From the Vault

Historical Reporter (image)

Mother Knows Best (image)

Sports Reporter (image)

Surfing is Surfing:
an essay on Grant Shilling
by Clayton Webb

We Don't Care What You Say

Growth Rings

Babes in the Woods

Exile off Main Street

Kids & Play & Adults

Squeegee People, Vulture Culture & Cars

Survival of the Fittest

True Crimes

Copper Ann

Bodysurfing, Travel & the Dead

Haunted Houses

Rock & Roll Road Kill, Kill, Kill!

Storage Locker

Searching for the Originals
by Hal Niedzviecki

Excerpt from the Penguin Canada Book Hello I'm Special by Hal Niedzviecki.

"I came here to write and lead a private life," retired novelist Jane Rule wryly notes about her life on another one of the Gulf Coast islands. "But gradually you get involved in the community." So it is with many of the rustic loners who come - as they still do - to the cluster of islands mere hours from the bustling metropolis of big city Vancouver searching for escape and a less acquisitive version of the good life. So it goes on my own trip through the Gulf Islands of British Columbia - I came to find the last rebels, the genuine individuals clinging to their revolutions. But, gradually, I realized that what I was looking for no longer existed. Even tenacious individualists like Jane Rule are eventually consumed by what is going on around them, the necessary strictures of socialization in a world where solitary physical and mental spaces are increasingly difficult to come by.

Jane Rule lives on Galliano Island. It's a lush verdant blob of green with two restaurants, a post-office and a healthy resentment directed at those land owners who want the right to clear swatches of their lots and put up giant vacation homes. She is as unique a person as you'll find on this earth, and yet she shares with many residents of these British Columbia islands the conflicting urges that are coming to define rustic life in the 21st century. On the one hand, there is the urge to escape, to find a spot where no one knows or cares who you are, and disappear. On the other hand, there is the growing realization that such spots are increasingly endangered, swooped up like mice in the talons of rich absentee owners who rarely find the time to visit, or suddenly legislated and governed as parsimoniously and ignorantly as many of our most crowded cities. You come to escape and be on your own, but you eventually discover that all the threats to your escape necessitate working together with your neighbours. In such circumstances, disappearing may no longer be possible.

I am cruising the islands with Grant Shilling, at the time editor, along with his partner Mary Alice, of the Gulf Islands Gazette, aka The GIG (now, sadly, defunct). Ostensibly, we are delivering the GIG to its far flung empire of islands - large and small, friendly and standoffish. But just as importantly, this is Grant's time to reconnect to his world, drop in on old friends (some of them, literally aged, but all sharp as the axes they once used to carve enclaves for themselves out of the rainy forest). These bi-monthly delivery trips are also an opportunity for Grant to pursue his passion: surfing the west coast. His book about riding the waves in BC, the Cedar Surf, is soon to be published. For Grant, surfing is another way to get closer to a region he loves for the way it beckons him, part salvation, part responsibility. In his early forties, Grant is the weather beaten, muscle bound, six foot plus slow drawling epitome of the islander. But dig a little deeper and you'll find that, like most people living on these islands, Grant is not exactly what he seems to be. He is, in fact, as unlikely a Jew from the Toronto suburbs as you will ever come across. He made his way from the East to Vancouver and finally to the islands, where he fell in love with the land and, though he wouldn't necessarily admit it, maybe even the people. From his year long stint living hermit-like on a tiny island off the small coastal town of Tofino, to his tenure on Galliano island working odd jobs, to his current set-up in a cottage on a hill overlooking the bay leading into the smaller of Salt Spring Island's three ports, Grant has sought and wrestled with the twin demons: escape and community; freedom and entrapment.

As we drive and ferry from Vancouver Island's Fanny Bay to lush Hornby Island, Grant introduces me to the characters and figures that make this unique and beautiful region more than just another tourist destination. These are the people I've come to meet. Like Grant they are the true individualists, rebels who refuse to conform to any notion, whether that's of conformity or originality. Like Grant, they are wrestling with the reality of the New Conformity, struggling to preserve a sense of unique identity in an age when the rebel - especially the rebel - is as ubiquitous and prepacked as they come.

