Sans car, we boarded the ferry to Powell River, a rainy, sulphurous mill-town, home of the forestry giant, MacMillan-Bloedel. We were nearly penniless when we arrived in the office of the local school-board, where I applied for a teaching position. Because I had American credentials, I was tentatively hired as a part-time, sixth-grade teacher, as well as an evening instructor for the adult education program, providing I could produce evidence of my degrees before fall classes began. We lucked-out on a two-room cottage in the backyard of a pleasant family, and we set up house, our only possessions carried in backpacks. The owner’s wife lent us dishes; I assembled shelves and a table from planks and spikes; we acquired a mattress and stuffed chair from the good-will store, and classes began.
In retrospect, 1969 was a dismal year with only three beacons blinking through the distance. On March 17th our first child was born: Rachel Michelle Ziegler. After a full day of false-labor for Bunny, a specialist was called in and her x-ray revealed that the umbilical cord had become wrapped around the baby’s throat and was strangling her, pulling her back in against the contractions attempting to expel her. A midnight caesarian section was decided upon, and I was asked to sign an emergency consent form. I paced, rubbery and pale, for what seemed a lifetime, and when the sun came up, I held my daughter for the first time. Bunny was elated and exhausted, and fell asleep.The swinging cradle I carved for Rachel could not seem to comfort her, and her continuos crying tried even Bunny’s patience, leaving us both irritable and homesick. Bunny needed maternal support, breaks from Rachel’s colic, and I was too self-engrossed and uninformed to offer more than perfunctory gestures: shoulder shrugs, frustrated expletives, or complaints about my problems in the classroom. The damp, one-room cottage offered little solace or relief from our triangle of tension, so we wrote long confessional letters home to our parents and friends in the States. It seems we connected mainly when return letters arrived, especially when Bunny’s family members promised an eventual visit.
That year I drank jugs of cheap red wine, learned to roll my own cigarettes with Canadian tobbacco, and wrote reams of self-indulgent prose, ornamental, surreal poems too personal for anyone to grasp, and angry response-letters to a number of American government agencies. I was warned one last time that my citizenship would be revoked if I did not turn myself in and stand trial for my treasonous action. I replied that it was they who would someday stand trial for their unacceptable invasions of third world countries, and for the massacres they were staging. I then received a demand to repay the student loan money which I had borrowed for graduate school, and I suggested that, since I had paid social security premiums since I first worked at sixteen, and since they were keeping that, they could simply apply my social security savings against the student loan, and we’d call it even. They were not impressed, and the F.B.I. sent detectives to my parent’s home to monitor my whereabouts until the amnesty in 1976.
My parents were profoundly disappointed with my choice to leave the country. I expect my ruthless decision re-enforced my father's pronouncements about my self-centeredness and my drug-induced irresponsibility, and maybe it brought my parents closer together, as they waved a permanent goodbye to their first-born child. My mother was broken-hearted that she had never even gotten to meet my wife, nor to watch, with her husband from a front-row pew, as her handsome son walked down the aisle; had not gotten to wipe away tears of happiness and toast the bride, while relatives and cousins lifted their glasses and said things that would make she and Dad proud She had not gotten to have a traditional daughter-in-law relationship, though they wrote regularly to each other even after Bunny and I had divorced. And, of course, there was the loss of her first granddaughter, Rachel, whom she would not get to meet until three years later. My flight from America left behind a trail of unresolved anger, sorrow, and confusion; I had inadvertently hurled a lightning bolt at the family tree, burning off lengths of protective bark and shearing free branches which could never be grafted on again. I had not gone to war, but I was, in every way, a casualty who would never really return home.
I had no experience in working with normal sixth grade students and even less with boys with behavior problems, and the half-dozen nasty little red-neck lads in my class tore me daily, strip by strip, into hippie shreds. I was teaching by the seat of my pants, and they knew where I shopped. So did their parents. Because we had no car, we walked or hitch-hiked wherever we went, and, with my long hair, beard, and second-hand store clothes, we were the brunt of small-town mockery and gossip throughout the year, save for a handful of exceptions. An elderly woman in my evening English course invited us for coffee, and she and her husband became our surrogate parents.
