Settling Down

I was a feisty fourteen-year-old when my parents moved from New York City to Vancouver. I’d learned New York, and had conquered the city with a vengeance. I may have sat in the same coffeehouse as Bob Dylan or Jack Kerouac just down the block from my Greenwich Village school. I’d been commuting to school alone, by bus and by subway, from the time I was eight.

My schoolmates were the sons and daughters the activists of of the 1950’s. We learned at an early age that it was important fight injustice and challenge existing systems. We marched in the streets, wrote letters, signed petitions, and stuck to our ideals. We tested our teachers, and pushed the envelope as hard as we could.

My friends were aghast when I told them I was moving to Vancouver, Canada. “Doesn’t it snow all the time, there?” “But what will you do?”

What would I do? Indeed. It was a valid question. I was as out of place among my conservative West Vancouver schoolmates as a thistle in a bed of lilies. After two tough years in the fledgling city of Vancouver, we moved south to a town in the Marin Hills near San Francisco. Before I completed my last year of high school my parents moved back to Vancouver. I stayed in California on my own, and finished my senior year. I was sixteen, and as bold and crazy as I could possibly be.

I fell in love with a man who had been dubbed the youngest of the beat poets. He matched my craziness, and then upped the ante. He’d had two slim volumes of poetry published by City Lights Books and I thought I’d reached the stars. Together we steeped ourselves in the readings and the music and the drugs of that era.

We spent the summer of ’69 riding freight trains up into Canada, and then throughout the USA. We hitchhiked when the riding got tough. We weathered hurricane Camille in New Orleans without a roof over our heads. We slept rough on rooftops in New York where the smell of fresh baked bread in the morning woke us to a new day. At the end of the summer, we settled back in California, but I was restless.

By the end of that year I was done with living in cities. I broke up with my poet, moved back to Canada, and began to look for a way to get back to the land. It was the right thing to do.

My generous father gave me a piece of property on a little island a hundred miles north of Vancouver. It took three ferries, ninety miles of twisty road along the east shore of Vancouver Island, and eight hours travel time to get there. I was nineteen, and had just married a draft dodger to help him become a Canadian resident. Was I in love? To this day I am not sure. We wanted the same thing, and that was enough.

Armed with the Whole Earth Catalogue, a copy of Ruth Stout’s ‘No-Work Gardening’ book, and a brand-new chainsaw, we loaded our VW Van with all our belongings, our two cats and their latest litter of kittens, and moved to the middle of fifty acres in the middle of an island in the middle of what is now called the Salish Sea.

The phrase ‘off-grid’ sounds so appealing these days. For us it was a struggle, and the learning curve was steep. We had kerosene lamps. We couldn’t get the kerosene refrigerator to work. Our hundred-pound propane tank ran out after two hot showers. We ate a lot of oysters. I kept detailed logs of our expenses and we were always broke. There were three other couples our age on the island among about 500 old timers. The old-timers, loggers and fisher people and serious gardeners watched our shenanigans, laughed at us, and graciously helped bail us out of trouble.

I stayed there for ten years. I had the chickens and rabbits and goats and horses and pigs and the big garden. During those years, the island filled with others like me, and we packed the local community hall for movies, plays, dances and community meetings. I played music with several different bands, formed a food co-op, got on the local Advisory Planning Council, and fell in and out of love a surprising number of times. I’d begun to work off-island in spring, cooking for tree planting camps. When I was twenty-five, I opened a restaurant at the local marina.

Fate intervened. One spring at a northern work site I fell in love with a tree planter from the Kootenays. In the fall, I was pregnant, and I packed up and left my island behind for the mountains. The affair with the tree planter lasted just five years, but my affair with the Kootenays has endured for the last forty. Here I have raised my children, found the love of my life and lost him, suddenly and tragically, twenty-two years later. Together, we had established a permaculture farm with an abundance of food-producing perennials, and after he died, I ran an Airbnb in hopes of converting others to a more sustainable lifestyle. That’s when I started to write in earnest.

I’ve always written. I wrote lists, records of expenses, hand-written letters, and dozens of journals that I still find entertaining fifty years later. I’ve written personal and poignant stories about people I’ve known, and made-up stories rich with the details of the lives of people I’ve met and loved only on the pages of my books. The lake and mountains make my writing possible; they fill my soul and give me strength, ideas, and solace when the well runs dry.

I’ve recently found a new home on the lake, and here I am sorting through and piecing together the most important and relevant things I’ve learned in my life. Here I plan to make one last stand for what is good and right. My last chapter, I promise, will be my best.