As the Goldstream Nature House celebrates its 50th anniversary, we're grateful to Tania—and to the hundreds of volunteers like her—who have helped generations of people discover the magic of Goldstream Park.
The first time Tania walked through the doors of the Goldstream Nature House twenty-four years ago, she was with her daughter, Tara, who was very pregnant with her first child.
Both Tania and Tara loved nature. After moving to Victoria in the mid-1970s, Tania and her husband spent years camping, picnicking and exploring Vancouver Island with their two children. So, when they visited the Nature House that day, Tania felt an immediate connection to the place.
She was surprised to see her son's Grade 2 teacher volunteering behind the desk. As they chatted, the Nature House manager came out to meet her—and it turned out to be one of Tara's best friends.
“I said, ‘I'd love to do this. How do I go about applying?’”
She signed up to volunteer before she left.
“It just felt right,” she says. “Felt like going home.”
For the past 50 years, the Goldstream Nature House has welcomed generations of visitors into Goldstream Provincial Park, helping people discover the park's wildlife, forests, river and annual salmon run. For Tania, it became much more than a place to volunteer.
One day, as she backed into her usual parking spot for a volunteer shift, a group of children were waving excitedly.
“I thought, well, what a welcome!”
Then someone told her to look up.
There were three yearling bears in the tree directly above where she had parked.
“You never knew what you were going to get,” she says. “No two days were the same. Over the years, it became my safe place. My happy place.”
Then, several years after Tania started volunteering, her daughter Tara died from cancer. She took a couple of months away from the Nature House as she mourned this devastating loss.
Eventually, her friends at the Nature House called.
“They said, ‘Will you come in? We need your help,’” she remembers. “I don't think they really needed my help, but they were doing it for me. It was one of the kindest things they could have done.”
But the day before she returned, a major weather event hit Goldstream.
“As I pulled up, I saw a man looking up at one of the giant cedar trees. He was just staring at it for a long, long time.”
When he came inside, he told Tania that he was trying to get home after the storm, but that he decided he needed some nature first.
"Then he said something I’ve never forgotten.
“He said, ‘We worry about the past, we worry about the future, but we don't live in the present and enjoy it.’”
“It was like a smack across the back of my head,” Tania says.
At that moment, she looked out the window, and over the inlet was a rainbow. Inside it was a second, smaller rainbow.
“I thought, you know what? That's my daughter. That’s my daughter telling me, ‘Mum, get on with life. It’s time to live.’”
Tania continued volunteering at the Nature House for years. Her favourite part was the people she met.
“The children and the people, because that's all nature too, isn't it?” she says. “We've got animals that are nature, trees that are nature, but we've also got human nature. Human beings are in nature, aren't they? It's a big spectrum of life.”
After twenty-four years as a volunteer, Tania recently decided it was time to “pass the mantle” to others.
As the Goldstream Nature House looks ahead to its next 50 years, she hopes it continues to be a place where children discover nature, families create memories together, and visitors leave feeling more connected to the forest, to wildlife, and to each other.
“When you stand in those big trees and it's quiet and the wind's blowing, and you can hear the river, it grounds you,” she says. “It brings you right back down.”
Being grounded, being present, and feeling a part of ‘the spectrum of life’ is a gift that we all receive from parks. Thanks to Tania and all of the volunteers and donors for giving that to all of us.