Eve was a bright cynical woman, surrounded by fools who never understood her, a sort of Susanna Moody-figure, stuck among the lumberjack and mill-worker mentality, at the end of the road, in the acid-rain of the pulp-mills. Her husband, Bal, was a gentle, quiet man, who had worked at the mill his entire adult life, also feeling like a man who did not fit. Their huge living-room window looked out on the salt-chuck, where tugboats blinked like fireflies in the foggy distance. They took our back-to-the-land dream seriously, and that year Bal introduced me to the northern interior, by boat. Soaked and shivering, I beheld cataracts of icy snow-melt cascading through sheer canyons, tumbling up-rooted spruce trees, like battering-rams, busting open log-jams, everything tangled, then roaring free. It was a demonstration of pure power. Bal’s eyes shone as I watched with awe: this was The Land. Meanwhile, Eve was slowly dying from cancer, and Bal wrote us at our cabin, the following year, of her death.
As the school year ground to a close, our plans for our move to the land intensified. We’d saved some money, gathered a few second-hand axes and a two-man saw, read Three Against the Wilderness, and stumbled onto several other disenchanted souls who were also gathering tools and scanning maps, preparing to make their leap off the merry-go-round and into the woods. All that was outstanding, besides transportation, was a location, an actual place to settle. The final light that shone bright in Powell River was a twelve-year old girl, a Pippi Long-Stockings look-a-like, named Nadina Mackie. Nadina had heard me sharing my dream in the classroom, and in the spring she brought me an invitation to dinner at her parent’s home. Her father was Allan Mackie, a renowned log-home builder who had opened his own log-building school. After dinner, Allan and his wife listened to our plans and assured us that we were following a true star.
There wasn’t much more to Powell River. I bought a 56’ Chevy; received a map with directions to Allan’s vacant log cabin on Francois Lake, along with suggestions for locating our own land, squeaked through the final months of teaching, drank and argued with Bunny. Before we left, two poems were published in the Powell River newspaper, and that had the simultaneous effect of squirting mud into the eye of the gossips, and of convincing me that I clearly had what it took, that I was going to make a living as a poet, living in a log cabin out on the land. I didn’t need America or The System. Eventually my parents would be exonerated; their son was more than a hippie deserter on drugs; he was a published poet raising a happy family on a pristine lake in northern British Columbia. He would dedicate his first book to his parents, come home and visit when his busy schedule allowed, and would fly them up to the homestead to watch their grandchildren play.
When school ended, I was informed that my degrees were no longer valid within the Canadian school system, partly because Americans with degrees were flooding the Canadian job market and restrictions were being put into place for Canadian protection. I believe that it was also obvious that my free-form style of teaching needed serious upgrading and revision to meet the standards of the Canadian curriculum. At any rate, it meant that I no longer had any profession to fall back on, that six years of university degrees had been erased.
The road north was mostly gravel, dust pouring in through the windows, potholes which finally snapped off a tie-rod, bringing us skidding to a stop in nowhere, slowing us way down, way down. Allan’s cabin was on the other side of Francois Lake, and we excitedly boarded a ferry and crossed over into the village of South Bank, a general store with a gas pump. It was June and the weather was hot, raspberry bushes hunched beneath their cloaks of blood-red berries. Young grouse picked at gravel along the dusty roadsides. We were there.
Gravel roads turned into dirt roads, which twined into networks of dried logging roads that lured us ever deeper into the bush. I had visions of discovering a dirt road that faded to a trail that opened out into another era; and that is nearly what we found. Following directions from rangers at a rural forestry trailer, we inched through a rooted, overgrown road that butted up against a jagged rock , right on the shore of Uncha Lake. Uncha is a Carrier word, meaning big-fish, place of the red-fleshed char, the land-locked salmon. A low mountain resembling a painting of Mt. Fuji floated like a mirror reflection in the still azure water of the lake. Loons laughed madly, diving, surfacing, shattering the water into sun-diamonds, disappearing, reappearing far away, their black and white necklaces glittering. We were home.
