Sooke

On November 10, I realized that November 11 was a holiday and that I would have the entire day off work. It’s my son’s week to stay at his mother’s, so I also didn’t have any parenting duties. It was going to be a clear, cold day.

So I sent my friend @linsey_bo_binsey a message seeing if she wanted to go on an adventure first thing in the goddamn morning. Because she’s a G, she totally agreed.

Lindsey - A Portrait of a Total G

We gathered our gear: two very large Eggnog lattes; two slices of banana bread (one warmed up, one eaten cold because I’m a monster); one camera (because Lindsey totally forgot hers); two phones; a tripod; Ritalin; some gusto. Oh, and my wallet. That’s important later.

Originally, my intention was to hit the East coast of Vancouver Island and take some sunrise photos of the Gulf Islands maybe, or just the coastline between Victoria and Sydney. Lindsey suggested that we try the Sooke Potholes instead. I’ve never been to the Sooke Potholes before, but I’ve definitely been up the East Coast of the Island, so we took a nice drive to Sooke and started taking a bunch of pictures.

The first spot we hit was a waterfall just inside the park. Those photos will be on Instagram later, so I don’t want to spoil them here, but we both got some really solid shots there. We climbed a bunch of rocks and I left my 50mm and my kit lens in my backpack below, so the best shots I got from up there were, uh… Weird.

Definitely not my best work, but I like this one because it’s interesting more than pretty.

We took some pictures of us looking like goblins in a hollowed out tree and moved on to a spot with a bathroom and a good view of the river. I didn’t catch anything spectacular, but this is where I met my new arch-nemesis: Archibald J. Eagle.

Archibald was a right bastard. I took a bad picture of him in a tree before he took off and all of my camera settings were still for longer exposure shots. He flew off down the river to pick at some of the salmon that had come up to spawn recently, and the best picture I got of him was this piece of shit:

I feel it’s important to note that I am not a bird expert and have no idea if this is actually an eagle.

I took a couple of good pictures of an interesting rock (riveting, I know!), and moved on to the portion of our adventure that lasted the longest and got us the best results.

The third parking lot at the Sooke Potholes has a couple of really interesting trails, and a few places that aren’t trails at all but you can still reach if you’re brave enough to go rock climbing to get there. If the rocks are dry and the weather is good, it’s a relatively easy climb. The weather was good, but it hadn’t been the day before and the rocks were quite wet and sometimes slick. I - being comprised almost entirely of soft margarine that has been shaped into a rough semblance of a man - am not particularly well-suited to climbing anything, let alone the rain-slick precipice of a rocky valley. So I did what I feel anyone would do when faced with a difficult and dangerous climb that was clearly beyond them.

I said “Fuck yeah,” and climbed all over the damned place, consequences be damned!

At 9:55am on Wednesday November 11, 2020, I biffed it. I have a screenshot of my reaction to this horrific event below:

We took a bunch of pictures. Some of them were about a cave. One of them, taken by Lindsey after she told me to “look heroic” became the new banner on my blog. One of them is my favorite photo of a waterfall I’ve taken to date (and will also be on Instagram later, @slurpeemoney). Archibald flew past just as I was taking a long-exposure of the waterfall and I couldn’t reset fast enough to catch it in flight, the wee bastard.

Then we went to take some pictures of graffiti at the abandoned hotel and get some breakfast at this adorable little outdoor diner shack thing that Lindsey knew about. And when I went to pay for our eggs and corn fritters, I discovered that my wallet was missing.

I knew that I’d had my wallet. I’d used it to purchase Eggnog lattes a few hours earlier. I searched the car to no avail. The wallet was not in my camera bag. It wasn’t under my seat. I even checked the glove box knowing full well that I would not put my wallet in someone else’s glove box. I have ADD and as soon as I can’t see a thing it stops existing. That seems like a really good way to, uh… Lose my wallet. Which is why I checked. Nothing.

I downloaded Google Pay to manage the breakfast purchase and spent most of the meal stressing out about my wallet. I like my wallet. There’s magic in it.

Lindsey, being the G that we have previously established that she is, offered to take me back to look for it. So we did. We redid our entire journey as a bit of a speed run. We hit the waterfall, the bathroom and the river, the paths that aren’t really paths, that rock I biffed it on, the abandoned hotel, the adorable Shark Graffiti, everything. We even saw Archibald one more time, but now my camera was out of batteries and I’m pretty sure it was just mocking me.

No sign of my wallet. We even asked a nice man who worked at the park about the lost and found. Giving up a bit of hope and resigning myself to buying a new bus pass and getting some updated ID, we went home.

I got a call at 6pm letting me know that the Sooke RCMP had my wallet. So I borrowed my roommate’s bus pass and took a very, very long bus ride there and back to retrieve it.

I’m happy I have it back. My body has decided it’s imperative that I remember that I am not a man built for climbing rocks, but I had an awesome time and took a bunch of awesome pictures, and I’m looking forward to the next big photo adventure.

Oh, and Lindsey insisted I should kiss this fish. So that’s a thing that happened.

It is very, very dead. And stanky. It is also not the first fish she wanted me to kiss.

Photo credit, @lindsey_bo_binsey