B.C. author returns with a second volume of Desolation Sound adventures

Everyone has their happy place, be it a cottage or a cabin, somewhere to escape the daily grind.  For author, broadcaster, and musician Grant Lawrence, that place is B.C.’s Desolation Sound.

Twelve years after his award-winning memoir Adventures in Solitude:  What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound, Lawrence is back with the sequel, Return to Solitude:  More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit, and Others. 

You could say he has a thing for long titles.

“That’s a non-fiction thing,” he explains.  “If you compare fiction books and non-fiction books, the non-fiction books often try to sell the rest of the book in the subtitle.”

Lawrence also admits 12 years is a long time between the two books, but he says he wasn’t about to rush out a sequel.

“I probably would have been a more successful, if possibly less-satisfied author if I had rushed a second edition of scraps, just flotsam and jetsam, leftover from the first book.  But I wanted to wait,” he says.

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“And so that took 10 years to a point of where I said, ‘Okay, I think enough has happened,’ that I can pull another full book out of this.”

Part-memoir and part-travelogue, Lawrence details how a frustrated Captain George Vancouver named the place while trying to find the Northwest Passage in the late 1700s.

“He named it Desolation Sound because he thought it was one of the most forlorn, ugliest places he had ever seen in all of his travels. He stamped it with that name.  And it has both kept people away and drawn people ever since.”

The characters Lawrence introduced us to in the first book are older and perhaps wiser or, sadly, no longer with us.

“Some of the people in the first book have come to their end in this world.  And some of those exits have been very macabre, and very strange, and very dark.  You know, that’s the kind of stuff that you just can’t make up.”

Take Russell Letawsky, who was something of a mentor to Lawrence in the first book.

“A friend of mine once said, ‘Be careful up there in Desolation Sound because where there is sunshine, there is shadow.  And there was a lot more shadows in Russell’s life than I realized.”

Lawrence is older too.  The nerdy kid with the unflappable, athletic parents from the first book is now a dad himself in the second.

“There’s and incredibly heightened sense of responsibility when it comes to having kids in Desolation Sound because it’s rough, it’s rocky.  It’s a place with a lot of potential hazards, let’s say tripping hazards like 30-foot cliffs, and stuff like that!”

“I hardly ever get to go kayaking or paddle boarding anymore, because I’m always right on top of the kids,” he says.

He may have more in common with his own parents than he would care to admit.

“I think I’m pretty different,” he says.  “But then, when I was a little kid, my memories of my parents, yanking me out of bed, and dragging me into the car, and then racing to the BC Ferries to try to make that first sailing and not miss it and [then] get stuck in the parking lot in Horseshoe Bay, waiting for Troll’s [Restaurant] to open.  I hated that, absolutely hated that as a kid, and then once we got to the Sunshine Coast Highway, I’d be firehose-vomiting all over the backseat, because it’s about one of the windiest roads you can find anywhere,” he says.  “But then, here I am, some 40 years later, and what am I doing?  I’m dragging my kids out of bed in the dark, strapping them into the car seats.  I’ve got a Tupperware bowl in the backseat to catch their vomit.  I’m racing to get to the ferry.  So, I guess in that way, I am the same as my parents, but in a lot of ways I’m a lot different too.”

Lawrence hopes readers finish the book feeling inspired.

“I really love adventure and I really love it when people take a chance and do things that 95 per cent of us would never do,” he says.

“If anything, I hope that people take away, you know, a sense of adventure and a sense of going for it and a sense of reading about lives well-lived.”