The place began as infrastructure rather than as a town. Logs came down the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway to be offloaded here, assembled into rafts on the sheltered water of Nanoose Bay, and towed by tug to sawmills up and down the coast. People called the site simply the flats. In 1912 two brothers, Joe and Max McKercher, built a sawmill on it, and the mill's name became the location's name -- which worked until the post office demanded something more specific. The early years were unsteady. A joint venture of the Newcastle Lumber Company and Merchant Trust took the mill over in 1913, which usually means money troubles, though the workforce still managed to field its first mill soccer team that season. Bankruptcy followed. The mill sat idle through all of 1916 before Frank Pendleton's Straits Lumber Company bought it.

Under Straits Lumber the operation found its market, and the market was across the Pacific. Logs arrived by rail or came in as rafts; finished lumber left by rail or was barged across the bay to deep-water ships, most of them bound for Japan. The mill cut to Japanese dimensions rather than North American ones -- a small detail that tells you how completely the business was oriented toward a single customer. There was not enough dry land between the railway and the shoreline to hold the complex, so it was built out over the water on pilings, a wooden town standing in the tide. When Japan came out of the Great Depression early, Red Gap boomed while much of the coast was still idle. For three years in the 1930s, at the peak of its run, the Straits mill was the largest in the Pacific Northwest.

The mill drew workers from India, Japan, and China, and it housed them separately from everyone else, in buildings raised on pilings near the mouth of the creek. The company store, the post office, and the rest of the accommodation stood on the far side of the railway track and the parallel road. This was not an accident of geography. Segregated bunkhouses were standard practice in British Columbia's resource towns, and the men who lived in them were doing the same dangerous work for less money and fewer rights than their European coworkers. By the mid-1930s the non-European housing had expanded to fill the ground between the road and the rail line. They were not a labour category. They were men with families, often on the other side of an ocean, whose remittances went home from a post office named after a joke in a novel.

A fire on the green chain in 1940 did some damage but not enough to matter. What finished Red Gap was not fire but the calendar: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 severed the mill from its only real market, and within months the business was gone. The complex, by then owned by H.R. MacMillan, was being torn down in 1942 when a fire destroyed much of what remained. A suspicious blaze in 1944 razed the rest along with two buildings people were still living in, buckled a few hundred yards of E&N track with its heat, destroyed a boxcar, and brought down telephone wires. Months earlier the Forestry Department had already burned the abandoned shacks as a hazard. Smaller outfits worked the site into the early 1950s, and then even they stopped coming.

Nothing is left standing. The highway was widened straight over the ground the settlement occupied, and a rest area now sits roughly where the store and post office once did, twenty-two kilometres north of Nanaimo and sixteen south of Parksville. At low tide, though, the bay gives up the evidence: rows of worn pilings still breaking the mudflats in the pattern of a vanished building, the footprint of a mill that once outproduced every other mill in the Pacific Northwest. The name itself has been demoted to a small shopping centre at nearby Nanoose Bay. Drivers stop at the rest area, stretch, look at the water, and get back in the car. Almost none of them know they are parked in a town.