By Brian Lee
Usually when talk drifts to the Sunshine Coast’s "one-way highway," we point at Sechelters and scoff.
"It’s twice as far from Sechelt to Madeira than the other way around," we like to say.
The subject even garnered a letter a couple issues ago from a Sechelt man defensively blaming the "hazardous nature of our highway" for folks’ hesitancy to keep going past the turnoff to Redrooffs.
I thought surely someone would respond with a letter in the next issue. I expected it, waited for it and then was disappointed no one took the bait to point out that people from the upper Sunshine Coast measure how often we travel to Sechelt by "trips per week."
Does it mean folks from the upper Sunshine Coast have better tires?
Are we better drivers?
Careless with our families’ lives?
I hear it from parents whose kids play soccer all over the Coast but find it hard to convince their lower Coast counterparts to attend games in Madeira Park. But while we’re tsk-tsking at the south Coasters, have any of you Madeira Parkers ever noticed how hard it is to drive over to Garden Bay in the winter? Or, worse, to Irvines Landing?
Yes, short days and low cloud work the same dark magic within our own community too. I have friends in Garden Bay who complain the only time people visit is the summer — when their lake’s warm.
It’s just one of the reasons why the restoration success at the old Irvines Landing school, now the Sarah Wray Hall, is so important. Naturally, having relatives that attended the school and even a grandmother who taught there, I’m a sucker for the historic value of the project. But, in my eyes, the project’s biggest value is what it has done and what it will continue to do for the growing community in Irvines Landing.
And they’re a social bunch. I know of no other neighbourhood that convenes anything resembling Friday’s well-attended "Beer o’clock". Beer o’clock brings together neighbours from all over the Daniel Point area, and abroad, to gossip and drink beer. It’s my kind of party but from Francis Peninsula I could swim to Irvines Landing faster than drive. Sechelt’s closer.
Yet as isolated as it is, Irvines Landing is a community without the symbolic anchor of shops, a post office or a school. For over 120 years now, you could point to the public dock and marina at the terminus of Irvines Landing Road as "Irvines Landing." But for the past six years, private business interests have allowed the historic property to fester into the eyesore it is now with no end in sight.
The Sarah Wray, as it may be referred to in a few years, has already replaced the marina as the focal point for the community. It has brought together a volunteer force like no other project in recent memory, introducing neighbours new and old along the way. With much of the hidden, heavy work already completed, the rest will start to take shape very quickly thanks, in part, to over $49,000 chipped in by the federal government.
That is enough to see the project to its end, estimated to be early next year. After that, the Sarah Wray Hall will be the symbolic waypoint marking the road entrance to the "town."
The spot where someday we can all point to when someone asks,
"Where’s Irvines Landing?"
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