Hugh Pite’s not going anywhere. Photo: Darren Stone/Times Colonist
Near the southern tip of Canada’s Vancouver Island is a tiny place called Jordan River. There’s not much there–a few little shops, a couple of houses–most of which have been boarded up–and a really, really good wave. And Hugh Pite, a 72-year-old surfer who calls the place home, is the last one living there.
It’s a breathtakingly beautiful area. Heading north from Victoria, one passes through long stretches of towering trees. Glimpses of the snow-capped Olympic mountain range peek through with the sun, if it happens to be out, which can be a rarity in the winter months. Like many places in the area, it started out as a logging camp and just sort of… stayed there. Not much changed as the years passed, save for a road linking JR with the nearby town of Sooke. But the wave there–when it’s working, it’s world class.
Of 11 cabins, only Hugh Pite’s hasn’t been boarded up. The others are all scheduled for either demolition or to be moved. That’s because, back in 2014, BC Hydro, the owners of a massive dam just upstream, offered all the homeowners in the area an offer most couldn’t pass up. A survey found that the area was, in fact, a terrible place for a community due to the fact that it lies in both a tsunami zone and one of the most active seismic areas in Canada. That meant, of course, that houses living in the shadow of a huge reservoir of water were in a very bad spot when the inevitable earthquake happens.
The reservoir, just upstream from Jordan River, never would have been built today. Photo: BC Hydro
“It was built in the wrong location, knowing what we know now,” said BC Hydro spokesman Ted Olynyk to CBC News. “There’s no other dam built so close to such a large earthquake area.”
Ten of the owners agreed to sell and move out. Pite, though, wasn’t having any of it. “I’m right across the road from the water and I go out there and I go surfing,” said Pite to CBC. “If I didn’t have the place there, I’d have to drive an hour and a half each way, which is in my opinion far more dangerous than the very slight chance of an earthquake.”
Pite bought his little waterfront slice of heaven back in the late ’80s. At the time, Jordan River was a bustling little hamlet. “It was quite a nice little community,” said Pite. “There were lots of people who were long time residents who lived out there. But over the years a lot of people have left. It isn’t like it was in the ’80s.”
Pite doesn’t call the cabin a full-time home, but he does spend a lot of time there. A retired oceanographer, he also has a home in an upscale neighborhood called Brentwood Bay that’s just over an hour away. He comes for the solitude and the waves, and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.“It’s quite possible I become so decrepit that I can’t surf anymore,” he said to Victoria’s local paper, the Times Colonist. “But I can still come here and look out the window and surf vicariously.”
