The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [17]
The end of the road was where we were headed. Highway 101 starts somewhere down in Panama, comes up through Mexico and California, up to Vancouver, and then about a hundred miles north of Vancouver it stops. If you want to go any farther up the coast you have to go by boat. If I was going to find what I was looking for, the end of 101 seemed like where it would be.
There were two long ferry rides to get up to Powell River, eighty miles above Vancouver. The scenery was spectacularly beautiful. The Coast Range dropped right off into the water. This was virgin frontier, unspoiled except for ugly scars left by loggers here and there. Man was here but not many of ’em and he was certainly not master. Back East you could drive just about anywhere you wanted to go. Here there were vast areas that you couldn’t get to except by boat or float plane or on foot. The idea that man could ever tame these savage, proud mountains seemed remote. For the earth to reclaim itself here wouldn’t take much effort. A little shrug would do the trick.
I wish I could say we got the land by some soulful means, but the truth is we got it through a real estate agent. Now Virgil McKenzie is not your standard-issue real estate agent but we had no idea about that. His was simply the first sign we happened to see.
It might seem to some that a real estate office would be a logical place to start looking for land, but I had been looking for a year and had never talked to anyone in the business. It was somehow against the rules. I suppose what we wanted to happen was we’d be walking through the woods and come upon some old codger who would take an instant liking to the wonderful young people and sell us his land cheap. We did a lot of tromping through a lot of land without much luck.
After we had been at the camp ground for a few days, operating on all the soulful levels, it started to rain heavily, making a mockery of my tarp houses. As much to get out of the rain as anything else, with deep misgivings Virginia and I went into the first real estate office we saw. It was Virgil McKenzie’s. Without much hope I described what sort of thing we were looking for, how much money we had to spend, etc., fully expecting him to come back with “Yeah, you and everybody else and their brother.”
We wanted a fairly large piece of land, something over fifty acres if possible, not too easily accessible, suitable for farming. With what I had and what Virginia had, and with the help of some of the other people who were interested in this sort of thing, we could get maybe $20,000 together.
It turned out he had something he thought might interest us. As he described it I felt my eyes get larger and larger. “There’s this piece of land…eighty acres…used to be a self-sufficient farm thirty years back…hasn’t been worked since then. Old boys used to bring in huge loads of vegetables and fruit…no neighbors. To get there you have to go about ten miles by boat and then back a mile or so on an old logging road. A year-round stream running through the property. Old fruit trees are still bearing.” And the asking price—$12,000. I caught myself just before the drool came over my lip. Would we be interested in having a look? It sounded too good to be true. We made a date to go up in his boat and have a look at it as soon as the weather cleared.
Why had it taken us so long to go into a real estate office? Having done it once it seemed easy to do it again, and so to be good shoppers we went into a few other real estate places to see what they might have. There was nothing remotely comparable to McKenzie’s deal. Completely undeveloped stuff that was accessible by dirt road, had been logged over, would have to be cleared, maybe had water, maybe could be farmed, was all about $500 an acre. Whenever I asked about anything cheaper they all shook their heads knowingly and talked about maybe some stuff way farther north by boat.
The next day there was a break in the weather. McKenzie and his son came to our camp site.