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The Curve of Time
The Curve of Time
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
271 people are currently reading
4914 people want to read
About the author
M. Wylie Blanchet
2 books8 followersM. Wylie Blanchet, née Muriel Wylie Liffiton (2 May 1891 - 9 September 1961) was a Canadian travel writer.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, and married Geoffrey Orme Blanchet on 30 May 1909. Following her husband's death in 1926, Blanchet embarked on annual summer cruises along the British Columbia coast with her five children. Her 1961 book, The Curve of Time, documented these travels.
She died in 1961 while working on a second book.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, and married Geoffrey Orme Blanchet on 30 May 1909. Following her husband's death in 1926, Blanchet embarked on annual summer cruises along the British Columbia coast with her five children. Her 1961 book, The Curve of Time, documented these travels.
She died in 1961 while working on a second book.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 439 reviews
March 14, 2013
I really, really wanted to like this book more. The title is so alluring, and the fact that it's a memoir about a widowed woman and her five children sailing alone over a series of summers in British Columbia in the late 1920s-early 1930s is fascinating. The book leaves an impression of place and time and wonder, and it's rich with the geography, anthropology, and natural history of the Pacific Northwest. But it's a bit dense and so...impersonal! I remember thinking halfway through the book that I only knew the names of 3 of her children. I would have liked to get to know the author better--her life, her husband's death (he disappeared one day and their boat was found unmanned), etc.
July 20, 2010
I love this book. It has inspired me, not to sail with my kids, but to face hard times with courage and imagination.
July 31, 2008
A bit of history, a bit of philosophy, a bit of adventure.
This book was highly recommended to me by a friend who has cruised the Inside Passage and explored the islets of British Columbia and Alaska for the past 15 years. Many beautiful places are vividly described by Ms.'Capi' Blanchet. The lasting impression is the feeling of having spent time as a companion to the author and her children as they experience the adventure of travel and exploration as they cruise far from home in their small boat, in the 1930's. I enjoyed meeting unique people like 'Mike' - the knowledgeable recluse who expresses much of what must be the authors own philosopy of life. Altogether this little book is a bit of history, a bit of philosophy, and a bit of adventure. I didn't want it to end.
This book was highly recommended to me by a friend who has cruised the Inside Passage and explored the islets of British Columbia and Alaska for the past 15 years. Many beautiful places are vividly described by Ms.'Capi' Blanchet. The lasting impression is the feeling of having spent time as a companion to the author and her children as they experience the adventure of travel and exploration as they cruise far from home in their small boat, in the 1930's. I enjoyed meeting unique people like 'Mike' - the knowledgeable recluse who expresses much of what must be the authors own philosopy of life. Altogether this little book is a bit of history, a bit of philosophy, and a bit of adventure. I didn't want it to end.
July 28, 2014
These stories are remarkable. Blanchet was widowed in her thirties when her husband took their boat out and never returned; they were able to recover the boat but not his body. She and their five children embraced the boat anyway and took to it every summer, exploring the Pacific Northwest coast alone. Blanchet is given to casual statements like, "The kids and I didn't mention that we were about to scale 2500 feet to reach the blueberry patch because we didn't want [well-meaning male homesteader] to worry about it." She tells of navigating dangerous tides through sleepless nights assisted only by the skipper, whom we forget is a nine-year-old girl. Her belief in all of her kids as fully-formed people is encouraging (six-year-old Peter does a good job of steering the boat), she repairs the engine despite nil mechanical training, and only at rare times do you realize how alone she was.
Blanchet and her crew encounter bears, storms, abandoned Native American villages, and two scary-as-shit ghost/apparitions. Fall creeps in and calls them homeward, and the descriptions of home life are as lovely as life on the water. There are just a couple of moments where Blanchet acknowledges that others found her unusual or extraordinary (she and the kids wave off a summons from some older relatives informing her that she can't possibly continue on alone). And there is one very short, very beautiful passage where Blanchet, having piloted her children safely home after yet another summer, speaks of her loss. Just lovely all around.
Blanchet and her crew encounter bears, storms, abandoned Native American villages, and two scary-as-shit ghost/apparitions. Fall creeps in and calls them homeward, and the descriptions of home life are as lovely as life on the water. There are just a couple of moments where Blanchet acknowledges that others found her unusual or extraordinary (she and the kids wave off a summons from some older relatives informing her that she can't possibly continue on alone). And there is one very short, very beautiful passage where Blanchet, having piloted her children safely home after yet another summer, speaks of her loss. Just lovely all around.
August 4, 2008
I do so wish I had written a review of this after I read it. I'll have to get it from the library again someday.
I loved this part about the "Little House" they lived in:
"When we first lived there, the big firs and balsams grew very close to the house. So close that they could lean across and whisper to each other at night. Sometimes they would keep you awake and you would forget and say sharply, 'Hush, trees, go to sleep!' At first there would be an astonished silence...then a rush of low laughter...and they would whisper louder than ever, until you had to put your head under the blankets."
I loved this part about the "Little House" they lived in:
"When we first lived there, the big firs and balsams grew very close to the house. So close that they could lean across and whisper to each other at night. Sometimes they would keep you awake and you would forget and say sharply, 'Hush, trees, go to sleep!' At first there would be an astonished silence...then a rush of low laughter...and they would whisper louder than ever, until you had to put your head under the blankets."
December 18, 2008
You do not have to be nautically inclined to appreciate the true story of M. Wylie Blanchet and how she set off every summer with her dog and her five children on a 26 foot motor boat in the 30's. This is a book I will read again and again. Her bravery and sense of adventure is completely inspiring. It reads like a diary so you truly feel like you are along for the ride!
August 2, 2019
"“I don’t quite like the mightn’ts!” said John anxiously.
"What mightn’ts?” I asked, as I spun the wheel.
"The mightn’ts be able to swim,” said John, eyeing the rough waters that curled at our stern.""
Wow, I really enjoyed reading this book. It comprises several vignettes of boat trips undertaken along the British Columbia coast by the author and her five young children (and sometimes the dog) during summer in the years after her husband's death in 1926. She mostly refers to the children as the "youngsters" or "crew", and although young they participate in the various activities.
As they go from one inlet, island or cove to another she teaches the children (and the reader - this reader was fascinated) the history of the area and its indigenous peoples. There are many interesting cultural snippets about local tribes. Here they are visiting a deserted winter village: "When a chief built his house it was a custom for him to kill four of his slaves and bury one under each house post as it was raised—for strength, or good luck, or perhaps prestige. They had a curious habit of destroying their property just to show how great they were." "In the old days a chief would have greeted us when we stepped inside—a sea otter robe over his shoulder, his head sprinkled with white bird down, the peace sign. He would have led us across the upper platform between the house posts, down the steps into the centre well of the house. Then he would have sung us a little song to let us know that we were welcome, while the women around the open fires beat out the rhythm with their sticks. The earth floor would have been covered with clean sand in our honour and cedar-bark mats hastily spread for our sitting. Slaves would have brought us food—perhaps roe nicely rotted and soaked in fish oil, or perhaps with berries." She also describes the various carvings and the myths attached to them. She allows the reader to travel through time and space to see how these people lived.
They encounter many different animals including bears, wolves, a cougar, marine animals and of course birds. She teaches her children to respect the environment and its inhabitants regardless of whether they be fish, flesh or feather. These children live in an innocent world where they romp around in the nude, fish for their dinner, climb rocks and swim in waterfalls. Mum (mom) navigates, steers, teaches and cooks. The children are her able crew and they are adept at providing the fish that she cooks for their meal.
As well as being an able skipper who is perfectly capable of keeping the boat ship shape, the author is also erudite. In addition to displaying her extensive knowledge of the indigenous peoples she throws in references to authors such as James Joyce and others, and she regales not only her children, but the reader, with tales of Captain Vancouver after whom that great city is named. I was so enchanted that I immediately downloaded a nonfiction book about the captain.
M. Wylie Blanchet, née Muriel Wylie Liffiton (2 May 1891 – 9 September 1961) died whilst writing a second book.
"What mightn’ts?” I asked, as I spun the wheel.
"The mightn’ts be able to swim,” said John, eyeing the rough waters that curled at our stern.""
