I imagine the captain on the bridge in his brass-button uniform, standing before the wheel with hands spaced at 10 and 2, feet spread in a seaman’s stance against the roll, against the yaw, holding the compass needle steady on WSW while the fog horn sounds. Peering out into the mist and waiting. All of us poised and motionless while the world moves beneath us, waiting for the planet’s rotation to slip the ghost of Galiano Island out of the fog and to us, Galiano steaming steadily ENE on the horizon as Sturdies Bay jockeys for position, the dock gradually reeling us in to shore.

A red-sweatered man singles us out from the disembarking foot passengers: “Did you phone about a taxi ride?” Retired to Galiano for just three years, there’s still a whiff of city sharpness about him in his button-down shirt collar and trimmed white hair. He and his wife operate a B&B in addition to the island’s taxi service. They make pizzas to order, and sublet their outdoor pizza oven twice a week to a woman who bakes bread as her way of plugging into the island’s small economy.

In 15 minutes we’re at his home, switching from the shuttle bus to a late-model sedan — “There’s no sense hauling a ton of unnecessary metal around” — for the remainder of our ride. A paved two-lane road runs up the west side of the island, and the firs and cedars appear and disappear as smudges while we drive north through the fog. When a car approaches, its headlights create a momentary sphere of light around us, but the fog presses in again, and we’re left with no clear sense of how far we’ve come or how far we have to go. Occasionally a gravel driveway breaks through the trees and connects itself to the road. That one, he says, belongs to a BC Ferries captain who commutes every morning from Retreat Cove with his daughter; two miles of water in a Zodiac to a bay on Saltspring Island where he keeps a pickup truck, the two of them then carrying on with their respective days, she to the highschool while he continues to Fulford Harbour for his shift as captain of the small ferry which shuttles all day between Saltspring and Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island.

Saltspring sure has changed, we’re told. “It’s Whistler with waterfront. Spielberg has a place there; and Ford: Harrison Ford; and Streisand.” I imagine Indiana Jones in the ferry cafeteria lineup ahead of me, sliding his blue plastic tray along, ordering the ‘All Aboard’ Breakfast with coffee (“The eggs over easy, please, with brown toast and sausage. Thanks so much.”) A battered fedora pulled down in an attempt at disguise but the stubbled chin giving him away.

Galiano is about the same size as Manhattan Island, and as I look out at the fog and forest I try to imagine New York City as it was three hundred years ago: a few farming plots in a wilderness of trees. Some day this road could be Galiano’s Broadway, I realize, with a steady stream of Checker and Yellow cabs jockeying for position in a blare of horns. Greenwich Village, SoHo, Rockefeller Center: you could hide a major metropolis out there in the mist, but the trees drift past us unconcerned. And at what might one day be 123rd Street or so — a big-city $40 fare from Sturdies Bay — we’re dropped at Bodega Resort, and our taxi’s tail-lights fade into the fuzzy distance.