Fireside Books: There’s exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The BookWyrm - used books are just $5 or less. The BookWyrm, on the corner of Redford and Anderson, opens seven days a week from 10 to 5, building your personal library for less. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon’s dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online.

The Ballad of Peter & Gracie: Peter and his dog raced here and there, through fields so wide, with dreams in their pockets and stars as their guide. Every day’s an adventure under the open sky. In their world of stories, time just flies by.

Peter McCully: The first thing Peter noticed was the quiet. Not the quiet of an empty room or the quiet of bedtime when the house was quiet, the kind the trees made. They were so tall and so wide and so close together that the sounds of the highway, the cars, the trucks, and the ordinary noise of the world simply stopped at the tree line as if they knew better than to come inside.

Peter stepped off the path and stood still. Gracie stood still beside him, which was unusual. She was not generally a standing still sort of dog. But even Gracie seemed to feel it, the way the light came down in long slanted columns through the treetops, the way the air smelled of cedar and moss, and maybe even something older.

“Cathedral Grove,” his dad said softly from just behind him. “The name fits, doesn’t it?” Cathedral Grove sat in McMillan Provincial Park, right on the highway between Parksville and Port Alberni. Peter had driven past the brown sign dozens of times without ever stopping. He’d always meant to. He’d seen the pictures at school, the enormous tree trunks, the way the light fell through the canopy, like something from a painting.

But it was the kind of place he kept meaning to visit until one day, when nothing else was planned, the sky the colour of old dishwater, and Gracie restless at the door, his dad had simply turned off the highway and parked the car. “Come on,” his dad said. “There’s something I want to show you.” That was twenty minutes ago.

Since then, Peter had not said very much at all, which was also unusual. The trees were Douglas firs, mostly, enormous ones, their trunks wider than Peter’s bedroom. Their bark was deeply furrowed and rust red, rising sixty or seventy metres into the sky before the branches even began. There were western red cedars too, their wood pale and fragrant, their roots curling all over the ground like the knuckles of some enormous sleeping hand.

And then his dad stopped. “This one,” he said. The cedar was vast. There was no other word for it. Its trunk was easily four metres across, maybe even more, and its bark was shaggy and silver-brown and deeply grooved, like the surface of something that had been through a great deal and survived it all. The roots spread outward across the floor of the forest in every direction, lifting the ground, rearranging the moss, creating little hollows and ridges that smaller plants had made their homes in.

Gracie reached it first. She pressed her nose against the base of the trunk and began sniffing in long, serious sniffs, working her way around the roots the way that she sometimes worked her way around the perimeter of a new park, as if she was reading something that Peter couldn’t see. “What does she smell?”

Peter asked. “Everything that’s passed by this tree in the last little while,” his dad said. “Deer probably, squirrels, maybe even a bear.” Gracie completed her circuit of the roots, sneezed once with great authority, and sat down at the base of the trunk looking satisfied. Peter walked up beside her and put both hands flat against the bark.

It was rough and slightly damp and very, very solid. “How old is it?” Peter asked. “About eight hundred years,” his dad said. Peter turned around. “Eight hundred?” “Give or take. Some of the Douglas firs in here are older, over a thousand years, but this cedar is around eight hundred. It was already a grown tree when Canada didn’t exist yet, when no European had ever seen this coastline.”

Peter looked at the tree again. Then he looked at his hands, still resting on the bark. “I can’t picture eight hundred years,” he said. “No one really can,” his dad said, “but let’s try.” He sat down on a nearby root, wide and flat enough to use as a bench, and patted the space beside him. Gracie wedged herself in between them both, leaned heavily against Peter’s leg, and sighed as if she’d been waiting all day for a sit-down.

“When this tree was a seedling,” his dad said, “about the size of your arm, the year was roughly 1220. Do you know what was happening in the world in 1220?” “No,” Peter said. “Well, in Europe, knights in armour were riding horses through muddy fields. Kings and queens were ruling countries that looked nothing like the countries we have today.

There were no cars, no electricity, no phones, no running water. People wrote with quill pens dipped in ink. If you wanted to talk to somebody far away, you sent a letter by horseback and waited weeks for a reply.” Peter tried to imagine it, a world without any of those things, a world that felt, to him, like something out of a storybook.

Gracie, who had been sitting politely beside him, suddenly stood up and stared into the undergrowth to their left. Her ears went forward. Her tail went still. Peter followed her gaze but couldn’t see anything, just a few ferns in the shadow and the enormous roots of another fir tree. “What is it, girl?” Peter whispered.

A moment passed. Then whatever Gracie had sensed apparently decided to go somewhere else, because her ears relaxed, and she sat back down and looked at Peter as if nothing had happened. “Deer, maybe,” his dad said quietly. “Or a raven. The forest is full of things that we just don’t notice. And here,” his dad continued, “on Vancouver Island, the Coast Salish and First Nations people had been living in this forest for thousands of years already.

Not just living near it, living with it. They knew every plant, every tree, every animal. They built their homes from cedar. They made their canoes from cedar. They wove cedar bark into baskets and clothing and rope. This tree, or trees exactly like it, were part of everything they did.” “So the tree was useful to them?”

