View from the Tower author Grant B. Evans

It is 1960 and a newly minted air traffic controller arrives with his young wife and daughter at the remote Port Hardy Airport for his first posting. The evening before their arrival, a Pacific Western Airlines’ C-46 ran off the end of the runway while making a forced landing. The wreckage was being cleared away as their flight landed. It was not an auspicious beginning. Even so Grant quickly grows to love the area with the fishing it offers and the eccentric characters he meets and he embraces the territory with its wild storms and raw energy.

With passion and humour Grant Evans takes the reader through one adventure after another while tracing the past of north Vancouver Island and its people. When a transfer and up grade is offered, he jumps at it and works at both Victoria and Abbotsford Towers but soon misses the north coast of Vancouver Island. He returns as chief of the tower, but things are not the same, old friends have moved on and soon Grant does too. Grant captures this feeling perfectly in his book with this quote from Lewis Carroll. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”