Welcome to the blog adventures of Nic, Jess and The Fridge in Canada. The Fridge is a 1986 Volvo wagon - white, heavy, big on right angles. We love it. It's also got some serious tint going on the back windows which is handy for when we sleep in it. Glen, the guy we bought it from, is something of a Volvo guru. Owns seven of them, hasn't bought anything else since 1963, doing up a 1960 Volvo rally car. We felt pretty good buying from Glen - he loves his cars and cares for them well.
So when we hit car trouble on day one, it was fairly disappointing. We were motoring north on the Vancouver Island highway when the automatic transmission dropped into third and wouldn't go back into fourth. (Volvo calls fourth on cars like ours 'Overdrive', which is pretty funny. The Fridge, lovely as he is, does not deal in speed and acceleration.) We've been getting around fine, but the car still won't go into Overdrive. It's gonna have to be fixed at some stage, we can't do 10,000+ km of highway driving with three gears... And, just on principle, I want my Overdrive.
Shortly after we were picked up by boat and taken to our first WWOOFing host on Maurelle Island. (As wwoofers we work 25 hours a week on small farms in return for lodging and food.) With only a handful of permanent residents, Maurelle is a beautiful little island with zero government infrastructure. Rob and Laurie Wood's wooden house (designed by Rob and built by them both) perches on a hill overlooking the channel. A little hydro wheel in the creek and solar panels provide power, and a small farm of chickens, vegies and fruit helps them almost subsist. Laurie is the sister of a good family friend in Tasmania.
As city folk turned farm help, we didn't really know what to expect as wwoofers and we were hoping our inability to build, or fix engines, or know plants, or know animals, wouldn't make us look too shit. But it was all fine. Our first job was to gather kelp for the garden, and after that we cut firewood, gardened, took down an old deck and washed up. Laurie cooks well, and we got looked after. When not working we climbed a small mountain (The Dome) with great views over the surrounding islands and went sailing on Quintano, the catamaran Rob built himself.
The house has a good bookshelf and Rob always leads discussion at meal times. A semi-famous mountaineer, he is never backward in coming forward and is fond of left wing politics and passionate debate. He says both the Canadian and BC governments are worse than Bush. Says the media and the education system are to blame because they feed people 'mush'. Says the economic crisis was caused by oil shortage. Also says the economic crisis is a good thing - humanity's last hope to end a cycle of consumption and growth that would lead to disaster for the planet. Says computers are causing us to live virtually, and lose our connection with the Earth - lose our intuition. Says Zen is the best of the religions, because it is most in touch with nature. Calls Tsutomu, the Japanese wwoofer, 'Tsunamu' - not deliberately, just cos he forgets. Calls Jess 'Tess' and 'Bess' for the same reason.
There is an interesting backstory to the Maurelle Island settlement. In the 70s a group of hippies wanted to go back to the land and start their own idyllic commune. They bought a sizeable patch of land for $30,000 - paying a 10th each. Rob and Laurie were among them. It seems for a while it went well and they all built crazy wooden houses and started little farms and had kids with hippy names (Jeska, Aisha). And then for a while it didn't go so well and almost everyone moved away. Only one other of the original co-op still lives on Maurelle. He lives in a pyramid-shaped house and doesn't get out much.
Rob and Laurie like their life on Maurelle for the most part, but Rob says they would move if they could, but they are trapped. To get any sort of resale value on the property, they would need a legal contract defining the borders of their lot, and how it relates to the entire property. The co-op, which until recently was completely dysfunctional, is starting to communicate again, but progress is slow.
It's the only time I've encountered a commune type of set up. We've all thought about doing something like this at some stage, yes? Obviously it's not all beer and skittles...
After the Woods we headed north on Vancouver Island to Port McNeill where we spent our first night sleeping in the Volvo by the beach and dodging bears - one black bear in the evening and another the next morning. Both were ambling along the beach, and took off when they saw us. They were beautiful animals and it was nice to see bears without our heads being chewed. Having lived in Canada for 16 months, and worked in the media where all bad news has its day, Jess and I had built up a fair case of bearanioa. The sightings have eased our fears somewhat.
We're now wwoofing at Blackfish Lodge - a wooden fishing lodge sitting on a float in BCs coastal wilderness about five hours drive north of the 'couve. In the lodge, I'm typing and looking out the window at the quiet bay and sunset on the passage to the next island. Killer whales roam these waters, but we haven't seen one yet. Plenty of hummingbirds though - they're brilliant. They buzz around in fast forward, like tiny, crazy superheroes. We saw a male perform his mating dance today. It involves him flying vertically to 20 m, hovering for a second, then hurling himself at the ground and pulling out of the dive about 10 cm off the deck, shooting out horizontally and then doing it again. Hummingbirds' wings flap 50 times a second. I know, it doesn't make sense. But their whole body is in fast forward. Apparently their heart beats over 500 times a minute and they breathe over 200 times a minute. Apparently I'm a bird nerd.
But probably our best wildlife experience so far was seeing a big colony of Sea Lions - obese, stinky, ill-mannered, beautiful things that they are - on the way to the lodge. We passed a rock with probably 40 of the fat bastards lounging about honking and snorting and shitting and wobbling. Occasionally, a big male would take time out from sunning to chomp on another male's head for a bit. They were strangely majestic though, and very watchable, in the same way watching a sumo wrestler eat must be magnetic.
Being back on the road feels good. Two weeks ago, there were six keys in my pocket. Now I've got one key and minimal stuff - a backpack, a guitar and a housecar that we can sleep in whenever the mood strikes. We're seeing some beautiful places, meeting interesting and friendly people and feeling free. So far, Canada has been very kind to us. Hope y'all are well. Write to us some time.
Nic.
May 21, 2009.
Being simple folk, we're struggling with posting photos on this blog. Here are a few, but we'll do the rest on our Facebooks and link to them from here. Just in case you're really bored at work...
Rob and Laurie's
First night in the Volvo
Sea Lions - The Fat Bastards