Wow, I really enjoyed reading this book. It comprises several vignettes of boat trips undertaken along the British Columbia coast by the author and her five young children (and sometimes the dog) during summer in the years after her husband's death in 1926. She mostly refers to the children as the "youngsters" or "crew", and although young they participate in the various activities.
As they go from one inlet, island or cove to another she teaches the children (and the reader - this reader was fascinated) the history of the area and its indigenous peoples. There are many interesting cultural snippets about local tribes. Here they are visiting a deserted winter village: "When a chief built his house it was a custom for him to kill four of his slaves and bury one under each house post as it was raised—for strength, or good luck, or perhaps prestige. They had a curious habit of destroying their property just to show how great they were." "In the old days a chief would have greeted us when we stepped inside—a sea otter robe over his shoulder, his head sprinkled with white bird down, the peace sign. He would have led us across the upper platform between the house posts, down the steps into the centre well of the house. Then he would have sung us a little song to let us know that we were welcome, while the women around the open fires beat out the rhythm with their sticks. The earth floor would have been covered with clean sand in our honour and cedar-bark mats hastily spread for our sitting. Slaves would have brought us food—perhaps roe nicely rotted and soaked in fish oil, or perhaps with berries." She also describes the various carvings and the myths attached to them. She allows the reader to travel through time and space to see how these people lived.
They encounter many different animals including bears, wolves, a cougar, marine animals and of course birds. She teaches her children to respect the environment and its inhabitants regardless of whether they be fish, flesh or feather. These children live in an innocent world where they romp around in the nude, fish for their dinner, climb rocks and swim in waterfalls. Mum (mom) navigates, steers, teaches and cooks. The children are her able crew and they are adept at providing the fish that she cooks for their meal.
As well as being an able skipper who is perfectly capable of keeping the boat ship shape, the author is also erudite. In addition to displaying her extensive knowledge of the indigenous peoples she throws in references to authors such as James Joyce and others, and she regales not only her children, but the reader, with tales of Captain Vancouver after whom that great city is named. I was so enchanted that I immediately downloaded a nonfiction book about the captain.
M. Wylie Blanchet, née Muriel Wylie Liffiton (2 May 1891 – 9 September 1961) died whilst writing a second book.
April 6, 2009
A single mother with three children boating in British Columbia's Inside Passage in the 1920's and 1930's. Episodes and experiences from their travels.
This little book is a microcosm-the little episodes inform us about relationships-with family, nature, technology (the boat), other people, past experience and the spiritual world. All in plain stores simply written. I can't recommend it enough.
This little book is a microcosm-the little episodes inform us about relationships-with family, nature, technology (the boat), other people, past experience and the spiritual world. All in plain stores simply written. I can't recommend it enough.
September 10, 2025
I had never heard of the memoir ‘The Curve of Time’, a collection of magazine articles written by M. Wyle Blanchet in the 1930’s. The author was a very unusual woman with an upper-class childhood and education, who possessed superb mechanical abilities, as well as being an excellent mom of five kids! On her own at age 35, when her husband presumably drowned (he disappeared after he took their boat out alone for a weekend spin) she spent many summers boating around Vancouver Island and the coast of the providence of British Columbia, which lies off the western coast of Canada. She alone maintained the boat, homeschooled her young children, and went for boating adventures, teaching her kids about life on the waters of the Pacific Northwest.
I have copied the book blurb:
”Widowed at just thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet placed her five young children aboard her twenty-five-foot motor launch Caprice. During the summers of the late 1920’s and 1930’s, the family explored the coves and islands of British Columbia, falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty while encountering settlers and hermits, prowling bears and dangerous tide rips. Blanchet—known as Capi—recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months.
The Curve of Time gathers these years into a memoir that has inspired generations to seek out their own adventures on the Wild West Coast. First published in 1961, less than a year before the author died, Blanchet’s captivating work has become a classic of travel writing and one of the bestselling BC books of all time.
Generously illustrated with maps and family photographs, this new edition offers a preface by publisher Howard White; a new foreword by two of Blanchet’s grandchildren, Michael Blanchet and Judy Reid, a biographical essay by celebrated journalist Edith Iglauer, plus Blanchet’s correspondence. Also included, for the first time in book form, is Blanchet’s incredible account of navigating the challenging west coast of Vancouver Island on the Caprice.”
The blurb says it all, and it is accurate. All I can add is that Blanchet could write! As the blurb says, her whimsical tone of writing was inspiring, drawing many people into having boating adventures for themselves. However, she is extremely reserved, telling almost nothing about herself and her kids beyond the most immediate descriptions of their trips and mishaps. While interesting and sometimes entertaining, I could not really understand Blanchet’s motivations. However, she clearly sought boating adventures and felt her children were happy with their lives. Since, as adults, every one of them ended up living happily as educated professionals or in good jobs, Blanchet was obviously an excellent teacher and mom.
Thankfully, there are plenty of maps included of the area where the family went boating. Otherwise, readers would be lost in the thicket of names of coves, inlets, and coastal and river formations, and the few inhabited settlements with populations of ten people or less, usually consisting of a goods store or a boat repair business. However, anyone who has gone boating will recognize the challenges and fun times that her descriptions of how wind and weather, and land shapes, affected how the boat handled. She describes several near disasters of sinking the boat because of miscalculations or ignorance of riptides and other tidal occurrences. Her kids were often oblivious, of course, of any dangers.
The family sometimes had even more difficulties on land! They would anchor the boat and go exploring in what were very wild and mostly uninhabited woods or very rocky beaches or cliffs. They would go on hikes to the top of coastal mountains, for example, where deadly fogs or rainstorms would suddenly make their adventure more interesting.
This family lived mostly outdoors. When indoors, they were always crammed together in small spaces. Blanchet’s house on Vancouver Island was a primitive wooden one without a lot of amenities on seven acres of woods. The boat was small for so many occupants crammed into it.
This book caused me to have a lot of mixed feelings, especially envy. What follows is my own personal memoir, decidedly less interesting than Blanchet’s memoir. You can stop reading this review now if you like.
I was born and have lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle is my hometown. I am generally very familiar with the area described in this memoir. I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Seattle, and my family also spent some vacations and weekends going fishing and boating and hiking. The natural parks and forests and waterways were not that different from what the Blanchet family explored in the 1930’s, but with the really really BIG changes of more people and more development.
Even with my being mostly a landlubber, it is difficult for anyone who has lived decades here to avoid or to have never had opportunities offered to go out into the local waters in some manner, whether it be sailing or boating out on the saltwater Puget Sound or on the numerous freshwater lakes and rivers, whether it is to go fishing, or being on someone else’s boat seeing the spectacular sights of nature and visiting coastal and island towns, traveling from a port city to a port town, or swimming.
Most of the cities, towns and counties in the United States along the western coastal regions have summer festivals and fairs which feature participation in water events, boat races, waterskiing, shellfish-eating contests and beach/water park celebrations.
The Washington State Ferry system, which connects many major waterfront town and cities around the Sound, is the largest ferry system in the United States. It also is the second-largest ferry system that carries vehicles in the world. I have been on a ferry hundreds of times, crossing Puget Sound from one town or city to another, saving myself many many hours of driving time, going to a festival or visiting a friend. Until recently, our water relationships with Canada were friendly and casual, so there were ferries that went back and forth between our countries and islands, as well as many accidental or incidental fishermen and amateur boaters’ meetings in the Strait of Juan de Fuca which divides America from Canada.
My husband and I owned a Reinell power boat for two years, a 22-foot ‘sedan’, where we could sleep, cook and use a porta-potty on board on weekend jaunts. As a young adult, I dated a fellow who owned a sailboat, and we went out into the Sound on romantic evenings. My parents owned a rowboat, in which they frequently went out into the Sound and in many rivers and lakes. My dad loved fishing, so he took us (forced us) to hike trails up to mountain lakes and rivers where the fishing was good if he could not drive the car there. I loved eating trout, even more than salmon or any other fish! We never ran into bears, but I learned to hate pissing down my legs, squatting awkwardly behind some bush.
