An evening of jazz, wine, dancing and unexpected community on the marina green in Nanoose Bay.

There are evenings that begin with very little expectation and end up telling you something about where you live. Last night, Nanoose Bay live music gave me one of those moments.

A few friends and I went to Nanoose Bay to hear The Palace Band, playing outside a new speakeasy-style café beside the marina. The setting was quintessentially Island: a green lawn, boats beyond it, people gathered in the evening air and no particular need to be anywhere else.

Families had come. Couples. Groups of friends. Children. People dressed for the occasion and people who looked as though they had simply wandered over after dinner. There was wine, hot dogs and snacks. Nothing particularly elaborate.

And yet there was a lovely sense that something was happening.

Then the band started playing.

The Palace Band is the kind of group that makes you listen a little differently to songs you thought you already knew. Their repertoire moved through familiar classics, but filtered through jazz — trumpet, horn, piano, cello, guitar and a terrific lead vocalist.

At one point they launched into a jazz version of I wear my Sunglasses at Night, and Pump Up the Jam.

It shouldn’t have worked.

It worked brilliantly.

My girlfriends and I had been standing off to the side, listening, and slowly starting to feel the rhythm as we swayed in unison. We were among the first to get up and dance.

There is a particular freedom in being one of the first people on a dance floor. You have a brief window in which you can feel slightly ridiculous, because nobody else has quite committed yet.

Then you stop caring.

As the music continued, more people got up. The space between audience and performers became less defined. The musicians took turns stepping forward, each getting their moment, before folding back into the whole.

It wasn’t a concert in the formal sense.

It felt more like a community gathering that happened to have an exceptionally good band at its centre.

And standing there, I found myself thinking about how differently we experience a place when we stop looking at it as visitors.

When you first arrive somewhere, you notice the obvious things.

The landscape. The beaches. The forests. The mountains. The restaurants. The places everyone tells you to see.

Those are the things that make a destination.

But they aren’t necessarily the things that make a place feel like home.

For that, you have to discover the less obvious geography: where people meet, where musicians play, which cafés become gathering places, where friends go on a summer evening simply because there is good music and someone they know might be there.

You begin to understand a place through its social life.

And that is something I have been noticing more and more on Vancouver Island.

There is a misconception, perhaps, that island life is quiet because there isn’t much happening.

I think it is quieter because you have to learn where to look.

The Island doesn’t always advertise its pleasures.

They appear in pockets.

A band on a lawn beside a marina.

A local café trying something new.

A group of women dancing before anyone else has found the courage.

Wine in one hand, a hot dog in the other.

A child running across the grass. Some young girls dancing at the back. A baby crawling down the aisle.

Someone you don’t know smiling because the band has just played a song everyone recognizes.

These aren’t the experiences that necessarily make it into a travel itinerary.

But they are the experiences through which you begin to understand how people actually live somewhere.

I’ve lived in eight countries and travelled through many more, so I have spent a lot of my life arriving in places and figuring them out.

There is a difference between seeing a place and becoming part of its rhythm.

The first is about discovery.

The second is about participation.

Last night, for a couple of hours, I wasn’t thinking about Vancouver Island as somewhere I had chosen to live.

I was simply living there.

Listening to music on the grass.

Dancing with my friends.

Watching families and strangers and musicians share the same evening.

Looking out towards the marina.

And thinking that perhaps this is how belonging happens.

Not through one grand moment, but through a collection of small ones.

The evenings you didn’t plan.

The people you didn’t know you’d meet.

The places you hadn’t yet discovered.

The songs you thought you’d forgotten.

And sometimes, a jazz version of Pump Up the Jam on a marina green in Nanoose Bay.

Those are the moments when a place stops being somewhere you live and starts becoming somewhere that feels like yours.