With Rachel on my back, I scrambled over the rock clump and found the faded ruts of a wagon trail that threaded through the undergrowth, and we followed it along the lake-shore. Bright green aspen trees towered up to the blue sky, spots of sunlight dappling the forest floor. In a cove that faced directly out onto the island, we sat on a driftwood log, eating peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwiches (our staple for the next month), and speculated on where to build our cabin. It was Crown land, and we had researched the stipulations with the forestry rangers; it was now a matter of locating the cabin site, searching through land deeds, and surveying.
The next morning our two-person saw bit into the massive trunk of a grandaddy-aspen. Half-way through, the tree settled heavily onto the saw, pinching the blade firmly under its green wet weight. With a dull, double-bladed axe, I chopped and chopped, attempting to widen a notch sufficient to free-up the rusty old saw blade. The cabin, I soon realized, would be a demanding teacher. It, not I, dictated its location, its size, and its form. The tree, once felled, had hung up in another tree, and once finally felled and limbed, was immovable. Length and girth determined distance.
Short rounds placed under the log created primitive rollers. I established vague connections with pyramid builders, ancestors who had moved mass, sans block and tackles, wheels or winches. After heavy rains, the swarms of mosquitoes and black flies joined the staff of wilderness instructors. Despite the netting and bug spray, Rachel was a tiny bundle of swollen bites. Our faces and necks, even areas covered by clothes, were also a grid of stinging welts. The saw stuck, the axe head wobbled, the rains came, the bugs drank blood, but the first round of logs was in place, albeit forty feet from our preferred location, and ten shorter on every side, than originally planned.
More difficult than the effort itself was the nagging thought that the whole project was probably crazy. Who the hell drives to the end of a road, walks into some woods and begins sawing and chopping down trees with the intention of moving in, and never going out again? Kids do that, little kids when they’re running away from home. I’d done it once with a Sunday school friend and our bow and arrows. We figured we’d shoot fish and live in a lean-to. Then it got dark and we were lost, and were grounded when we were taken back home. Well, I wasn’t going home this time, or to jail, or back to the city into some institutional job.
The notches were too big half the time and the logs rocked loosely. I had crappy, second hand tools, dull with split handles. I was making a mess of the woods, limbs laying everywhere. I wanted to run some days, quit and go back in time to when things were easy. Then I’d think of Smitty, my old wrestling coach, hear him yelling “who the hell do you think you are, candy-ass! Born with a silver spoon in your mouth, get up off your sorry ass and move!” And another tree would fall, another swarm of negative thoughts were momentarily shooed away.
As the cabin grew taller, the logs became thinner, according to how much I could lift above my head, and at eight feet high, we called it quits. Within eleven days we had built an 18 x 12 foot aspen wood cabin (inside dimensions 10 x 16), and, minus the floor and roof, we were ready to move in. We’d grown tired of driving back and forth to Allan’s cabin daily, despite the relief it provided from the bugs and rain; besides, the perfection of his work threw into dramatic relief, the primitive rawness of my own, and added even more seeds of doubt to my ample garden.
Each day we went to the building site we carried in more supplies: galvanized tub, buckets, rope, nails, tar-paper, tools, pots and pans, which we stashed under plastic tarps. Daily I'd drag log-slab planks I’d salvaged from the loft of a collapsed barn. These were the roof and floor. I laid sapling-stringers across the notched logs and nailed the planks over-top. We gathered tubs of moss from a boggy nook and used it to chink the space between the logs. Dark, tight, and crooked was this house that Jack and Jill built. With spears of light pouring through chinking on all sides, I stood and smiled wanly at our new home.
The sheet of plastic pulled over the roof did little to keep out the dampness, and my irritability intensified. My leather boots stayed damp, the woods were wet, and I was learning to hunt as well as manage to keep us warm with my smokey fires. One afternoon, after returning soaked from another unsuccessful trek through the dripping bush, I sat sullenly swallowing a soggy tuna fish sandwich. Rachel was screaming and Bunny was crying and I exploded, attacking her, then Rachel, then myself, then Bunny again, for her inability to keep Rachel quiet. I remember her face, jaw out-thrust, eyes blazing, yelling back at me, and I suddenly spit my tuna and bread into her face. The woods became silent. I had crossed another line, violated her dignity, done irreparable damage. No amount of apology could heal the insult to love. There was no sun to set on our wrath, and the distance between us did not diminish.