In Fanny Bay, a small outpost on the coast of the large Vancouver Island with the feel of a suburb, we drop in on George Sawchuck, a grizzled former logger. Sawchuck is famed for having converted the woods behind his house into a giant sculpture garden replete with glorious wood carvings all done by his own hand. When the province tried to stop Sawchuck's designs on their land, local pressure forced them to back off. The sculpture garden remains. German backpackers and neighbourhood kids stop by, the tourists pausing in George's garage studio, the kids looking for a handout of George's famous home-baked cookies. George takes us into the studio, shows us a tree stump with a tap protruding. Above the tap, a clock methodically ticks off the seconds. The message is clear: how much longer can we keep abusing the planet?

George spent his younger years as a logger and he's pretty much done it all, including a solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which he has now come to regret. "Worst of all," he says, "you become an artist. Better to remain an individual." As he grows older, Sawchuck has become more and more interested - even obsessed - with this idea of remaining true to yourself at all costs. Once, a gallery exhibiting his work asked him for an artist's statement. In a short missive, Sawchuck wrote: "I do what I do not because I want to be some sort of hero for the underculture, but to survive as an individual with an identity. People often ask why do all this, the answer I give is 'what does one do when you are too old to work and too young to die?' It is a nice way to fill in the interim."

George is serious - not glib. In an age when people increasingly seem to be floating through life, awaiting death in tastefully decorated prisons, he reacts the only way he knows how: by continuing to assert his primal existence, the stuff of his life, that which makes him want to survive: his identity as a singular unit. "We're losing our individuality today," he says. George puts artists right in the middle of what he calls "the cloning process." After badmouthing his show at the VAG, he speaks vehemently about the art world: "You become a hero, you're in a circle, you're not an individual anymore, artists talk and get together, they become part of the pot of stew."

But, isn't their any way to be an individual and an artist? George describes the local college's art show. "I viewed the show, I looked around and it was shameful, there's nothing there. You can't blame the students, 90% of them have never missed a meal, been cold, slept on the ground, never had any real life experiences, never bled. So how can you expect them to have any real material?"

The same could be said for a lot of the citizens of Western countries. We've never gone hungry. We've never suffered. Does that mean we can't be real, we can't have something to say?

"When I lecture I say, don't think you're going to go out in the real world with your brushes and chisels. Go out into the world, live and suffer a little then if it takes ten years or whatever, you go back - I tell them now that you made the escape from the womb don't just go crawling into another one."

Eschewing the life of the artist, George no longer sells his work. "All my sculptures go to the camp out back." George prefers to live on his pension and his disability payments. But even George has not been totally able to avoid the trap of consumerism and contradiction. He was featured in an ad campaign for a long distance company. The campaign appeared all over the province in billboards, newspapers, and on television. "They drove up in a fancy German car, yuppie types, but nice guys. They took a lot of pictures. Then they came back and they stayed around all weekend. I was never so happy to see them leave. I told them I hate corporations and I hate telephones and they said, 'That's alright George, just don't say it on camera.' Centerfold in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Vancouver Sun, 60 different newspapers. I'm not selling telephones, never once do I say the world telephone. They came back and gave me a couple of thousand dollars. People say I sold out and I say maybe I have but I've got enough to pay my bill for two years and you've got to pay your bill out of your pocket."

Why did the phone company look to George? The Telus ad features George staring out at passerbys. A caption says, "Sing your own song George." Over George's mussed hair, a single word: "Original".

Can a straight talking logger with socialist sensibilities who reinvented himself as an artist shill long distance without being compromised? Perhaps that's what true individuality is all about these days - an ability to shift and change and take advantage of circumstance without abandoning a core truth and confidence. While we visited George, he mused on what piece to send to a local gallery that claimed to be putting on a show meant to challenge conventional sensibilities. George is considering a piece he's been sculpting: a bible with a knife stuck in it.

Few can force themselves to suffer. We can't chose to leave home still a boy, wander the backwoods, work as a logger in the days when logging meant heading off to the forest and cutting down trees by hand, a dangerous business, you could easily lose a life or a leg. Maybe that's why most of today's painters, writers, and creators seem to lack gravitas, seem to be complaining just for something to do, just because it's the next move in playing the game. Is that what we're doing? Playing an elaborate game? George has a moral certainty that suggests he refuses to play the game. Things have gone wrong with the world, but Sawchuck remains stalwart. He survived the north woods of interior British Columbia, he'll bloody well survive the Vancouver Art Gallery and phone company. Selling out would have been capitalizing on the billboard ads to promote his image and his work. George didn't do that.