Peter said. “Useful and sacred,” his dad said. “There’s a difference. When something is just useful, you use it up. When something is also sacred, when you understand that it has a life of its own, you take only what you need, and you give thanks for it, and you make sure there will be more of it for the people who come after you.”

The Indigenous peoples of this coast understood that long before anyone else came here. They had been taking care of this forest for thousands of years. Peter sat quietly for a moment, thinking. “And the tree was just growing the whole time, through all of that?” he said. “Just growing,” his dad said. “Year after year, ring after ring, every year this tree added one thin layer of wood just under its bark, one ring.

Eight hundred rings is eight hundred years of rain and sun and wind and snow, all recorded inside that trunk.” Peter looked at the cedar tree very differently now. Not just as something large, but as something that had been keeping a very long, very quiet record. “What else happened when the tree was growing?”

Peter asked. He had his notebook out now, the small green one that he kept in his jacket pocket, and his pencil was ready. His dad smiled. He liked this sort of question. “Well, Peter, when the tree was about two hundred and seventy years old, the Vikings, those Norse warriors from Scandinavia, were still exploring the North Atlantic.

They’d already reached the coast of Newfoundland, but they never made it here to the Pacific. This forest had never seen a European person. When the tree was about five hundred and seventy years old, a man named Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany. Before that, every book had to be copied out by hand.

After that, ideas could spread across the whole world in a way they never had before. When the tree was about five hundred and seventy-two years old, a sailor named Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic and reached the Caribbean. He thought he found Asia. He hadn’t. And when the tree was about five hundred and seventy-eight years old, Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa.

Peter was writing as fast as he could. “Slow down,” he said. Gracie chose this moment to put her paw on his knee. He looked down. She looked back at him with the expression she used when she most wanted to remind him that she was there. “One second, Gracie,” he said. Gracie sighed and lay down across his feet.

“When the tree was about six hundred years old,” his dad continued, “the first ships began exploring the Pacific coast of North America. The First Nations people near here, near this very forest, were among the first to see those ships. One day there’s nobody on this entire coastline. Then there are ships.”

“Were they scared?” Peter asked. “Probably curious,” his dad said. “And then over time, many things changed. Not all of them good. The settlers arrived and changed life enormously for Indigenous peoples, and a lot of that change was very hard and very painful. That’s an important part of our history to know. But through all of it, through every change, every arrival, every storm, this tree just kept growing.”

Peter looked up from his notebook at the cedar. It rose above him, enormous and patient, its crown somewhere up in the grey sky. “It doesn’t know any of that happened,” Peter said. “No,” his dad said, “but it was here for all of it. In a way, it remembers everything, just not the way we remember things.” Gracie had been very patient through all of this.

She had sniffed the roots thoroughly and investigated a banana slug making its slow way across the moss and stared for a while at something small moving in the undergrowth. But now she came back and put her head in Peter’s lap and looked up at him with her soft eyes. “She wants to go,” Peter said.

“Probably,” his dad said, “but give her a minute. I think she likes it here.” Peter stroked her ears and looked up at the tree one more time. He thought about all those years stacked inside the trunk in the dark, eight hundred rings, eight hundred winters, eight hundred summers. He thought about the First Nations people walking through this forest long before his great-great-grandparents were born, knowing the name of every plant, taking care of every tree.

“Dad,” he said, “do people still take care of this forest?” “Some do,” his dad said. “The park protects it, and that’s why no one can cut these trees. And Indigenous communities have always advocated for their forests and continue to. But it’s something all of us have to think about, especially as the trees get older and rarer.

Old-growth forests like this one, with trees this old and this big, are not common anymore. Most of them were logged a long time ago.” “So this place is special,” Peter said. “Very special,” his dad said. “There are a few places left on Vancouver Island where you can stand next to a tree this old, and that’s worth remembering.”

Peter stood up. He walked back to the cedar one more time and put his hand on the trunk. Gracie came with him without being asked. She sat down beside him, her shoulder warm against his leg, and looked up at the tree the way she sometimes looked up at him, steady and calm, not asking for anything. Peter didn’t say anything.

He stood there for a moment, his hand resting against an eight-hundred-year-old tree. Gracie stood beside him, feeling the bark and the faint, cool dampness of the forest air. Then he stepped back, picked up Gracie’s lead, and turned toward the path. “Thank you,” he said quietly. He wasn’t sure exactly who he was saying it to.

The tree, the forest, the people who had cared for it so long. Maybe all of them. Gracie leaned against his leg as they walked, the way she did when she wanted him to know that she was there. And he was glad she was.

The Ballad of Peter and Gracie: Peter and Gracie, the finest of friends, with tales of wonder that never end. In the pages of books or stars above, they find their magic in laughter and love.

Fireside Books: There’s exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The BookWyrm - used books are just $5 or less. The BookWyrm, on the corner of Redford and Anderson, opens seven days a week from 10 to 5, building your personal library for less. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon’s dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online.