People may come to Tofino, B.C. to see the crashing waves and rugged coastline, but a special sight at one local intersection has them asking questions.
At Third and Neill streets, right next to the skate park, tossed shoes of all kinds have a power line drooping substantially under their weight.
“I don’t know the story behind the shoes. You see them here and there,” passerby Rick McCrank told Global News. “I’ve seen ballet slippers up there before.”
While McCrank worried about their impact on the power line, a couple of passing tourists looking up said they thought the unusual artwork was “very special.”
As it turns out, the tossed shoes are a memorial to a beloved Vancouver Island skateboarder, Jamie Collins. Collins died in August 2012 at the age of 33 in a cliff-diving accident in the Kennedy River.
“He put a lot of time in with the kids to bolster the skateboarding community all over the island,” his father, Bob Collins, said Tuesday.
The memorial has grown in size over the past decade.
In Nanaimo, BC Hydro’s Ted Olynyk said he was aware of the tossed shoe tribute. It’s a TELUS line, however, so the utility hasn’t moved to remove or contain it.
“It’s a way of showing respect to that community member,” he said. “We don’t get calls in particular about this one, but we do get calls of shoes on lines and when we get those calls we go up and of course we’ll deal with them when crews have time to get in there and remove a shoe.”
— with files from Elizabeth McSheffrey
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