In reading this book, I think the 1930’s in this area were an era where people easily ran into a lot more of wildlife in the wild, much more than now. Then, as now, houses were built near or in wild areas. But everything is more developed now, more roads, more houses, more people. Strangely, I’ve run into more deer near my home, a senior park in the middle of a city, than I ever did while on hikes, or fishing. Our beaches are as full of rocks (not sand) now as they were during the time period described in ‘The Curve of Time’, but still they are full of people walking on them, the risk of twisted ankles be damned. But cougars and bears are now invading Pacific Northwest cities, poor things, settling for our pets and garbage refuse for protein, needing food which is scarcer to find in their natural habitats. We have record numbers of visitors to all of our parks and forests now, and I guess they are loving the outdoors to death, covering trails with trash and camping sites with noise, or setting campfires improperly, leading to massive forest fires. Peculiarly, while the surviving animals living in the nearby Pacific Northwest wild areas are having more trouble finding enough to eat, and are taking the risk of tipping over garbage cans in people’s backyards and driveways, hunting the pet cats and dogs, coyotes are thriving in our Pacific Northwest cities, joining the crows and seagulls in the feast of human garbage and pets. I’ve seen fat coyotes in my senior park. They are not being shot to death like the cougars and bears when they are seen on a city street or alleyway.
It is really really cool, though, to be able to get in a car, and after a half-hour or hour-drive, be able to be on a mountain hiking trail in the middle of forest no matter how carefully designed, curated and managed by naturalists or forest rangers, or on a beach at low tide, seeing a lot of ocean critters, or be in a boat or ferry on Puget Sound watching freighters from around the world coming here and orca frolicking and looking at us as much as we are looking at them, or on a river or lake seeing birds take off or clownishly dance away twittering angrily at our disruption of their activities (the braver ones flying to a tree to watch us curiously)!
However. But.
I must admit the antihistamine Dramamine became my best friend throughout my life. I did not, as I learned to my everlasting regret, ever lose my inability to tolerate being on rocking and rolling platforms without losing everything in my stomach. I tried, gentler reader, I really really did. But “sea sickness” haunts me whenever I take road trips in a car longer than 40 minutes, much less boat rides (except for the ferry rides). In addition, I break out in a rash when I am in the sun too long, which is as unbelievable to me as it is to everyone I know. I thought this can’t be happening, until I googled it, and I discovered this is a thing that happens to a minority of human beings. I also learned in many ways, one way being in the constant attempts to increase my physical strengths through constant exercise, I do not possess very many genes of the athlete. I get tired before everyone else on hikes of any kind, needing to sit and rest. This! This despite that I exercise (mild exercises) three times a week, 40 minutes a time, now that I am in my 70’s, and that I belonged to an exercise club when younger, and that I used to walk an hour three times a week until my knees hurt too much ten years ago. Plus, my blood apparently smells sweeter than normal, or so I’m told, because of the fact that I turned out to be a bug magnet. To this day I avoid being outside in the dusk time, when most biting bugs come out in this area. Even so, if I stand outside anywhere with a group of people, I will have numerous bites, numbering in the dozens compared to the few bites that others had who were also there.
Alas! I never had any intense fun whatsoever being on any waterways (except for the ferries). I don’t really have much fun being outdoors, full stop, with all of my fricking body stuff issues going on, but I try. I don’t want to be a wet blanket. But I end up being one anyway.
Once, as a 19-year-old encyclopedia salesman walking about Cascade Mountain foothill towns in Washington State neighborhoods from 6pm to 10pm, I returned to my Seattle apartment to discover I had thousands of bug bites all over my legs. I had been bitten through my pantyhose. My legs swelled up, and I stayed many days soaking in cold water in my tub, taking time off from my job as I endured the worst itching and painful sores I have ever gone through. None of my fellow young salesmen had had this issue at all, despite that all of us had been dropped off in nearby neighborhoods, and all of us had walked through the night knocking on doors. I took to wearing jeans or slacks after this.
FYI, I quit this door-to-door job after two - TWO - years. Why did it take so long to submit my resignation? Basically, I was having a lot of fun meeting so many different types of people I had never imagined could exist. It was a horrible job, though. Full stop.
I did take a boat navigation class in high school (I mean, hello, I lived in a port city), and I did take a class on boating, required by the Coast Guard, in order to “be safe” while boating on our Reinell. I learned how to read maps and work out the necessary speed/time/tidal direction plotting on the waterways in that navigation class, I learned how to go with our Reinell boat through the Ballard Locks (officially the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks) which joins Lake Union, fresh water, to the Puget Sound, salt water. The Lake Washington Ship Canal runs through from Lake Washington to Lake Union to the Ballard Locks to Puget Sound, maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers (so far, President Trump has not cut these funds, I guess, I don’t know actually).
https://www.nws.usace.army.mil/Missio...
Currently, the Pacific Northwest is enduring a years-long drought. There are fears of a water shortage every summer for the last few years, and last year, some Pacific Northwest counties issued directions to conserve water! This is unheard of, as are the huge numbers of forest fires all over Washington, Oregon and California, as well as in Canada. President Trump has fired most of the people whose job was to fight the forest fires in America, as well as those forest rangers who maintain the hiking trails. The glaciers in our local mountains are almost all gone. The ski resorts have been using mechanical snow production machines to open the resorts for skiing in the winter, also unheard of until now. The local and ocean waters have been significantly cleaned up from the chemical pollution of the industrial sites in the 1970’s, but our sewage water-treatment processing plants have lately been having spillage incidents due to the much much bigger population of people pooing than the plants were designed to handle. Down below in the Puget Sound are millions of fishing nets and plastic garbage still lying on the sea floor, killing sea life and entangling boat propellers. Many beaches are closed to swimming because of poisonous algae growth in the summer - our waters are much hotter than they used to be. People are trying to save our Puget Sound orcas from extinction due to a shortage of salmon, their only food source. However, despite the hopeful news of cleaner water and salmon restoration efforts such as the demolition of some dams which blocked the salmon from laying eggs in their traditional sites up rivers, scientists have warned the waters are getting too hot for salmon survival at all, full stop. Global warming is changing everything, gentler reader, along with too much development.
While folks can still see much of the same things that Blanchet wrote about in her memoir, as I did too as a child growing up here in the Pacific Northwest, the sights and sounds of the western coastal waters and western land wildlife are harder to find and are definitely going away or extinct. However, it is probably true the sights and sounds of the Pacific Northwest that Blanchet wrote of can be seen only here and in western Canada at this time. So. Come and see while the Pacific Northwest still looks like it did in the book! In some areas here and there, anyway.
I have copied the book blurb:
”Widowed at just thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet placed her five young children aboard her twenty-five-foot motor launch Caprice. During the summers of the late 1920’s and 1930’s, the family explored the coves and islands of British Columbia, falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty while encountering settlers and hermits, prowling bears and dangerous tide rips. Blanchet—known as Capi—recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months.
The Curve of Time gathers these years into a memoir that has inspired generations to seek out their own adventures on the Wild West Coast. First published in 1961, less than a year before the author died, Blanchet’s captivating work has become a classic of travel writing and one of the bestselling BC books of all time.
Generously illustrated with maps and family photographs, this new edition offers a preface by publisher Howard White; a new foreword by two of Blanchet’s grandchildren, Michael Blanchet and Judy Reid, a biographical essay by celebrated journalist Edith Iglauer, plus Blanchet’s correspondence. Also included, for the first time in book form, is Blanchet’s incredible account of navigating the challenging west coast of Vancouver Island on the Caprice.”
The blurb says it all, and it is accurate. All I can add is that Blanchet could write! As the blurb says, her whimsical tone of writing was inspiring, drawing many people into having boating adventures for themselves. However, she is extremely reserved, telling almost nothing about herself and her kids beyond the most immediate descriptions of their trips and mishaps. While interesting and sometimes entertaining, I could not really understand Blanchet’s motivations. However, she clearly sought boating adventures and felt her children were happy with their lives. Since, as adults, every one of them ended up living happily as educated professionals or in good jobs, Blanchet was obviously an excellent teacher and mom.
