OUTER ISLANDS COMMUNITY
“What kind of community do you have now?”
FORTUNATELY FOR US, JUST AS our co-op community was fizzling out, the larger but still local outer islands community, centred around the school, the post office, the community centre and the dock on the next island continued to flourish. There still remain a lot of year-round residents, and quite a few newcomers have arrived who have chosen to live in the area mainly because of the natural beauty and the lure of the off-grid lifestyle. Funnily enough, some of them keep on having children, so the presence of the community school is still a strong attraction.
Unlike our co-op, which started with grand ideological aspirations that couldn’t be sustained, the outer islands community has evolved smoothly and continues to thrive because it has, at its core, not so much ideology as live experience of sharing both the natural beauty and the inherent adventure of travelling on the water and through the forests. Consequently, when people congregate at the centre they invariably bring some of the natural high energy, as well as humility, that comes from engagement with the wild natural environment. Everyone is keen to help others when they are in trouble, especially on the ocean, because they know that next time it could easily happen to them. We all look out for each other. Living off grid is not so much about solar panels and baking bread as about paying attention and being fully present in the moment. This honest sincerity builds on itself to form an authentic sense of community that combines capitalism’s self-interest with socialism’s sharing to form a new undefined ideology, neither left nor right, meeting somewhere in the middle or round the back. Although each family has its own unique livelihood, with considerable diversity of income levels, there is unwritten subliminal agreement that, rather than how rich or poor people are, it’s enjoyment of the beauty and adventure of the place that counts. Because of this essentially green experience being its main foundation, the community could be considered an eco-village.
Although this new kind of village has the all-important central meeting place of a more traditional model, complete with even a public green space and direct and convenient public access, it is more spread out. Many of the folks live along the shorelines of the neighbouring channels, each with their own private dock and boats that link us all together. I have recently heard us all referred to as “the boat people.”
Even the folks who live on the same island as the village centre and walk or drive off-highway vehicles to get there have had to travel by their own private boats to get to their island, there being no direct public road access. Although outboard motors are not green, they do connect the more remote homesteads with each other and with the village centre. Not all of the remote homesteaders within a five-mile radius of the community centre care to participate much in community affairs, but many do, and just about all the 100 or so year-round residents come to the village dock and post office at least once a week to collect their mail, which arrives three days a week by float plane.
A weekly market and lunch, held on the public dock on Wednesdays, brings people together in all kinds of weather to socialize, collect their mail and trade their produce. This event is also becoming a popular, unique tourist attraction in the summertime. This helps the peripheral homesteads, like ours, to be more efficient through specialization and division of labour. For instance, we sell or trade our surplus eggs and seasonal vegetables there on a regular basis. The community market provides a bit of cash flow and welcome social entertainment, all of which contribute to strengthening the symbiotic relationship between the homesteads and the community, making them both more sustainable.
A monthly newsletter greases the communication wheels with information, debate, entertainment and intrigue. The soulful old buildings that were built by the hippies are now being used by their grandchildren. The bunkhouse, for instance, continues to function as a community centre and has recently been refurbished with a brand new kitchen extension. The old school building has been renovated and converted into a community woodworking shop. Both these projects depend largely on volunteer labour and donations of local materials, although some grants from governments and private charities have also been enlisted. On the write-up for grant applications, part of the stated “intended use” of the bunkhouse kitchen was the more humorous than realistic notion of teaching men how to cook, while the crafts shop was to teach women how to build.
A project I volunteered a lot of time on was building a new dock at the public road end access. This is the gateway to the outer islands if you are on the way out from town or the gateway to the rest of the world if you’re on your way in. It’s where we change out of boat mode into car mode and vice versa. The rough dirt public road, connecting as it does with the main provincial highways and ferries, was always there, but in the old days it was barely usable, and most town trips required a ten-mile boat ride which, in winter, was right into the teeth of the southeasters on their way up the Georgia Strait from Seattle. While contributing to all kinds of wild adventures, this also made life in the outer islands more dangerous, especially for those folks with marginal old boats. It was one more additional and expensive factor in whether people were able to hang in and remain in our area or not.
More recently the road was improved and a private float was installed which enabled boats to tie up and be left reasonably safely, and a few people started using it. The main catch was the 30-foot gap between the float and the shore. There was a makeshift raft on a pulley and the obvious unwritten understanding was to always pull the raft back to the float when you’d finished using it. Unfortunately, all too often some bozo gapped out and left the raft on the shore side so the raft got hung up on the rocks as the tide went out, resulting in the next users having to strip off and swim to get back to their boats after a tough day in town.
A few years ago our local regional district councillor and I brokered a three-way partnership deal between the local government, a local fish farm and the local community to build a properly certified small boat dock for public pedestrian use. The local council would take over the lease, ownership and insurance and provide a grant for a new ramp; the private company would donate recycled galvanized steel and Styrofoam-billeted floats while the local community users would volunteer labour and materials for a new landing stage.
When at last, after years of bureaucratic contortions, we were ready to start construction, it was midwinter and we needed a really low tide so we could pour concrete pads for our pilings on the intertidal foreshore, but at this time of year the low tides are at night. So there we were at ten o’clock at night on the slippery beach with an icy northerly outflow wind blasting arctic cold air out of Bute Inlet from the Interior Plateau. We had generators running for floodlights and cement mixers, with a gang laying out forms, another carrying buckets of navy jack from a pickup truck at the bottom of the hill across the beach to the site and yet another mixing cement and wheelbarrowing it into the forms. With at least a dozen people working hard to keep warm the job got done, and just in time before the rising tide wetted our forms. We all dispersed into the blackest of winter nights, some of us bucking a huge flood tide to boot – quite a relief to get back home for a hot toddy and a warm bed!
This small project, though fraught with bureaucratic delays, was very rewarding in itself, serving as it does to make the outer islands more accessible to the public and the rest of the world more accessible to the islanders; it was a great boost to community spirit and the most successful of my experiences with the mainstream public process.