Monster Malahat

No matter where you live, everyone, at some point during the growing up process learns to adapt to their environment: what is around where they live, and the best ways to live according to those surroundings. Well me, I grew up in BC, and from an early age I have been adapting to - and indeed loving - that my surroundings include forest, ocean, mountains, hills, and long curvy highways built off the sides of those mountains, snaking through the endless forest.

But it's not enough to know what's there; you have to know how to properly live in it. And if I'm being perfectly honest here, when it comes to those long curvy highways, people as a whole in general are absolute freaking idiots. There are a few highways around the south coast where city people get outside the city, but don't lose the aggressive city driving habits: the Sea-to-Sky outside Vancouver, the Malahat north of Victoria.

The Malahat is a section of the Trans-Canada highway that runs from just outside Victoria to Duncan, about 45 minutes north, and it is an incredibly busy road. A lot of people live in the areas outside Victoria, or further up island in the little communities between there and Duncan, and commute down every day.

But by all accounts, it shouldn't be dangerous. There is one lane up, one lane down, and for a large chunk of the way, a concrete meridian down the middle.But there are corners, sharp corners around the side of a mountain and though the posted speed limit may be 80, occasionally 90 km/h, people routine roar up at over 100. And when it rains - which is most of the year - or gets icy - most of the winter - and people are going too fast they lose control, resulting in these catastrophic crashes.

People die unnecessarily on that road on a far to regular basis. And for what? To make the ferry? To be 10 minutes earlier? Is that worth the loss of human life? But apparently most people aren't thinking that far.

The thing that scares me the most about our changing world is the ever increasing speed at which things need to happen. Think about it, everyone has a smart phone, you want to know something, you've got internet in the palm of your hand. Witness something, you've got a built in camera and in 30 seconds you've put a video on YouTube. Everything is getting faster and faster, and it's building up the expectation within us that everything has to get faster and faster. But it still takes 2 hours to drive to Nanaimo, and 6 hours to fly to Toronto, and that's just the way it is.

And for those of us living here on the west coast of BC, we have to accept that there are mountains and corners, and it takes extra travel time to accommodate them. It's not worth it to risk it.