Walking Forward Backward

Instead, George responded to potential fame by retreating. For a lot of the people I meet in these parts, the answer has been escape. Rebellion becomes not doing something. This is most certainly because when everyone is a rebel, refusing to conform to pseudo-rebellion seems to be one of the few ways we can actually step outside the system. In the age of the New Conformity, of the pseudo individual, of the serial killer celeb, can there be genuine dissent? If individualism has become a conformity, than how can we assert the opinions our true unique selves without evoking the cliche of special and buying into the psuedo-extremes of pop culture sensationalism? If George Sawchuck is deemed fit for a long distance commercial, who has not been drawn into the drama of that mass dispensed oxymoron, semi-specialness? If even extreme acts of violence now seem de rigeur and made for TV, then what act could convey genuine dissent, true individuality? As we drive through the Gulf islands and then backtrack across the twisting mountain road from Fanny Bay to the burgeoning resort town of Tofino on the other side of Vancouver Island, I stare out at the gorgeous fog dipped landscape - complete, at times, with clear-cuts as dramatic as swatches of giant firs - and keep coming back to this question: If everything is allowed, if everyone is special, if conformity and individuality are equally encompassed into the system of power nodes that consumes and regurgitates all human activity as a form of (pop) product, then is genuine individual identity essentially doomed?

George Sawchuck tells us that to establish identity and have something to put on the blank canvass we all imagine filling, we have to first get out into the world and suffer. But today, there's precious little bush to adventure into. College kids sign up for tree-planting, a 3 month stint in horse fly country, and come back to their parent's comfortable manses acting as if they'd just parachuted into Baghdad on a solo mission to steal Saddam Hussein's favourite cravat. True escape requires more extreme measures. While Grant routinely accelerates the teetering van into steep blind curves, he tells me about the year he spent on an all but deserted island off the coast of the small resort town of Tofino. He survived on rice and mussels he collected from the shore. He smoked a lot of pot. There was another squatter on the other side of his island, and every month or so, they met up at one of their camps. With no rent and nothing to buy, the days passed slowly. It was quiet. Very quiet. "I still can't look at mussels," Grant says.

From Sawchuck's perspective, Grant earned his stripes, his right to write about the grizzled elders like Jane Rule who came to these islands in the Sixties and Seventies without a plan or a safety net, without a down-payment on a luxury cottage with a view of the coast and no fewer than five sun-roofs, guaranteed. And it's true. Like Sawchuck's evocation of art as a way to continue to assert primal identity, Grant's journey was no mere cliche of adventure, but a search for something different, for a way into the centre of a single human being's nature, sprung from the trap of society and mass culture.

There are few deserted islands left to colonize. The Gulf islands were once full of hippy squatters living under tarps in the trees. Today, the former-hippy residents, now comfortably ensconced, grumble equally about the kids draped in tie-die sheets who stagger half- dead into town looking for handouts, and the rich foreigners who tear down modest cottages to build up huge vacation mansions they rarely visit. "Humanity can no longer escape from itself and its doings," notes Thomas Homer-Dixon in his Ingenuity Gap. "There was a time when the adventurous and pioneering could go to a new land, open a frontier, and try again...In the last few decades however, the global frontier has closed. There is nowhere new, untrammelled, and unexplored to go." [ingenuity gap,59-60]

The idea of the land shrinking is not just a metaphor for the shrinking opportunities we have to assert our identity. It is also a very literal phenomenon that I encounter repeatedly while travelling through the Gulf islands. On Hornby Island, we stop in on Jerry Pethick, another sculptor, but one who continues to be involved in the contemporary art scene. A giant robot figure made entirely of empty champagne bottles was recently exhibited overseas. An elaborate sculpture project for the city of Vancouver is underway. Jerry and his wife and son moved to Hornby in the early Seventies and spent their first two summers living in a cave. Today, his children grown, Jerry and his wife reside in a sprawling series of shack-like cottages all connected by a weathered wood boardwalk. He built the complex himself. Over a lunch of cheese and bread and homemade preserves, Jerry talks about being visited recently by a provincial compliance offer telling him about changes to the laws regarding construction. Now, Jerry complains, they say you need insurance to guarantee construction, and you have to register with the province, for a fee of course. This effectively drums out the island tradition of slowly building your own home, or casually contracting out your services to erect a home for someone else. DIY replaced by costly professionals. If Jerry was moving to Hornby today, his method of building up a homestead and studio one shack at a time would be illegal. "All you can do is fight it," he says, shaking his head. Jerry thinks that you could still come to the islands and live in the woods, drop out of society. But he says that the kids today aren't prepared for the sacrifices, and they don't know how to subsist in the woods. He admits that the island is no longer the space it was -- cheap hippy haven providing refuge to artists and dropouts alike. "The island is aging," Jerry says sadly. "No young people are coming."

