Treacherous Tofino

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/04/2023 (1243 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tofino is a perilous place fraught with danger for PTSD-afflicted former overseas aid worker and current social-justice activist Amanda Doucette.

If the bears and cougars don’t get her, maybe it’ll be a storm-battered shipwreck and vicious tides slamming hapless overboarders onto death-dealing shoals, or possibly doom will come from all the Americans who’ve somehow crossed the border with guns.

Doucette has come to Vancouver Island to launch her charity’s latest venture — wilderness hiking and kayaking trips on which older recovering addicts and convicts try to bond with their estranged adult sons.

Amanda leaves behind in Deer Lake, N.L., her romantic partner, Mountie Chris, who’s shared her criminal sleuthing all over Canada. Chris worries that Amanda always gets in trouble, and never listens to anyone who tells her, “But what you’re planning to do is way too dangerous.”

Of course, if Amanda ever listened, the book would be about 10 pages long.

She’s soon off to the resort town of Tofino on the Pacific coast, not even noticing that her old friend Matthew, a veteran war correspondent who now does all the paperwork for her charity, is looking awfully gaunt, sickly even.

And before you can say the game is afoot, Doucette has met Luke, a physically and mentally scarred old hermit living deep in the woods of a remote Pacific island, where he paints the nightmares that sear his mind.

Pretty much like the nightmares of atrocities that scream inside Amanda’s brain.

Montreal-born author Barbara Fradkin is one of Canada’s best murder mystery authors, who deserves far greater acclaim for her Inspector Green police procedurals and her Amanda Doucette novels (this is her fifth Doucette book).

Fradkin takes Doucette to some of Canada’s most amazing places, along the way weaving in with quiet subtlety Indigenous culture and history, environmental crises, the silent cries for help of the mentally ill, the homeless and the lonely. Fradkin and Doucette are treasures.

There is, of course, a murder.

Much of the story of Wreck Bay began before Long Beach became a national park and surfing paradise, back when hippies and draft dodgers and societal dropouts set up makeshift camps on the Tofino beach and smoked too-copious quantities of substances only now just made legal.

Or for some, it started even before they reached the communes, when the U.S. sent teenagers armed to the teeth to an illegal war in Southeast Asia and turned them loose.

This isn’t the war in Vietnam of rewritten history, it’s the catastrophe that readers around since the 1960s will remember played out each evening on TV screens that changed, and often destroyed, the lives of so many.

So many characters in Wreck Bay are tormented by secrets. We’re never quite sure who some people are, or were.

There is a terrible dichotomy here in the ease with which some Americans carry and shoot their guns, and the horror with which Canadians who find themselves holding a gun face the possibility of having to fire it in a life-or-death situation.

Someone once called in a napalm air strike in Vietnam, unleashing the fires of hell on villagers and their children, maybe even catching American soldiers in the flames. Soldiers who died in the inferno — or who maybe survived.

And what would that have to do with Tofino of 2023? Why are there gun-toting members of an American military family on Vancouver Island? Why is there such interest in who begat whom in a hippie commune 50 years ago, and who that baby may be now?

Who is willing to kill to keep those secrets buried in the past?

Wreck Bay is a remarkable work, and Barbara Fradkin is a remarkable Canadian.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin shares Amanda Doucette’s passion for Vancouver Island fish and chips, but hopes she never gets behind him on a double-yellow-line mountain highway — not if she claims to drive from Victoria to Tofino in four hours.