I sawed holes through the walls and inserted thin sheets of glass; hung, on harness-leather hinges, a warped, storybook door, salvaged from the same barn; rolled out the tar-paper, built a one-legged log-table, a one legged highchair, and a log bed. We were ready to cook but had no stove. I learned to shoot grouse and squirrels with a single-shot 410 shotgun, and we cooked them over a fire. Rachel ate mashed livers. Grouse and peanut butter, berries, beans and pan-bread were our staples till the snow fell.
We were now the third dwelling on the lake. Uncha Lodge stood at the head of the lake, and a large white summer-house, which we passed daily on our drive to the rock out cropping, housed a couple whom we waved to as we passed by. Our first visitors arrived unexpectedly one morning in a wagon pulled by a black horse. A slender, dark-skinned native boy was slashing away undergrowth, just ahead of the slowly rolling wagon. A heavy-set woman with weathered wrinkles and thick gray braids, grinned from the seat. She clicked the horse to a halt, and gesturing to a huge leather tub, explained they were gathering their winter berries. Several small children sat wide-eyed and quiet, staring at our squatter’s cabin on their homeland. I felt like I was part of an Edward Curtis photograph. Several days later they returned as silently as they had come, the tub heaped high with purple Saskatoon berries.
Dean Pulsifer was the spitting image of chairman Mytower, except he came bearing good will. Rain was still dripping from the branches when I opened the cabin door. He surveyed the inside as he introduced himself, then handed Bunny a tin of muffins his wife had baked for us. I softened. I had been expecting a visit, any day, from some official from the Dept. of Lands and Deeds at the Burn’s Lake office. I had not followed their red tape protocols religiously, but I had researched the lakeshore lots, ascertained that ours was not claimed, had done a rough survey by locating the corner-pins, measuring the 100 x 300 foot dimensions, placing my claim, and moving onto the section. I had not waited the required two years they deemed necessary for a “thorough claim’s search”, nor had I waited for their surveyor to set the legal wheels in motion. I had done what several locals and rangers had suggested others had done for hundreds of years: I had squatted; I was a squatter with squatter’s rights.
“So I have this little lap-strake rowboat” Dean was saying, “and a tree fell on it during a windstorm. You know how those aspens and cottonwoods go all dowdy and soft,” casting a canny eye around the walls of the cabin, “don’t hold up well, so nobody builds with’m usually. But anyway, it put a crack right across the hull of the boat, split the supports and loosened the lap-strakes. But if a fellow run a cable through a couple eye-hooks, the hull’d be tight enough to hold together, and then maybe slap on a bit of tar between the seams, she’d hold up a few more seasons. Might be handy to have a little boat, living here on the lake. Drop by if you’re interested.” He became my next teacher, in a checkered Woolrich shirt, suspenders, bent back, woodsy words and neighborly ways.
Dean waved from the white house the next time we returned from one of our supply runs in Burn’s Lake. We were becoming recognizable new-comers, our long hair and tattered clothes a topic of covert discussion on the small ferry over to town, and at the hardware store, the liquor store. We were seen at the unloading platform behind the Overwaitea store, where the flats of bruised or soft fruits and vegetables were discarded every Friday afternoon, sorting through apricots and lettuce. We were them hippies from down south that folks had heard (not yet seen) so much about. We were outsiders, around whom rumors could be spun. We were mythical.
Dean and Vera’s kids were our age, grown and gone back to Dakota, back to the city. Vera loved to hold Rachel and chat with Bunny over tea. Dean walked me around his winter wood-piles, split, stacked, drying under tarps.
“I guess you know a cord of wood measures 4’ x 4’x 8’, eh?”
“Well, no, not exactly. I actually didn’t.”
