There are a number of small streams that run across the beaches on the west coast of  Vancouver Island in B.C.
After all, they are the fringes of a rain forest that boasts the highest annual rainfall in North America.
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It’s late August 2008, and my youngest daughter, Sarah, here age nine, is fording a creek on the Incinerator Rock end
of Long Beach, down the road a few miles from Tofino.
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When I was six or eight years old, my parents brought us camping to this same location. It was the final days of the hippie era,
and there were probably several hundred living here on the beach in what we called “hippie huts.” They were traditionally
cobbled together with whatever flotsam or jetsam could be found, all covered with a sheet of industrial polyethylene.
Not very aesthetic.
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Back then, there were no other options for camping; no commercial or government grounds, as there are now. You just walked
or drove your car down the beach, found a spot (hopefully above the high-tide mark) and set up camp. We arrived late and drove
down the crowded beach looking for room, but here was none to be found by the light of our car headlights. After what seemed
llike ages, we came upon a very nice vacant open area. It seemed odd that people had crowed together elsewhere and nobody
was here. Boy, were we lucky.
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Later that night, when the rain started, we came to understand why nobody else had chosen to camp in that particular stream bed.    Mark Heine