One summer, when I was eleven or twelve years old, I brought to Hornby Island the one-speed bike my brother, Rob, had handed down to me. It was pretty basic, and on the verge of still being a tad large for me, but I loved it.

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Starting in 1971 the roads on Hornby Island began to be paved. They started out the first year paving about three kilometres of road from the ferry landing at Shingle Spit to just past Phipps Point. It was a rather rudimentary style of paving, but it did the job, and the road would finally be relatively smooth, and great for riding a bike. 

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Bob Cain, who took the black-and-white images on this page, worked on the road crew back then. He said: “The most fulfilling [road crew work] was road construction. We got to drive dump trucks, graders, and loaders. Nowadays they bring everything over, and the local workers get to sit and watch. I don’t recall any other name than ‘road construction’ but George Cowie (Hornby foreman) used to call our work ‘getting ready for ‘Tarvey’.”

These days bikes are everywhere. It seems like every other car getting off the ferry to the island has a bike rack with two, three, four, sometimes five bikes on the back. Whole families go out cycling. But, in 1971, bikes were a rare thing to see on Hornby Island. I guess I was just “ahead of my time.”

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I’d ride out often on summer evenings; it was rare to see even one car on the road. I had such an incredible sense of freedom, and even though I was not very far from home, I felt like I was on an adventure. 

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As I’d cycle along watching the big open fields of the “Bond Farm” on my right, and the sun filtering through the rim of trees above the beach, reflecting up the sparkly water from the lowering sun, I’d think about how great it felt to be alive, and how my future was ahead of me.