also, of course, the natives who gathered and hunted for thousands of years before all the rest. Yes, the natives who adapted or perished so sadly as the winds of change, for better or for worse, blew across the big beautiful face of this “skookum” country now so sadly deserted for the most part. Oh yeah, don’t forget the Seventh Day Adventists up at Nikite at the head of Smith Inlet and elsewhere.

And what did they all do? They were fishermen, loggers, miners, whalers, farmers, doctors, clergymen, merchants, scoundrels and dozens of other things. For the most part it was a tale of raw survival.

Whatever would put food in the mouths of “them and theirs” would have to be done – so they did it. They worked harder than almost anybody alive these days.

“Nothing to do but the doing it!” said a long-gone hooktender to us each day as we climbed out of our crummy to face the work and the wind and the rain.

A loader man in another camp told me something so true that it always comes back to me whenever I watch the TV news from Ottawa or Victoria or any other big city showing the latest degenerance of our time.

“The problem with this country,” said Ralph, pondering in the middle and then continuing “...is everybody wants somethin for nuthin’.”

Boy did he say a mouthful! You only have to look at our times versus their times to see that it’s all got to fall apart for lack of work and willingness.

But I digress.

Nostalgia reminds me that coastal folk, for the most part, were a wonderful bunch. Sadly, satellite TV was just beginning to arrive when I did, and it helped destroy the very coastal culture it was supposed to just entertain.

The sons and daughters of natives, loggers and fishermen would somehow deceptively become city folk in their minds, though they lived hundreds and thousands of miles away!

An exodus to town was too often the result. The internet and all the rest would come along later, and just as certainly seal their fate all the more. Even as the coast crowd thinned out, the remnant folk of their culture were similarily being wiped out by the MTV morons and the like.

Oh yes, this beautiful BC coast was a wonderful place populated by an amazing bunch of folk. You can read of it all in hundreds of books. “The Curve of Time,” “Bull of the Woods,” “Never Without Hope,” “Spilsbury’s Coast,” “The Accidental Airline,” “Flynn’s Cove,” and dozens of other titles can bring you back to those days long before us, when, as the old loggers say, “The towers were wood and the men were steel!”

Luckily for me I got to see, taste, feel and smell a little glimpse of it all just as the big curtains seemed to be closing upon this great big coast of ours.

And for that I’ll always be thankful.

Bruce Lloyd lives in Port Alice.