Thankfully, there are plenty of maps included of the area where the family went boating. Otherwise, readers would be lost in the thicket of names of coves, inlets, and coastal and river formations, and the few inhabited settlements with populations of ten people or less, usually consisting of a goods store or a boat repair business. However, anyone who has gone boating will recognize the challenges and fun times that her descriptions of how wind and weather, and land shapes, affected how the boat handled. She describes several near disasters of sinking the boat because of miscalculations or ignorance of riptides and other tidal occurrences. Her kids were often oblivious, of course, of any dangers.
The family sometimes had even more difficulties on land! They would anchor the boat and go exploring in what were very wild and mostly uninhabited woods or very rocky beaches or cliffs. They would go on hikes to the top of coastal mountains, for example, where deadly fogs or rainstorms would suddenly make their adventure more interesting.
This family lived mostly outdoors. When indoors, they were always crammed together in small spaces. Blanchet’s house on Vancouver Island was a primitive wooden one without a lot of amenities on seven acres of woods. The boat was small for so many occupants crammed into it.
This book caused me to have a lot of mixed feelings, especially envy. What follows is my own personal memoir, decidedly less interesting than Blanchet’s memoir. You can stop reading this review now if you like.
I was born and have lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle is my hometown. I am generally very familiar with the area described in this memoir. I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Seattle, and my family also spent some vacations and weekends going fishing and boating and hiking. The natural parks and forests and waterways were not that different from what the Blanchet family explored in the 1930’s, but with the really really BIG changes of more people and more development.
Even with my being mostly a landlubber, it is difficult for anyone who has lived decades here to avoid or to have never had opportunities offered to go out into the local waters in some manner, whether it be sailing or boating out on the saltwater Puget Sound or on the numerous freshwater lakes and rivers, whether it is to go fishing, or being on someone else’s boat seeing the spectacular sights of nature and visiting coastal and island towns, traveling from a port city to a port town, or swimming.
Most of the cities, towns and counties in the United States along the western coastal regions have summer festivals and fairs which feature participation in water events, boat races, waterskiing, shellfish-eating contests and beach/water park celebrations.
The Washington State Ferry system, which connects many major waterfront town and cities around the Sound, is the largest ferry system in the United States. It also is the second-largest ferry system that carries vehicles in the world. I have been on a ferry hundreds of times, crossing Puget Sound from one town or city to another, saving myself many many hours of driving time, going to a festival or visiting a friend. Until recently, our water relationships with Canada were friendly and casual, so there were ferries that went back and forth between our countries and islands, as well as many accidental or incidental fishermen and amateur boaters’ meetings in the Strait of Juan de Fuca which divides America from Canada.
My husband and I owned a Reinell power boat for two years, a 22-foot ‘sedan’, where we could sleep, cook and use a porta-potty on board on weekend jaunts. As a young adult, I dated a fellow who owned a sailboat, and we went out into the Sound on romantic evenings. My parents owned a rowboat, in which they frequently went out into the Sound and in many rivers and lakes. My dad loved fishing, so he took us (forced us) to hike trails up to mountain lakes and rivers where the fishing was good if he could not drive the car there. I loved eating trout, even more than salmon or any other fish! We never ran into bears, but I learned to hate pissing down my legs, squatting awkwardly behind some bush.
In reading this book, I think the 1930’s in this area were an era where people easily ran into a lot more of wildlife in the wild, much more than now. Then, as now, houses were built near or in wild areas. But everything is more developed now, more roads, more houses, more people. Strangely, I’ve run into more deer near my home, a senior park in the middle of a city, than I ever did while on hikes, or fishing. Our beaches are as full of rocks (not sand) now as they were during the time period described in ‘The Curve of Time’, but still they are full of people walking on them, the risk of twisted ankles be damned. But cougars and bears are now invading Pacific Northwest cities, poor things, settling for our pets and garbage refuse for protein, needing food which is scarcer to find in their natural habitats. We have record numbers of visitors to all of our parks and forests now, and I guess they are loving the outdoors to death, covering trails with trash and camping sites with noise, or setting campfires improperly, leading to massive forest fires. Peculiarly, while the surviving animals living in the nearby Pacific Northwest wild areas are having more trouble finding enough to eat, and are taking the risk of tipping over garbage cans in people’s backyards and driveways, hunting the pet cats and dogs, coyotes are thriving in our Pacific Northwest cities, joining the crows and seagulls in the feast of human garbage and pets. I’ve seen fat coyotes in my senior park. They are not being shot to death like the cougars and bears when they are seen on a city street or alleyway.
It is really really cool, though, to be able to get in a car, and after a half-hour or hour-drive, be able to be on a mountain hiking trail in the middle of forest no matter how carefully designed, curated and managed by naturalists or forest rangers, or on a beach at low tide, seeing a lot of ocean critters, or be in a boat or ferry on Puget Sound watching freighters from around the world coming here and orca frolicking and looking at us as much as we are looking at them, or on a river or lake seeing birds take off or clownishly dance away twittering angrily at our disruption of their activities (the braver ones flying to a tree to watch us curiously)!
However. But.
I must admit the antihistamine Dramamine became my best friend throughout my life. I did not, as I learned to my everlasting regret, ever lose my inability to tolerate being on rocking and rolling platforms without losing everything in my stomach. I tried, gentler reader, I really really did. But “sea sickness” haunts me whenever I take road trips in a car longer than 40 minutes, much less boat rides (except for the ferry rides). In addition, I break out in a rash when I am in the sun too long, which is as unbelievable to me as it is to everyone I know. I thought this can’t be happening, until I googled it, and I discovered this is a thing that happens to a minority of human beings. I also learned in many ways, one way being in the constant attempts to increase my physical strengths through constant exercise, I do not possess very many genes of the athlete. I get tired before everyone else on hikes of any kind, needing to sit and rest. This! This despite that I exercise (mild exercises) three times a week, 40 minutes a time, now that I am in my 70’s, and that I belonged to an exercise club when younger, and that I used to walk an hour three times a week until my knees hurt too much ten years ago. Plus, my blood apparently smells sweeter than normal, or so I’m told, because of the fact that I turned out to be a bug magnet. To this day I avoid being outside in the dusk time, when most biting bugs come out in this area. Even so, if I stand outside anywhere with a group of people, I will have numerous bites, numbering in the dozens compared to the few bites that others had who were also there.
Alas! I never had any intense fun whatsoever being on any waterways (except for the ferries). I don’t really have much fun being outdoors, full stop, with all of my fricking body stuff issues going on, but I try. I don’t want to be a wet blanket. But I end up being one anyway.
Once, as a 19-year-old encyclopedia salesman walking about Cascade Mountain foothill towns in Washington State neighborhoods from 6pm to 10pm, I returned to my Seattle apartment to discover I had thousands of bug bites all over my legs. I had been bitten through my pantyhose. My legs swelled up, and I stayed many days soaking in cold water in my tub, taking time off from my job as I endured the worst itching and painful sores I have ever gone through. None of my fellow young salesmen had had this issue at all, despite that all of us had been dropped off in nearby neighborhoods, and all of us had walked through the night knocking on doors. I took to wearing jeans or slacks after this.
FYI, I quit this door-to-door job after two - TWO - years. Why did it take so long to submit my resignation? Basically, I was having a lot of fun meeting so many different types of people I had never imagined could exist. It was a horrible job, though. Full stop.
I did take a boat navigation class in high school (I mean, hello, I lived in a port city), and I did take a class on boating, required by the Coast Guard, in order to “be safe” while boating on our Reinell. I learned how to read maps and work out the necessary speed/time/tidal direction plotting on the waterways in that navigation class, I learned how to go with our Reinell boat through the Ballard Locks (officially the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks) which joins Lake Union, fresh water, to the Puget Sound, salt water. The Lake Washington Ship Canal runs through from Lake Washington to Lake Union to the Ballard Locks to Puget Sound, maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers (so far, President Trump has not cut these funds, I guess, I don’t know actually).
https://www.nws.usace.army.mil/Missio...
