Destination Cortez Island

Geoff Cragg is a tenured instructor in the Faculty of General Studies at
the University of Calgary.

Voyagers along the B.C. coast—notably Muriel Blanchet and, more
recently, Beth Hill—have created haunting descriptions of abandoned
farmhouses, overgrown orchards, and settlements returning to the wild.
June Cameron helps to explain why the coastal settlers’ way of life
wasn’t sustainable in the long run. Although Cameron describes her
book as a memoir and a “stew” drawn from many sources, she is too
modest: carefully researched and generously illustrated with period
photographs, Destination Cortez Island is a micro-history of a small
island community.

A short introduction sets the stage by explaining how Cameron’s
grandparents came to Cortez and, more generally, considering the
economics and psychology of immigration. The major section is a series
of chronologically arranged chapters running from 1930, when Cameron’s
parents bought the boat that annually took them to Cortez, to 1949, when
the boat was sold and the old pattern of family visits dissolved. The
picture of coastal life that emerges is at times nostalgic, but never
sentimental. Cameron does not gloss over the harshness of pioneer life,
especially for the women. She also captures the ever-present dangers
that the settlers faced—everything from the hazards associated with
cutting trees to the risk of fire aboard wooden boats—and their almost
casual acceptance of those dangers.

Cameron’s affectionate and critical portrait of a vanished way of
life deserves a place on the shelf alongside the publications of Hill
and Blanchet.