Whistler’s That Way, Brah…

After years of gracing the bumpers of rusty Toyotas in the BC Interior, the iconic middle finger of the “Whistler’s That Way” sticker is thrusting out from a relatively new locale.
A few weeks ago, after catching the 6:00am ferry and driving my sorry ass to the closest surfable beach to my house, I found myself staring down the barrel of a sticker placed ever-so-strategically on a fellow surfer’s Tupperware bin.

All I wanted to do was ride a cool buzz and catch a couple of tasty waves. But here was this sticker telling me to go back from whence I came (and, for the record, totally pointing in wrong direction).

That’s right Whistlerites. It would seem that there’s a growing contingency of locals in Tofino and Ucluelet who are, for lack of a better expression, sick of our shit.
Of course it’s not really that bad. We are in BC after all and the communities on the coast are just as welcoming as they’ve always been.

Except for the last time I went over there, a girl showed me a secret spot where we surfed by ourselves for the most unforgettable couple hours of my life. But just as we were leaving, a truckload of dudes pulled up and started kicking my ass.

“Locals only,” one of them said.

“You flew here, we grew here,” said another.

Wait wait wait, that’s actually a scene from the film “Blue Crush”. But seriously, man, it’s getting tense out there.  The guy with sticker on his tuppy hardly even said hello. And the shaka he tossed in response to mine seemed totally forced.

Just kidding. No shakas were tossed in the making of this article. Whistler’s that way, brah.
I get it. We here in Whistler like to bitch about things too: Aussies taking our jobs, Swedes stealing or ladies, Americans clogging up our lift lines, etc.  But I think it’s true for Whisterites and Tofitians alike that our lives are so god damn good that we fixate on what little we have to complain about.

Anger is the exact opposite of happiness which, if we’ve chosen to live in a place like Tofino, Ucluelet or Whistler, is the one thing that we value above all else. So it’s only natural that it flashes its hideous face every now and again.

And if I lived in Tofino, I’d probably bitch about Whistler too. Without doing any sort of empirical research, I’m gonna toss out the claim that there are almost as many surfers in Pemberton, Squamish and Whistler as there are in Tofino and Ukee.
We’re just, you know, a lot shittier at it.

But we know how to read the alarmingly accurate surf forecasts. And, like any reasonable person living in a town surrounded by awesomeness, have set up our schedules to accommodate as much fucking leisure time as humanly possible. So if there’s a swell coming, we know about it. And a few of us will hop on that gigantic, cash-sucking transport vessel so we can be there to greet it.

No wonder the locals are protective….

So, to the surfers in Tofino, Ukee and even you crusty bastards on the South Island, on behalf of Whistler and all of us kooks in the Sea to Sky, I’d like to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry that surfing is so fucking awesome that we don’t think twice about spending hundreds of dollars and driving hundreds of kms to take hundreds of waves on the head so we can spend less than a minute of time actually standing on our boards.

Surfing, much like sex, skating and snowboarding, leads to irrational decisions. And those decisions will continue to be made. For that reason, our two locales will always be connected to one another.

And to all the surfers in Whistler, or anyone really, who visits those surf-blessed beaches on the exposed part of our Coast, make sure that you:

a) don’t drop in on anyone
b) don’t let go of your board in the surf
c) tip your servers famously
d) buy something from the local shops
e) tell everyone you’re from Abbotsford

Mahalo!