Currently, the Pacific Northwest is enduring a years-long drought. There are fears of a water shortage every summer for the last few years, and last year, some Pacific Northwest counties issued directions to conserve water! This is unheard of, as are the huge numbers of forest fires all over Washington, Oregon and California, as well as in Canada. President Trump has fired most of the people whose job was to fight the forest fires in America, as well as those forest rangers who maintain the hiking trails. The glaciers in our local mountains are almost all gone. The ski resorts have been using mechanical snow production machines to open the resorts for skiing in the winter, also unheard of until now. The local and ocean waters have been significantly cleaned up from the chemical pollution of the industrial sites in the 1970’s, but our sewage water-treatment processing plants have lately been having spillage incidents due to the much much bigger population of people pooing than the plants were designed to handle. Down below in the Puget Sound are millions of fishing nets and plastic garbage still lying on the sea floor, killing sea life and entangling boat propellers. Many beaches are closed to swimming because of poisonous algae growth in the summer - our waters are much hotter than they used to be. People are trying to save our Puget Sound orcas from extinction due to a shortage of salmon, their only food source. However, despite the hopeful news of cleaner water and salmon restoration efforts such as the demolition of some dams which blocked the salmon from laying eggs in their traditional sites up rivers, scientists have warned the waters are getting too hot for salmon survival at all, full stop. Global warming is changing everything, gentler reader, along with too much development.
While folks can still see much of the same things that Blanchet wrote about in her memoir, as I did too as a child growing up here in the Pacific Northwest, the sights and sounds of the western coastal waters and western land wildlife are harder to find and are definitely going away or extinct. However, it is probably true the sights and sounds of the Pacific Northwest that Blanchet wrote of can be seen only here and in western Canada at this time. So. Come and see while the Pacific Northwest still looks like it did in the book! In some areas here and there, anyway.
July 10, 2016
I was all set to read this one as an ebook, when as one of those "universal" coincidences the publisher offered me a copy of the audio edition. Very kind of them, and in no way influences my opinion of the story itself.
If you're looking for a "clean" (G-rated) read, this one's for you - there were a couple of chapters that I found a bit ... cutesy, perhaps, though they fit in with the overall work (fairy-tale style rather than actual events). For the most part each chapter concerns a specific location visited, or potentially dangerous situation faced on the water. For those who like spooky tales, I found their visit to a deserted native village plenty spine-chilling.
Definitely a recommended read, especially for those interested in maritime adventure or Canadian history (Canadiana). I found the audio narration truly outstanding, one of the best fits I've run across as a veteran listener; I had to regularly remind myself that it wasn't the voice of the author herself!
If you're looking for a "clean" (G-rated) read, this one's for you - there were a couple of chapters that I found a bit ... cutesy, perhaps, though they fit in with the overall work (fairy-tale style rather than actual events). For the most part each chapter concerns a specific location visited, or potentially dangerous situation faced on the water. For those who like spooky tales, I found their visit to a deserted native village plenty spine-chilling.
Definitely a recommended read, especially for those interested in maritime adventure or Canadian history (Canadiana). I found the audio narration truly outstanding, one of the best fits I've run across as a veteran listener; I had to regularly remind myself that it wasn't the voice of the author herself!
July 16, 2009
Deb Walsh - Ladies Summer Reading Tea - exploring the coastal waters of the NW - a memoir - mother of 5, widowed in the 1920's - inspiring story of motherhood.
My take - These are wonderful tales of enjoying the simple things/appreciating nature - exploring islands, beaches, winter Indian villages, meeting people who lived out in the middle of nowhere - meanwhile having amazing adventures - some scary, some simply beautiful. This woman is an amazing writer and must have been an amazing mother - self-sufficient, intelligent, fun, etc. I would love to know what happened to those children as they grew up - they would be a little older than my parents and I think Grandmother Sylvia - given a different husband perhaps would have lived somewhat like this.
My take - These are wonderful tales of enjoying the simple things/appreciating nature - exploring islands, beaches, winter Indian villages, meeting people who lived out in the middle of nowhere - meanwhile having amazing adventures - some scary, some simply beautiful. This woman is an amazing writer and must have been an amazing mother - self-sufficient, intelligent, fun, etc. I would love to know what happened to those children as they grew up - they would be a little older than my parents and I think Grandmother Sylvia - given a different husband perhaps would have lived somewhat like this.
August 14, 2018
I selected this book because it takes place near my little corner of the world. Written by a widow with five young children, it's a memoir of their summer travels boating around the coast of British Columbia. I think Blanchet was both a very brave and very fool hardy woman. She and her children seek out isolated and unusual places and encounter eccentric individuals. With the casual ease of hind sight, she writes about her kids in perilous situations-first published in 1961, this was way before cell phones. From today's viewpoint, she and her kids basically plunder sacred Native American burial sites. Still, it was an interesting perspective on a time and place. Also, stunning cover
September 12, 2014
An utterly fantastic read. Generally this type of journal is more a description of the places the author is visiting but through Blanchet’s inquisitive, keen, and philosophical eye it becomes so much more. It transcends both time and place and becomes a good testament on how to live in and be apart of this world. Now I wanna buy a boat and roam the Canadian waters.
Side note, it also manages to create it’s own mythology which was a fantastic surprise.
Side note, it also manages to create it’s own mythology which was a fantastic surprise.
September 14, 2016
The perfect summer read - especially if you live in British Columbia. Really, for me, this book is about Capi. Here is a widowed woman taking her 5 children out on a sailboat summer after summer. The stuff she is made of - I'd like some of that. And it made me realize what wonders are on my doorstep.
April 27, 2016
It is an unusual premise: a widow, five children (and sometimes a dog) on a 26 foot boat, travelling several long summers around the waters between Canada's mainland and Vancouver Island.
One reviewer has commented that the book is a little impersonal - and it is: neither the personalities of the writer, or her children come through, and the actual "story" of their lives is not present. I would have liked a bit more personal background, but the real "character" here is the landscape; the moody atmosphere of the West Coast British Columbia woods and waters comes through on every page of this book.
I bought The Curve of Time while travelling by boat in the very waters Capi (M. Wylie Blanchet) writes about, and devoured it in three days of calm waters. Matching the places she visited, back in the late 1920s, early 1930s, with the ones we were visiting in 2015, gave the pages extra poignancy. Even without that, though, her descriptions of the inlets and islands come to life with her poetic imagery.
I particularly loved the inclusion of Capi's thoughts on Captain Vancouver's notes about his early explorations, her interpretation of the account of Juan de Fuca's voyages
A slice of time, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the history and geography of BCs West Coast.
One reviewer has commented that the book is a little impersonal - and it is: neither the personalities of the writer, or her children come through, and the actual "story" of their lives is not present. I would have liked a bit more personal background, but the real "character" here is the landscape; the moody atmosphere of the West Coast British Columbia woods and waters comes through on every page of this book.
I bought The Curve of Time while travelling by boat in the very waters Capi (M. Wylie Blanchet) writes about, and devoured it in three days of calm waters. Matching the places she visited, back in the late 1920s, early 1930s, with the ones we were visiting in 2015, gave the pages extra poignancy. Even without that, though, her descriptions of the inlets and islands come to life with her poetic imagery.
I particularly loved the inclusion of Capi's thoughts on Captain Vancouver's notes about his early explorations, her interpretation of the account of Juan de Fuca's voyages
A slice of time, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the history and geography of BCs West Coast.
September 25, 2024
A beautiful memoir of a mom delighting in her life with children. This book was recommended to me by a fellow inside passage sailor, after she watched our seven children come off our 24 ft boat. Blanchet was invested in creating awe, wonder, and adventure in her children. I will be adding this to my read aloud books.
August 17, 2012
If you were widowed with five young children, of course you'd spend summers exploring the Inside Passage and the BC coast with them in a 25-foot boat. Bears, cougars, orcas, storms, reefs, rock slides, crazy woodsmen, and unreliable food and water—what better environment to raise a child? (And this in the '20s, when radio wasn't available there, let alone cell phones and GPS.)
There's not really any continuous story here, but every scene and event is so beautifully and unpretentiously told that you accept the family's reality as normal. There are only a half-dozen black-and-white photos in the book, but from Blanchet's writing I have a better idea of the beauty of the coast than I've had from living near it for 18 years.
I'm trying to think of further ways to praise this book, but I can't. Read it.
There's not really any continuous story here, but every scene and event is so beautifully and unpretentiously told that you accept the family's reality as normal. There are only a half-dozen black-and-white photos in the book, but from Blanchet's writing I have a better idea of the beauty of the coast than I've had from living near it for 18 years.