“An as the temperature here on the lake can drop down to 50 below, accounting for the chill factor from the steady wind off the lake, a fellow might want to have a at least ten cords of good dry wood on hand to get through till snow melt in April. Course that includes heating wood and cooking wood. Do you have a chainsaw?”`
“No, I don’t want one. They’re loud and expensive. Besides, they’re part of the society I’m leaving behind. It’s all like a giant American umbilical cord; if I take part of it, I feel I’m sanctioning all of it, including American invasion and domination of other countries. We’re sticking to the two-man saw.”
“Yes, mm-hmm. Well then, I guess you oughta get started because you only have about three months to get it all in, before the first snow flies. Did you figure how to get stoves down there into your cabin yet?”
“I’ve been thinking about building a wheelbarrow. I don’t know yet.”
Dean walked me down to the lake-front and out to the end of his dock. The bulky old lap-strake boat was tethered to the back of his aluminum outboard. A steel cable had been tightly strung across the bow, and a can of tar sat in a puddle of water slowly oozing through the cracks.
“Hop in. We’ll tow’r up to your place. Once she’s tightened up, you oughta be able to haul all manner of things to your cabin. Much shorter by water.”
And she did haul, and tow, and leak, and float. Into coves where driftwood logs had blown up into tangled piles, across the windy choppy lake, pulling a primitive necklace of rope and spikes, forming up a boom of salvaged logs. Broad in the hull and deep, we balanced a second-hand wood stove precariously, and staying close to the shoreline, poled her to our landing, levered the stove up the bank, and rolled her home. Nothing quite like the smell and taste of fresh baked bread straight from the oven. Next, a rusty cast-iron upright heater; was this my old Frostburg stove? Deja-vu. And the damp green wood stacked up as the leaves turned gold and the lake water chilled.
We needed milk for Rachel so in October we bought our first goat. A herd of 50 white and striped nannies, chased by a shaggy, piss-strong Billy, were bleating and prancing in a mad goaty circle, as the foxy farmer led me to a $20 milker that he promised would give us more milk than we could use (taking a nip from a mickey in his coat-pocket). Yes sir; Mariah, her name’s Mariah. He shoved the wild-eyed goat into our backseat, where she promptly opened the aperture of her anus and deposited dozens of steaming m & m shaped pellets. She brayed so loudly as we boarded the ferry that people craned their heads around, and the smirking ferry crew had an instant shipment of new rumor material to spin into tales for weeks to come. As we clanked across the metal loading platform, Mariah squatted and let loose a torrent of steaming piss onto the seat, and the ferry winked to the sky.
Mariah had an infection in her teat, making it too painful to be touched. The other teat, which the farmer had used, yielded six or eight thick streams then stopped. Her udder was practically dry. She had arthritis in her knees and by late November I had to carry her from the shed to her milking stanchion. I had to shoot her in January and we ate her. The farmer replaced Mariah with Hosanna but because her shed was too cold she, too, stopped giving milk. She enjoyed tearing tarpaper from our roof, or moss chinking from between the logs. Hosanna was my next northern instructor; the goat’s specialty was patience. The goats stamped their muddy cloven hooves into the milk, jumped my fences and crashed into the cabin, running off with socks and diapers, which they apparently found quite tasty. They broke into the grain shed and ate until they were bloated and nearly died. They held back their milk unless they were given double portions. With their beautiful golden rectangular pupils and their telepathic intuitions, I came to think of them as the devil’s own daughters, yet they were cheaper than a cow.
By early December, snow covered the hills, the grouse were gone, the lake was frozen, and we were set for our first winter in the woods. Six old chickens that laid barely three eggs a week, a milkless goat, and a coyote pup given to us by a native friend were our companions. A grain-grinder and a hundred pound sack of wheat berries was our bread; a fifty pound bucket of peanut butter, big bags of beans and rice were our staples. The monthly government child-allowance check of six dollars was our sole source of income. Although I had managed to drag nearly ten cords of firewood into stacks, we were uneducated about the difference between seasoned dry hardwood, and green, damp softwood. The winter, our most ruthless headmaster, would soon teach us about cold.
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