The Englishman begins in an unremarkable place: tiny Jewel Lake, on the eastern slopes of the Beaufort Range, high enough that snow lingers on the shoulders above it into early summer. From there it runs east for forty kilometres and empties into the Strait of Georgia at Parksville. The watershed it drains is a scatter of small lakes with a certain pleasing randomness to their names - Arrowsmith, Hidden, Fishtail, Rowbotham, Healy, Shelton, Rhododendron. The south fork tells its own compact story. It leaves Shelton Lake, which locals still call Echo, and almost immediately runs into Healy Lake, which they still call Panther, then turns northeast to find the main stem. Two names for each lake, held simultaneously, the way small places often do.

How the river got its English name depends on who is telling it. One account holds that Indigenous people found the skeleton of a white man near the waterfalls, and that the name commemorates an Englishman who drowned trying to cross. Another is quieter and more likely: a settler named Hirst, the first to build beside the water, was known to his Indigenous neighbours as that Englishman by the river, and the description simply hardened into a label on a map. Neither version can be confirmed now. What both have in common is that the river was named by other people about an Englishman, rather than by the Englishman himself - which is, in its way, a fair summary of how most place names on this coast actually came about.

About ten kilometres upstream of the mouth the river drops twice in quick succession, and those two falls are the reason Englishman River Falls Provincial Park exists. It was created on 20 December 1940, in the middle of a war, specifically to protect the old-growth forest and the ecosystem along the river near the drops. The upper falls plunges into a narrow gorge the colour of old jade; the lower is broader and gentler, with a pool at its base that swimmers find unforgivingly cold even in August. Campsites sit back among the big trees. In the wet months the whole canyon runs loud enough that conversation at the viewpoints has to be shouted.

Parksville and its neighbours drink this water. Arrowsmith Dam, finished in 1999 and built jointly by the City of Parksville, the Town of Qualicum Beach, and the Regional District of Nanaimo, holds back a reservoir that keeps the summer taps running from an intake on the lower river. The dam operates under a rule that would have puzzled an earlier generation of engineers: it must maintain a minimum baseflow for fish before it serves anyone's kitchen. Downstream, the estuary has been under repair for years. Since the 1930s it has been diked, ditched, roaded, and built on, and more than a hundred hectares of what remains are now protected inside the Parksville-Qualicum Beach Wildlife Management Area. Juvenile chinook, coho, and chum spend weeks or months there, adjusting to salt water before they go to sea - the same estuary the Spanish once mistook for crane habitat.