I'm trying to think of further ways to praise this book, but I can't. Read it.
June 16, 2010
Great book! Wylie Blanchet is a powerful story teller. Her passion for coastal B.C. waterways and history comes through clearly. The adventures she shared with her children were mesmerizing and sometimes thrilling. They travelled during a time when there were many risks and few ways to get help. Reading this while planning a trip to the area made it even more special.
August 19, 2011
this book brought me back to what i cherish in life, and inspired me to make more time for living that way.
August 19, 2012
Read this in 2007. Last year we cruised the same waters. I want to re read this incredible account of a brave, strong and adventuresome woman
June 4, 2024
A book to bundle up with
February 13, 2017
Looking at my GR books tagged Canada. Saw this one, added re-read tag.
The descriptive "classic" has long contained an element of annoyance. That's partly library employment induced, and partly my maverick genes. Like god, classic ... endless variations.
Thinking classic, remembered, when, just a few weeks ago, chatting with one of the old timers in the library, being asked with enthusiasm if I'd ever read Blanchet. Indeed, yes, was impressed and curious to know more about her boat life. Will Timeless feel be there with re-read? Is it a classic? Likely.
In my fantasy world, the coast of British Columbia is a region for decades of exploration. The Curve of Time ...
The descriptive "classic" has long contained an element of annoyance. That's partly library employment induced, and partly my maverick genes. Like god, classic ... endless variations.
Thinking classic, remembered, when, just a few weeks ago, chatting with one of the old timers in the library, being asked with enthusiasm if I'd ever read Blanchet. Indeed, yes, was impressed and curious to know more about her boat life. Will Timeless feel be there with re-read? Is it a classic? Likely.
In my fantasy world, the coast of British Columbia is a region for decades of exploration. The Curve of Time ...
April 21, 2025
Es war halt vor hundert Jahren und die vielen Stellen, an denen völlig ungerührt First-Nations-Gräber geplündert werden etc., lesen sich heute nicht mehr ganz so lustig. Die Stellen, an denen was Harmloseres passiert, hätten davon profitiert, nicht erst dreißig Jahre später aufgeschrieben zu werden. So sind sie zwar schön, lesen sich aber wie oft erzählte Familienanekdoten, deren Wahrheitsgehalt über die Jahre wahrscheinlich etwas nachgelassen hat.
December 4, 2017
This is a volume of remembered experiences, incredible journeys the author took with her family in a small boat exploring the shores of British Columbia.
Muriel and her husband Geoffrey moved West in the early 1920s and settled on Vancouver Island. At the time, Vancouver was a small, grubby, sawmill town and the province was considered a backwater. But the couple loved the landscape and began raising their children there. They bought a small boat they called The Caprice and used it for recreation. One day Geoffrey went out in the boat on a day trip and never returned. The boat was picked up later, but he was nowhere to be found and was presumed dead.
One might think that Muriel, left a widow in her early thirties with five children, might never want to set foot in a boat again. But a year after her husband’s death, she bundled her young children into the boat and began travelling the inland seas during the summers. The family would leave their secluded seven acre property on Vancouver Island each year in June and return later in October. These are her memories of their adventures during the fifteen summers she travelled with her children up and down the coast, investigating inlets, recreating the travels of early explorers and examining artifacts in the empty villages of native peoples. During their travels they were frequently lost or never sure of exactly where they were, forced to rely on pilot books and out of date charts to navigate their way along the rocky shore. At the time, the coastal rainforest was still intact and much of what they saw is now gone. The book is neither a story nor a log, just an account of the adventures Muriel and her children enjoyed during these summer camping holidays.
Blanchett first published this small volume in the United Kingdom, but with little publicity the book was completely unnoticed in Canada. The Canadian edition published in 1968 was well received and she started a second volume shortly afterwards. Blanchett died of a heart attack while writing it, found by friends slumped over her typewriter and hard at work. This volume is now considered a classic travelogue in Canadian literature, one of the few to chart a woman’s experience travelling the coastal waterway during that time period, recording her nomadic experiences and sharing her interactions with the natural world.
Blanchett approaches the rugged natural beauty of the British Columbia Coast with an appreciative eye. Her narrative reflects the way she viewed her surroundings, not as someone pitted against nature but rather as a part of it. She did not see the landscape as a dangerous, hostile wilderness, something to be feared, confronted, challenged and conquered. What she saw she described as beautiful, striking and awesome. She alluded to its dangers by simply acknowledging the powerful tides, the dangerous rapids, the unpredictable winds and the heavy insistent fog which could appear out of nowhere. In one instance, she describes coming upon a wall of rock that suddenly appeared ten feet in front of her vessel, rising out of the sea in the fog. But she did not panic or cower before it. Instead, mesmerized by its majesty, she stepped out on the deck to get a better look and to marvel at the flocks of seabirds nesting in its crevices.
Anyone the family met in these isolated surroundings was hospitable, ready to share what little they had and open to the infrequent experience of human visitors. We know little about the children themselves who serve as her crew and three of the five, Joan, Peter and John are most frequently referred to in the text. In later sections two other names are mentioned, that of Elizabeth and David and the introductory remarks by a friend speak of her taking five children on these journeys.
The Caprice was not a large vessel, only twenty-five feet long and 150 square feet. It was a challenge to pack everyone (and sometimes the dog) into this small space with all the gear and supplies they needed. Everything had to have its exact place or no one could move. Each person had one mug, one plate, one set of clothes, their pajamas and a bathing suit. Sleeping on board was cramped and uncomfortable so they spent every opportunity they had sleeping on the shore in their tent. Living on a boat in such close quarters must have been an uncomfortable, uneasy experience at times. Blanchett’s even tempered approach to whatever trying circumstances confronted her is not just remarkable but unusual.
Blanchett spends little time on the domestic challenges of these adventures, instead using her narrative to record the spellbinding landscapes, the interesting people they encountered and the almost sensual experience of eating freshly caught salmon without knives and forks, the fish cooked on an open grate over a fire on a deserted beach.
Several noteworthy experiences are described in detail. One involved meeting Mike, a logger who almost died in a barroom brawl and retreated to the isolated wilderness to heal his body and soul. There he built a house, nurtured the soil over several years and planted scores of apple trees. Surrounded by his thoughts, his books and the trees, he got his life back and stayed, happy and spiritually content in the new home he had created.
In another adventure, the family was caught on the top of a mountain in heavy fog after a challenging and strenuous hike, unable to find their way back down and forced to navigate a nerve racking descent. They proceeded down slowly and carefully holding the hand of the person in front of them, the back of that person the only thing they could see clearly. They also had to cross swaths of wet granite which had been bathed with the fog and were now as slippery as ice. They negotiated this harrowing part of the journey by sitting down and sliding on their buttocks, their visibility the meager three or four feet in front of them, enough to keep them from falling off a precipice but not enough to give them any sense of direction.
Blanchett also records some humorous moments on their journeys, including the time she whistled a duck to join young John who was having difficulty sleeping and the time she and the two boys, without a book to read aloud to each other in the late evening, made up a story about a whale they called Henry, a story that continued over many subsequent adventures and was frequently refereed to over the years.
Blanchett is cautious, pragmatic and level-headed and appears able to cope with anything. Even the moments when she experiences concern, she quickly acknowledges it, deals with it and quite remarkably just moves on. After a harrowing adventure, she looks back and questions why they were worried, minimizing her “irrational fright” and saying to her children, “weren’t we sillies to worry”. Her competence on the water promotes a calm that allows all of them to have a positive connection to the landscape and the experience of their adventure. Any time there was true danger, it was never presented as such, but was seen as an opportunity to connect with the world, to become engaged and a part of it.
