Day Off

Today the rain brought me a day off – a day to do as I choose. I feel like it’s been a while since I had a day like this.  Oliver has been doing a lot of work on the land while I’ve been away working on other people’s land, volunteering in the school and trying to sort out this summer’s tour. 

I spent the morning planting seeds and loving them up to help them grow. There are many things in the gardens now – potatoes, various peas, fava beans, lettuce, kail, chard, pac choi and plant species between, herbs, onions and our crowning glory: garlic. The Garlic is already surprisingly huge and since it’s one of my favourite tastes in the world – I am very excited every time I see it.  The orchard is now packed full of trees and fruiting shrubs and many of them are beginning to bloom.

Today I’m feeling pretty good about all of this mess. I think I’m beginning to come to terms with not having a proper home and that it will be some time before I ever have anything that resembles a couch or a desk. 

The elections are happening today and I decided to swap my vote (party choice) with someone from another region in an attempt to resurrect democracy and have the election outcome better represent the voters.  A lot of people were doing this, and I feel really great about it. I’m not sure it we’ll get the results we want – but it does make Canada feel smaller and more like a big, supportive community where everyone works together, despite their differences, in order to meet a common goal.  Also, after talking with my vote-swapping partner who found me through an Internet application, we realized that she was married down the road from where I grew up in Muskoka, at a little resort where I worked as a teenager. Great coincidences like that always put me in a good mood.

This past Saturday was also a day that put a smile on my face. Oliver and I played our first gig at the Comox Valley Farmer’s Market. It was a big, beautiful market with lots of farmers and happy little kids running around and we had a really great audience gathered in front of us.  The pay for the gig is a donation from each vendor and we went home with a wheelbarrow load of fresh, locally produced veggies, pasta, cheese, meats (which I won’t eat, cuz I’m veg, but my lovely friends will enjoy it), bread, desserts, starter plants, and even a blueberry bush. It was the most amazing paycheque ever and I love playing music outside so that was also perfect. I hope they’ll keep us coming back in future years. 

Garlic

Our most spacious garden - about half planted. 

the bawling lumberjack

Does the occasional minor injury have you fighting back a river of tears these days? Does even cutting onions, at times, seem to give your inner-child an excuse to break into a sorrowful cry?  I’m not sure what it is, but lately my emotions seem to be getting the best of me at the most unexpected moments.  Today I jammed my shin between two logs while I was peeling on the pole rack, and while the result will be a giant purple bruise, it’s not typically the kind of thing that, well, hurts my feelings. It may have been the sappy, nostalgic feeling I get every spring or perhaps it was that once I was back in a less compromising position I noticed how far away I was from anyone who could have helped me if anything had really gone wrong. A few weeks ago, Oliver’s father fell off a ladder and was alone for short while, and ended up phoning Oli who came with the car and then called an ambulance. By the time Oliver got to his dad, his mum was there, but the size of the clear-cut we are all working on is just too large for total security. 

The task at hand seems more daunting lately.  When we first picked up shovels and pitchforks and began building our gardens we were driven by excitement, but more and more we are being driven by seasons and deadlines and need, and the road ahead looks longer and longer. The house itself is not even in the foreground of our thoughts – the logs we’re peeling are going into a workshop, which will temporarily serve as a kitchen and dry storage for everything we own.  We’ve put in an orchard with fruit and nut trees and shrubs and the food we’ve planted in the soil is showing signs of life. But the dry season is fast approaching and Oliver has been rushing around rigging up a gravity-fed watering system to prevent death during the impending drought.

The construction of my smithy has taken a back seat to most other things, although I did get in there to level the ground the other day. I am still on a hunt for tools, and there’s really no rush to get the building closed in until I at least have an anvil here on the island. I’m looking in to shipping solutions for a 100-pound, awkwardly shaped chunk of steel.

I think I’m feeling a little uncertain lately.  (Well, always…)  I look at the lives of friends from school and usually see something very different from where I am. Twenty-nine is approaching and I’m not nearly as grown-up as I ought to be. I think perhaps I missed the maturity train when it went by. (I’m still trying for a music career, for christ’s sake.) At the same time, I’m way more grown-up than I want to be. Not only am I part of four committees and the owner of three aprons and a Dutch oven, but I’ve decided a lot of absolute and un-renege-able stuff about my life. We’re committed to this tiny island and this huge task of building our home by hand in the middle of an off-grid west-coast clear cut.  I can’t even imagine the feeling of finality that comes with children and mortgages, but I imagine that like this, it must be enough to make you cry when you cut onions.

Anyway, things are good, but springtime sure does get me feeling wishy-washy and wishing for a few more carefree years. 

