The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [16]
It was a nice little two-story house in a light-industry neighborhood. The front door was open so we called hello. Rosanne, whom we didn’t know, was working out in a garden in the back yard with her little girl, Holly. Sally had gone up north with her boy friend but we were welcomed in. A little later Rosanne’s husband, Bert, showed up. Of course we could stay there. Lots of people had been staying there off and on. Rosanne and Bert were ex-Americans from Portland.
The laws about homesteading and leasing crown land weren’t heartening. There wasn’t very much available and you had to be a citizen, which took a minimum of five years. The worst news was that most of B.C. was mountainous, with gravelly soil, not suitable for farming, and that lumber companies owned just about all of it. There was virtually nothing available on Vancouver Island. There were a few encouraging stories about people who had found nice places, but mostly it was depressing tales of squatting and being thrown out by logging companies.
We talked a lot with people who had been looking for the same sort of thing we wanted and we checked the want ads faithfully. Prices and the sort of thing that was available didn’t seem to be radically different from the way they had been in New England. If anything, the prices were higher. Large tracts of completely undeveloped, nondescript wooded land that might be farmable when cleared, and then again might not, ran about $500 an acre. We looked for old farms around the city that maybe we could rent until we got more money together, but here again the pickings were slim. We even snuck an occasional look at the apartments available and the help-wanted section. Apartments were pretty expensive and the job situation was dismal.
After a couple of weeks Virginia started getting discouraged and talking about running out of money, etc. I tried to be bright and cheerful. The thought of what the hell we were going to do if we couldn’t find some land was just too painful to consider, so I didn’t. We had moved out of Rosanne and Bert’s living room into a leaky cardboard shack behind their house. You could barely stand up in it. It was pretty dismal. We weren’t making love much. That was another thing I just put out of my mind.
Day followed day. Getting to know Vancouver, reading the newspapers, smoking a fair amount of dope, doing odds and ends and occasionally driving around the country saying, “Ooh, ah, isn’t that nice land.”
During one of our drives out around the city I noticed a sign saying “Ferries to Sunshine Coast.” What could be nicer? The Sunshine Coast became the new focus for my hopes. I bought some beautifully detailed maps of the area and fell in love again.
The Sunshine Coast isn’t really very sunny but I didn’t know that then. It has slightly less rainfall than Vancouver, which is where it gets off calling itself the Sunshine Coast while having a typically wet Pacific Northwest climate. But I wasn’t in a very cynical or analytic frame of mind. Sunshine Coast was paradise. It had to be.
Swifty and Bo, old Swarthmore friends, came north in a monster Pontiac Bonneville. They brought up some good California wine and some ancient Spanish brandy. I went out and got a beautiful leg of lamb. We had homemade garlic bread, French-cut beans, a huge salad, avocados with lemon and salt, and on and on. A feast. It was old times. We had done this sort of thing at college. Half the kick was starving for weeks on end to be able to afford it.
The next day we packed up the tarps, the ice chest, all the camping shit, and got on the car ferry for the Sunshine Coast, Swifty, Bo, Virginia, Zeke, and me. I was in high spirits, happy to be back on the road, back to camping out, building tarp houses. Away from worrying about Zeke being run over. Out of the city, out of stagnation. On the move and with old friends. The only thing I didn’t like was that pig of a car, which didn’t corner for shit on those mountain