Blanchett has created a single narrative choosing not to divide the text into dated sections about her various trips. Instead, each section focuses on the experience of a visit to a specific location. This results in the creation of a long narrative of small sketches which can be disorienting and confusing for the reader. One is never sure what year it is, the age of the children or the distance travelled. In each section, she skips back and forth between short passages of domestic life and the experiences of coastal life as they wander the landscape, pondering their connection to it and think of others who had explored it before them. In the process, she creates beautiful descriptive paragraphs of the lakes, waterfalls, rivers and the sea itself. She writes of exploring the beaches, fishing for their meals, looking for seahorses and encountering a host of wild animals including black, brown and grizzly bears, bald headed eagles, minks, a cougar, a pod of frolicking killer whales, vultures and a grey wolf and her cubs. As she describes each adventure she continues to show herself to be a competent and confident traveler who takes everything in stride, calmly facing every catastrophe and challenge she meets, including repairing the engine on the boat, dealing with a sick child or encountering a black bear. She does not dwell on personal dramas but minimizes them in the narrative to focus her attention on the experience and her connection with the natural beauty of the landscape. Her prose contains the meticulously recorded details of the phosphorescent bits of plankton in the sea, the relentless sometimes monotonous waves, and the every changing colors of the vast stretches of sea water.
Reading about the family’s travels to the Indian Villages is difficult and disturbing. They had spent the winter months researching the Indian’s history and their habits, determined to get the most from these visits. Blanchett was especially anxious to explore a past that she believed would soon disappear and be lost forever. She never described encounters with the First Nation people, but felt free to explore their surroundings. The family entered boarded up longhouses despite the posted “No Trespassing” signs, removed artifacts from the sites and even disturbed their dead. Many of the villages they visited were not abandoned, simply closed up for the summer while the villagers went up the rivers to their fishing grounds. Although present day readers might be aghast at their offhanded attitude, it must be remembered that Blanchett was a product of the time in which she lived, a time when a colonial approach to native people was the norm. Canadians have since become aware of the damage they have done by this cavalier manner which has negatively impacted First Nation people through several subsequent generations. Reading about Blanchett and her family trespassing on these peoples’ lands, exploring their private homes, sifting through their belongings and wandering through the places that housed their dead are painful to read, a sorrowful reminder of what was accepted behavior in the past.
This a book of travel and adventure, a very readable account of this unusual, independent, intelligent and brave woman who explored the waters between Vancouver Island and the rugged mainland coast of Canada with her family. I think about the children and the amazing childhood they must have experienced as well as the remarkable role model they had in a mother who was an adventurer and also a writer. It is a wonderful account of their adventures.
Muriel and her husband Geoffrey moved West in the early 1920s and settled on Vancouver Island. At the time, Vancouver was a small, grubby, sawmill town and the province was considered a backwater. But the couple loved the landscape and began raising their children there. They bought a small boat they called The Caprice and used it for recreation. One day Geoffrey went out in the boat on a day trip and never returned. The boat was picked up later, but he was nowhere to be found and was presumed dead.
One might think that Muriel, left a widow in her early thirties with five children, might never want to set foot in a boat again. But a year after her husband’s death, she bundled her young children into the boat and began travelling the inland seas during the summers. The family would leave their secluded seven acre property on Vancouver Island each year in June and return later in October. These are her memories of their adventures during the fifteen summers she travelled with her children up and down the coast, investigating inlets, recreating the travels of early explorers and examining artifacts in the empty villages of native peoples. During their travels they were frequently lost or never sure of exactly where they were, forced to rely on pilot books and out of date charts to navigate their way along the rocky shore. At the time, the coastal rainforest was still intact and much of what they saw is now gone. The book is neither a story nor a log, just an account of the adventures Muriel and her children enjoyed during these summer camping holidays.
Blanchett first published this small volume in the United Kingdom, but with little publicity the book was completely unnoticed in Canada. The Canadian edition published in 1968 was well received and she started a second volume shortly afterwards. Blanchett died of a heart attack while writing it, found by friends slumped over her typewriter and hard at work. This volume is now considered a classic travelogue in Canadian literature, one of the few to chart a woman’s experience travelling the coastal waterway during that time period, recording her nomadic experiences and sharing her interactions with the natural world.
Blanchett approaches the rugged natural beauty of the British Columbia Coast with an appreciative eye. Her narrative reflects the way she viewed her surroundings, not as someone pitted against nature but rather as a part of it. She did not see the landscape as a dangerous, hostile wilderness, something to be feared, confronted, challenged and conquered. What she saw she described as beautiful, striking and awesome. She alluded to its dangers by simply acknowledging the powerful tides, the dangerous rapids, the unpredictable winds and the heavy insistent fog which could appear out of nowhere. In one instance, she describes coming upon a wall of rock that suddenly appeared ten feet in front of her vessel, rising out of the sea in the fog. But she did not panic or cower before it. Instead, mesmerized by its majesty, she stepped out on the deck to get a better look and to marvel at the flocks of seabirds nesting in its crevices.
Anyone the family met in these isolated surroundings was hospitable, ready to share what little they had and open to the infrequent experience of human visitors. We know little about the children themselves who serve as her crew and three of the five, Joan, Peter and John are most frequently referred to in the text. In later sections two other names are mentioned, that of Elizabeth and David and the introductory remarks by a friend speak of her taking five children on these journeys.
The Caprice was not a large vessel, only twenty-five feet long and 150 square feet. It was a challenge to pack everyone (and sometimes the dog) into this small space with all the gear and supplies they needed. Everything had to have its exact place or no one could move. Each person had one mug, one plate, one set of clothes, their pajamas and a bathing suit. Sleeping on board was cramped and uncomfortable so they spent every opportunity they had sleeping on the shore in their tent. Living on a boat in such close quarters must have been an uncomfortable, uneasy experience at times. Blanchett’s even tempered approach to whatever trying circumstances confronted her is not just remarkable but unusual.
Blanchett spends little time on the domestic challenges of these adventures, instead using her narrative to record the spellbinding landscapes, the interesting people they encountered and the almost sensual experience of eating freshly caught salmon without knives and forks, the fish cooked on an open grate over a fire on a deserted beach.
Several noteworthy experiences are described in detail. One involved meeting Mike, a logger who almost died in a barroom brawl and retreated to the isolated wilderness to heal his body and soul. There he built a house, nurtured the soil over several years and planted scores of apple trees. Surrounded by his thoughts, his books and the trees, he got his life back and stayed, happy and spiritually content in the new home he had created.
In another adventure, the family was caught on the top of a mountain in heavy fog after a challenging and strenuous hike, unable to find their way back down and forced to navigate a nerve racking descent. They proceeded down slowly and carefully holding the hand of the person in front of them, the back of that person the only thing they could see clearly. They also had to cross swaths of wet granite which had been bathed with the fog and were now as slippery as ice. They negotiated this harrowing part of the journey by sitting down and sliding on their buttocks, their visibility the meager three or four feet in front of them, enough to keep them from falling off a precipice but not enough to give them any sense of direction.
Blanchett also records some humorous moments on their journeys, including the time she whistled a duck to join young John who was having difficulty sleeping and the time she and the two boys, without a book to read aloud to each other in the late evening, made up a story about a whale they called Henry, a story that continued over many subsequent adventures and was frequently refereed to over the years.
Blanchett is cautious, pragmatic and level-headed and appears able to cope with anything. Even the moments when she experiences concern, she quickly acknowledges it, deals with it and quite remarkably just moves on. After a harrowing adventure, she looks back and questions why they were worried, minimizing her “irrational fright” and saying to her children, “weren’t we sillies to worry”. Her competence on the water promotes a calm that allows all of them to have a positive connection to the landscape and the experience of their adventure. Any time there was true danger, it was never presented as such, but was seen as an opportunity to connect with the world, to become engaged and a part of it.
Blanchett has created a single narrative choosing not to divide the text into dated sections about her various trips. Instead, each section focuses on the experience of a visit to a specific location. This results in the creation of a long narrative of small sketches which can be disorienting and confusing for the reader. One is never sure what year it is, the age of the children or the distance travelled. In each section, she skips back and forth between short passages of domestic life and the experiences of coastal life as they wander the landscape, pondering their connection to it and think of others who had explored it before them. In the process, she creates beautiful descriptive paragraphs of the lakes, waterfalls, rivers and the sea itself. She writes of exploring the beaches, fishing for their meals, looking for seahorses and encountering a host of wild animals including black, brown and grizzly bears, bald headed eagles, minks, a cougar, a pod of frolicking killer whales, vultures and a grey wolf and her cubs. As she describes each adventure she continues to show herself to be a competent and confident traveler who takes everything in stride, calmly facing every catastrophe and challenge she meets, including repairing the engine on the boat, dealing with a sick child or encountering a black bear. She does not dwell on personal dramas but minimizes them in the narrative to focus her attention on the experience and her connection with the natural beauty of the landscape. Her prose contains the meticulously recorded details of the phosphorescent bits of plankton in the sea, the relentless sometimes monotonous waves, and the every changing colors of the vast stretches of sea water.