The pole rack.

old photo

I thought this was the coolest picture when I was a kid. My dad was in a band when he was in his youth - which to me, at the time, pretty much meant that he was a celebrity at one point.

I thought myself pretty damn lucky to have cool parents. I suppose it was lucky for them that I thought so.  They weren't afraid to tell me the truth about their own interesting pasts, both successes and screw ups and let me laugh and learn from their mistakes in hopes (in hopes) that I wouldn't make so many of my own. I remember one day the kids at school were calling my parents "hippies" and I got so upset I almost cried. When I went home and told them, they said "That's ok. I guess we sort of are."

If I ever get to be a parent, maybe my kids will find at a picture like this and realize that I too, parental unit A, am actually a real person with dreams and ambitions and a little bit of cool.

Rory Jordan-Stevens: The Flowers Are Budding

Rory Jordan-Stevens is just barely old enough to get into the bar and play a set, but the song he sings exposes a soul as old as the earth. His self-produced, independently released EP, The Flowers Are Budding, may well be scientific evidence of pure, unadulterated musical genius. Like some of the most acclaimed singer/songwriters on the scene today, (Hawksley Workman, Ray LaMontagne, Ryan Adams et al.) Rory shows an unfaltering ability to think outside the box of formulas and subject matter and deliver truly unique, unforgettable music that quiets even the rowdiest of patrons. With a satiny smooth, moody-dramatic voice that could belong to someone twice his age, Rory steals your heart as soon as he opens his mouth.

On The Flowers Are Budding  – Rory independently and quite professionally lays down multiple tracks of vocals, guitar, keys, nature sounds and percussion. The result is a heart-gripping ode to some of his most-loved people, places and things, and a six-song album that is personal, natural and faultless.  If this emotion-soaked EP is Rory’s contribution to music at only nineteen, it’s hard to imagine what kind of magic he will produce in the long future that waits ahead of him.

Buy the album:http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/roryjordanstevens

The oil will run out.

The end of the cheap oil has become a scary thought since I moved out here, far away from my family and most of my friends. So far every trip I’ve taken home to visit has relied on the old black gold, and I can’t see any way out of that. I’m hoping I’ll suddenly become an amazingly fast cyclist.
   While I don’t know exactly how to prepare for the day when I can’t afford a bus ride across the country, I am starting in small ways to get ready for the upcoming oil-crises at home.
   I think a major global crisis inevitable. When I go to the city what I see is that people are not changing. Some people are changing yes, and trying to get others to follow along. But the vast majority of people are not ready or willing to change their ways, and would much rather ignore the problem all together – the problem being global warming and the decreasing availability of oil.  Business will continue as usual until it’s gone. And when it’s gone people will be screwed. 
   Unless they get ready. 
   This is probably one of the biggest reasons why I’m here on Denman – after Oli. Maybe this is why Oli’s wants to be here too, but I can’t speak for him. It seems to me that there are certain factors that will make it easier to live off the land here – some of those factors being climate, a local government that seems to be focused mainly on environment, and a very strong sense of community.
   Anyway, I don’t want to blather on too much. A few months ago I joined up with a group of people who are trying to turn Denman Island into a Transition Town. “Transition Towns” is a global movement that started in Totnes, England. Each Transition Town creates a plan to go from oil-dependence to oil-free (or very low-oil) sustainability or “Local Resilience,” as the TT movement likes to call it. Denman, luckily, already has a whole bunch of groups working on various components of the entire goal.  In ten to twenty years, if all goes well, Denman will be producing all of the food and energy it needs to continue day-to-day life, without help from the monster oil industry. On the side bar there is a link to the “Transition Denman Island” blog, which I created. The website is www.transitiondenmanisland.org.
   As for Oli and I, we are hoping to build a house that is completely off the grid and doesn’t rely on maintenance people from off-island. This is going to be a challenge – but a good challenge. We have been watching Oli’s parents build a log cabin with barely any power tools. They peeled the logs with a hand tool and used a chisel for the notches to link the logs. It is totally ridiculous in some ways, but it reminds me of how much can be done without standard electricity.
   I’m really glad that I was brought up in the country and taught to use a saw and a hammer and to light a fire. There are lots of people out there who can’t do these things. I don’t know what’s going to become of these people. Thanks mom and dad.

"Skinning logs" as I like to call it - cuz I will never skin anything else. Except potatoes.

