Volume 6 • 2019 • Issue 8

22 | 2019 | Issue 8 I ssues and P eople long bike trip on Vancouver Island. He skied and he surfed, “sometimes on the same day.” He competed as a triathlete and sailed in regattas. “But then in 1980, the economy imploded, and interest rates were at 17 percent, so I went on sabbatical for a few years,” Dr. Walford says. When he returned to dentistry, he bought a practice in Cumberland in the Comox valley of Vancouver Island. “It’s was very much a blue-collar mining town. People really struggled to get by,” says Dr. Walford, but then he met people from the artist colonies and back-to-the- land settlements on the gulf islands who traveled to Cumberland for dental care. “They were outside-the- box thinkers. My kind of people.” Community leaders from Hornby approached Dr. Walford about starting a practice on the island. He looked for a building, but there wasn’t much commercial real estate in “the village,” and he worried that there wasn’t a big enough client base. “It was August. Fire season, so no logging. No money in Cumberland during fire season. The phone wasn’t ringing,” Dr. Walford says. He asked if the people on Hornby Island would mind being served by a dentist in a bus. “One man said, ‘Of course. Half of us came here on buses.’” Dr. Walford bought a 38-foot bus and, in 16-weeks, transformed it into a mobile dental clinic. “Back in those days, we had a local alternative currency called green dollars. Often, I’d take payment for dental services in half green dollars and half federal dollars,” says Dr. Walford. He used his green dollars to pay for local carpenters and mechanics to help retrofit the bus. “Eighty people worked on that mobile clinic in one way or another.” Starting in 1986, one week a month, Dr. Walford would move his sterilizer and other portable equipment from his base practice in Cumberland into the mobile clinic, and, along with his two dental assistants, take the ferry to Hornby and Denman Islands. The ferry rates rose 40 percent, which made it more difficult for island residents to travel for dental care. He parked the clinic where he could hook up water, electricity and telephone lines “near the elementary school and the medical centre, in the centre of the downtowns, such as they are.” He fell in love and married a woman, Robin, who was a preschool supervisor on Hornby Island. He moved to the island and left the Cumberland dental office. Together, he and Robin raised four children. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Walford bought another bus, a Blue Bird, parked it in his backyard, and then spent four years building it into a dental clinic with all new equipment and custom-made wood finishing. He apprenticed with fine carpenters to improve his skills. “It was a process that brought me to a new place creatively, a different consciousness,” says Dr. Walford. “I figured out how to do things correctly, to their greatest potential, no matter how long it took. And I took that master craftsperson mentality back to dentistry.” He says that after building the second bus, he did better quality work chairside. And the bus? “It’s a thing of beauty.” Reinvigorated, Dr. Walford studied advanced restoration using gold with Dr. Richard V. Tucker. He took classes and worked with dentists from California to Washington state. With a focus on posterior composite restorations, he honed his skills to apply the principles of adhesive dentistry to complex restorations. “I began to teach and mentor other dentists. I did live stage demonstrations and wrote articles about what I was doing,” says Dr. Walford, who also wrote handbooks about adhesives, direct dentistry, and full mouth reconstruction using composite. “I feel very alive in my work.” Three days a week, Dr. Walford works on the Blue Bird bus, which has two operatories and a cozy waiting room. He knows many of his patients well. “We laugh a lot, pick up where we left off. Talk about island events and world events,” he says. On his off days, he builds racing sailboats and works in the organic market garden that he grows with Robin. View of the two operatories. The clinic's waiting room.