Reading about the family’s travels to the Indian Villages is difficult and disturbing. They had spent the winter months researching the Indian’s history and their habits, determined to get the most from these visits. Blanchett was especially anxious to explore a past that she believed would soon disappear and be lost forever. She never described encounters with the First Nation people, but felt free to explore their surroundings. The family entered boarded up longhouses despite the posted “No Trespassing” signs, removed artifacts from the sites and even disturbed their dead. Many of the villages they visited were not abandoned, simply closed up for the summer while the villagers went up the rivers to their fishing grounds. Although present day readers might be aghast at their offhanded attitude, it must be remembered that Blanchett was a product of the time in which she lived, a time when a colonial approach to native people was the norm. Canadians have since become aware of the damage they have done by this cavalier manner which has negatively impacted First Nation people through several subsequent generations. Reading about Blanchett and her family trespassing on these peoples’ lands, exploring their private homes, sifting through their belongings and wandering through the places that housed their dead are painful to read, a sorrowful reminder of what was accepted behavior in the past.
This a book of travel and adventure, a very readable account of this unusual, independent, intelligent and brave woman who explored the waters between Vancouver Island and the rugged mainland coast of Canada with her family. I think about the children and the amazing childhood they must have experienced as well as the remarkable role model they had in a mother who was an adventurer and also a writer. It is a wonderful account of their adventures.
August 8, 2023
Very beautiful story–I think I would follow it easier if I was more familiar w British Columbia but I loved following their journey.
February 8, 2023
Anyone who's boated, logged or salvaged in the coastal waters of BC (or wants to) will enjoy this book and will recognize the names/places & the tricky tides that have confounded many. To spend entire summers roughing it alone with 5 small children speaks volumes about the author's pioneering spirit however it's never made clear how she afforded to maintain the boat, buy the gas to run it or feed her children while they adventured their summers away.
March 21, 2022
I enjoyed this book so much that I found myself intentionally reading it slowly, to savor it. It’s charming and atmospheric. I wanted to reread it almost as soon as I’d finished it.
February 19, 2025
This book was amusing but ultimately kind of forgettable. I wish there was more commentary or introspection -- without it, her stories felt a bit repetitive and impersonal.
March 4, 2014
Muriel Wylie, who in l927 was left a widow with five children, packed them aboard a 25 foot boat and cruised the coastal waters between Vancouver Island the mainland for a number of summers. They went wherever they felt like going, exploring bays and inlets, often camping ashore. There is no chronological narrative, and the reader is left in almost a dreamlike state in following the adventures of Wylie and her five children.
The title is explained at the first of the book. On board they had a book, Maeterlinck’s THE FOURTH DIMENSION which uses the anolgy of a curve. At the highest point, you can look forward and see the future, or look back and see the past, all in the same instant. Or if you’re at the side, you can go from one to the other without any distinction.
This sense of indeterminate time pervades the book. The author speculates about the possible route taken by the mysterious explorer, Juan de Fuca, and later the British explorers who sailed these waters. When they come across deserted Indian villages with ghostly totem poles and lodges, they are made aware of the life that flourished here long before they encountered its remains. An even deeper past time is provided by the towering mountains and the ever present tidal waters that affect every movement of their small boat.
Even though, amazingly it seemed to me, they have no serious accidents except for one child breaking a collar bone. But there is always a sense of impending danger. The tides can be treacherous as well as hidden shoals, all of which require very cautious navigation. And that’s not to mention some of their land exploration; at one point half of the group nearly gets lost on a mountain top when a thick fog rolls in over night. It could easily have been a fatal expedition.
They get unfailing hospitality from individuals who live along these isolated shores, and Muriel seems to know how to do everything, from intricate navigation to repairing the engine when it breaks down. Something is always happening in the present, and although Blanchet doesn’t dwell on it at all, she suggests at one point that she is aware that she and her family may be leading a charmed life, “Destiny rarely follows the pattern we would choose for it, and the legacy of death often shapes our lives in ways we could not imagine. “
But these are golden days, this group of six people may be dwarfed by the forces of nature, but they are still in harmony with them, and reading the book leaves a reader suspended in sunshine and shadow, water and land, tides and calm, a timeless world of nearly 90 years ago.
The title is explained at the first of the book. On board they had a book, Maeterlinck’s THE FOURTH DIMENSION which uses the anolgy of a curve. At the highest point, you can look forward and see the future, or look back and see the past, all in the same instant. Or if you’re at the side, you can go from one to the other without any distinction.
This sense of indeterminate time pervades the book. The author speculates about the possible route taken by the mysterious explorer, Juan de Fuca, and later the British explorers who sailed these waters. When they come across deserted Indian villages with ghostly totem poles and lodges, they are made aware of the life that flourished here long before they encountered its remains. An even deeper past time is provided by the towering mountains and the ever present tidal waters that affect every movement of their small boat.
Even though, amazingly it seemed to me, they have no serious accidents except for one child breaking a collar bone. But there is always a sense of impending danger. The tides can be treacherous as well as hidden shoals, all of which require very cautious navigation. And that’s not to mention some of their land exploration; at one point half of the group nearly gets lost on a mountain top when a thick fog rolls in over night. It could easily have been a fatal expedition.
They get unfailing hospitality from individuals who live along these isolated shores, and Muriel seems to know how to do everything, from intricate navigation to repairing the engine when it breaks down. Something is always happening in the present, and although Blanchet doesn’t dwell on it at all, she suggests at one point that she is aware that she and her family may be leading a charmed life, “Destiny rarely follows the pattern we would choose for it, and the legacy of death often shapes our lives in ways we could not imagine. “
But these are golden days, this group of six people may be dwarfed by the forces of nature, but they are still in harmony with them, and reading the book leaves a reader suspended in sunshine and shadow, water and land, tides and calm, a timeless world of nearly 90 years ago.
August 15, 2020
To be honest, I am not much of a nonfiction reader. Although, thanks to GR challenges I am learning to enjoy them more and I'm certainly reading a lot more of them. This one really piqued my interest. I felt like it was told like a fictional story and that I was on a journey with this family.
Blanchet is widowed and left with five children (I have 5 children too) after her husband left one day but never returned. The assumption is that he might've drowned because they found his boat but not him. Many people who've lost a spouse might want to ditch the home they shared as the memories are too painful, but not Blanchet. She took that boat which was a 25 foot and only 125 square feet and set off with her children and they did it for "15 summers."
This book is of a family of six, a brave and courageously strong woman and her children who learned to explore their natural world. They came across black bears and grizzlies, cougars, and other animals, Indian villages, and even ghosts (totally unexpected). Her children helped steer the boat and they were very young, Peter being 6 and and one of her daughters only 9 (forgot her name).
I think Blanchet was an exemplary woman that we women today can look to and say, "I can do that, too." Maybe we don't want to take a boat with our children to explore the world, but we can do whatever it is we want to do. We don't always need a man or someone else to show us the way. Blanchet's story is really inspiring.
Blanchet is widowed and left with five children (I have 5 children too) after her husband left one day but never returned. The assumption is that he might've drowned because they found his boat but not him. Many people who've lost a spouse might want to ditch the home they shared as the memories are too painful, but not Blanchet. She took that boat which was a 25 foot and only 125 square feet and set off with her children and they did it for "15 summers."
This book is of a family of six, a brave and courageously strong woman and her children who learned to explore their natural world. They came across black bears and grizzlies, cougars, and other animals, Indian villages, and even ghosts (totally unexpected). Her children helped steer the boat and they were very young, Peter being 6 and and one of her daughters only 9 (forgot her name).
I think Blanchet was an exemplary woman that we women today can look to and say, "I can do that, too." Maybe we don't want to take a boat with our children to explore the world, but we can do whatever it is we want to do. We don't always need a man or someone else to show us the way. Blanchet's story is really inspiring.
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