Moving Dirt

For the last couple of weeks, on my free days, I’ve been working on the plot of land where we are going to build our little home. Before any house starts to happen, we are putting in gardens and fruit and nut trees. The trees take a few years to start producing edibles so we want to get them in asap. And the garden is something we can do while we are still deciding about house stuff.
I’ve been listening in on Oli’s conversations with other people to try and figure out what kind of garden to build. Last winter Oliver took a “Permaculture Design” course given by Jesse Lemieux of Pacific Permaculture. (www.pacificpermaculture.ca)  Through the course Oli met several of the people who are now our friends on Denman. Whenever we get together with any of these friends, they speak in tongues. Permaculture language. I don’t always understand it, but I’ve caught on to a few things and I’m trying to use them in my garden project.  I’m sort of trying to get my way with the garden – I want it to have nice aesthetics. But I’m also sort of trying to impress Oli, who thinks I don’t give a rat’s behind about permaculture – which is not true, I just don’t care for the jargon.
I’ve been spending all of my time so far on this one garden bed. It started out as a four-foot-deep ditch between the stumps and top soil that were pushed over to clear space for the pond, and the sandy gravel that came out of the hole that will be the pond (once we get it sealed and the rain fills it up). I filled most of the ditch with living and rotting logs and branches and salal and then I dug top soil out from the jumble of stumps and put it on top. We got a load of seaweed and put that on, and some sawdust. Then we were given 6 truckloads of soil that had been built by Jesse for one of his courses – so we really lucked out. The soil was built from various types of plant matter that broke down into rich earth over the summer. So that went on next. Now I have a fairly large garden bed with some stony key-hole shaped pathways into it. The layers of organic matter will turn to soil over time, as will the stocks and leaves from the veggies we grow in it every year.  In a couple days I’ll be planting garlic into it – the first crop. The soil is raised in a way that water should flow into the garden when it rains, and the mulchy soil should hold it for a while, so it doesn’t have to be watered as often.
Next I think I’ll take over Oli’s project. He is building an even bigger garden and is doing it the way I did mine, but more accurately. He’s been busy planting and fencing our trees and helping his folks build their own house, so he hasn’t had time to work on his garden bed.
I’m really excited to be putting in big gardens that I will be able to keep, instead of move away from when the lease is up. I’m going to grow stuff, and can it, and get totally ready for Armageddon. Yay.

Welcome Home

It’s Friday night, 8:00 PM and I’m in my twenties. A year ago I would have been sipping on a glass of wine and getting ready to go downtown in an hour or so. That’s when I lived in Toronto and was into live music and clinking glasses with friends and looking nice. But right now I’m in my pyjamas and in bed. And if only it were a bed, but in fact it’s a piece of blue camping foam and a blow up Thermarest sleeping pad on the loft floor of a tiny sauna. When I say tiny, I’m not kidding – your average basketball player would not be able to lye down in here.
I’m living on Denman Island – a tiny speck of land surrounded by a moat of salty pacific ocean off the east side of Vancouver Island. It’s rural to say the least. I’m in the middle of the island, in the middle of a clear cut that is quickly becoming forest again. I’m dirty and I have a headlamp on. I haven’t had a shower in two weeks, since I got back from my visit to Ontario. I have attempted to bathe with a bucket of water and a giant sponge – and I tell you, after a couple days of digging in the dustiest kind of dirt even a bucket of cold water feels great – but it’s not the clean I’m accustomed to.

My partner, Oliver and I came to Denman Island last January after playing a dozen gigs on a little tour across Central and Western Canada. Oli’s parents live here on this clear cut and have been doing so for six years. They are off the grid. They have a couple solar panels that they use to charge a few batteries – One for some light, a hand blender, a seed grinder and a cell phone charger, one for pumping water from the pond to the gardens, and one for backup. They have a woodstove to heat the air and the rain water they collect from the roofs of their 10x10 house and all of the little out buildings. They fill drinking water barrels at neighbours’ houses. They eat raw food – fruit and vegetables from their garden and from local organic growers, nuts and seeds and Ryvita crackers and rice wraps.
I did not in a million years see myself living this way. But somehow, I am. Except, Oli and I don’t have a 10x10 house or our own solar panels. We have a 7x7 room where one of us sits on a bench and the other sits on a pail that is turned up-side-down, and we have a woodstove to keep warm when the days get cold enough to light it. We have a tent made of sails that contains a chair with a toilet seat and a bucket full of grass, and a pail of sawdust, and coffee container with toilet paper. I keep calling it the bathroom, even though it will never include a bath.
I wear overalls covered in dirt. My hair looks like the high school Janitor’s mop, tied back in a flat ponytail with frizz sticking out the sides. I go to bed when it gets dark and I get up when the sun comes out. I only see my reflection in windows and when I do I am embarrassed to be seen by the dear that roam the property, desperately trying to break in to the gardens. They even smell better than I do.

We are going to build a house here. We will probably be very dirty for a couple years, but in the end our house will have a shower.