The Vancouver Island town of Tofino is meeting a similar fate brought about by opposite circumstances. It has moved from being an all but ignored low rent retreat on the far corner of the isolated coast of a huge island, to a world renowned scenic destination with resorts and vacation complexes and more on the way. With its organic foods co-ops, community bakeries and tiny tie-dye shirt shops, it exudes the superficial specialness that emerges when locality is superimposed on a region increasingly dependent on the displacements of tourism. Grant and I meet up with Ralph, an old pal of Grant's from his wilder years. Ralph is in his forties, an imposing figure with a big beard and thick black horn-rim glasses. His house sits on prime Tofino beach front real estate, and he's been living there on the cheap since 1979. He buried his father on the beach behind the house, and always believed that he would spend the rest of his life attuned to the slow rhythms of the Tofino tide. Lately, though, he's begun to reconsider. He feels oppressed by the commercialization he's witnessed over the last five years. We sip coffee and he talks menacingly -- though jokingly -- about "a terror campaign against the out-of-towners." Ralph muses out loud about what it might look like. "Bullets through windows, emptying their gas tanks, stickers on their doors saying 'Go Home.' " Recently, Ralph was offered almost half a million dollars for his land. He talks about how the pressure to sell out and move somewhere cheaper is decaying the community. If all the residents decamp to make way for rich absentee owners, what will be left of the town he once knew? Ralph has never really had a steady job and works intermittently as a painter, builder and jack of all trades. His most recent venture is a plan to cash in on the tourist market and open a surf shop. Why would he cater to the tourists he hates? Ralph admits that his need to feel part of his community on an ongoing basis is stronger than his disgust for "out of towners." If he's not going to sell out, he needs to assert his place in what's left of the town in some other way. In that respect, his decision to open the surf shop is not unlike George Sawchuck's decision to become a sculptor: both are rebels seeking ways to cling to what they see as genuine individuality, recognition that comes not from reinventing one's narrative via ever more extreme antics but from sticking to one's hard fought principles; neither are motivated by finances, but, rather, by the pressing and ever more difficult desire to assert identity and presence. Angry and sarcastic, Ralph still wants to hold on to the diminishing sense that he lives in a place where he is recognized, where people know who he is and what he is about. "I feel ridiculous," he says, "living a white trash lifestyle in a house worth half-a-million dollars." Ralph finishes his coffee and tells us a final story: "When I was in England," he says, "I went into this small pub in a tiny village and all the old men in there said, 'Fuck off, we don't want you here. The tourists and the young kids go to the other pub in the next village and that's the way we like it.' Now if we in Tofino had done that since day one, we would have been alright."

In an age of regulation and restriction, of displacement and anonymity, even the denizens of the farthest outposts suffer and struggle with diminished opportunities for the articulation of the kind of individuality that comes naturally from having a place in a community. It's dying out on Hornby Island, and it's dying out in Tofino, though both Ralph and Jerry cling to the circumstances that made them who they are. Leaving Ralph and heading out to one of Tofino's gorgeous beaches, Grant tells me about his own reservations: He hates the built-up Salt Spring and longs for Galliano Island, the much smaller and less developed island he and Mary recently left. But, as the Lasquedi diner proprietor Karen noted, Salt Spring has more opportunities for those who need to make a living. Once, Shilling thought he could disappear, live off the land. But as the land shrinks, even this garrulous unlikely figure found himself pulled into compromise. "The world has separated from individuals," writes Keith Tester in Moral Cuture. "And it has experientially become increasingly like a seamless web of overlapping institutions with an independent existence. These institutions together seem to cover the whole world and all possibilities and opportunities within it, leaving individuals with the choice of either accommodation...or exit."

Back on the other side of Vancouver Island, on our way back to one of the ferry gateways that will return us to the tiny Gulf Islands, we're passing a surprisingly crowded strip mall: A&W, Boston Pizza, Cactus Club. We could be anywhere. Grant presses down on the gas, eager to escape to the long cedars and empty beaches flanked by monster vacation homes or tiny artist shacks.


For More info on Hello I'm Special by Hal Niedzviecki check out www.smellit.ca and www.helloimspecial.com. Special thanks to Hal for use of the excerpt.