I am so keen on living off-the-grid that I confess to proselytizing and preaching now and then.  One could even assert that this blog is trying to start the new back-to-the-land movement or at least cheering from the haywagon, as it were.  I write to attract readers and I attract readers to come live this way.  I am kind of like ‘wooing’ in a way.

It’s true.  I know it, anyway.  You probably haven’t noticed but now and again, if not a whole bunch too often,  I wax rhapsodic about rural living, the forest, the sea, blah, blah, blah.  Ravens.  Clams.  Whatever.  It can get a bit sickening, I am sure, so I try to keep the boosterism to a dull roar when I become aware of the tendency.  But I know that I mostly fail to keep it very subtle and I must occasionally come across like a beginning realtor in a cheap suburb.

I am sorry about that………………a bit.  Not too sorry.  Well, not very sorry at all, really.

There are several reasons I promote this way of life, the most prominent of which is that I am sincere and I believe it and I want to share with others.  I am a sweetheart, I am NOT a realtor.  But there are also a few other reasons and I thought I should expose all my agendas, you know, so as to be pure-of-heart as well as sweet.

A second reason for recommending a cottage to visit (putting a delicate spin on it…I could say a place to ‘hunker down’ or ‘hole up’) is that I have and have had a sense that the system is breaking down and that being in the city will cause my friends and readers extreme hardship in the coming years.  In other words, I think you are all pretty much doomed.  Mind you, in the words of a journalist from the Georgia Straight writing about recent problems,  I am clearly not alone in that.

“Am I the only one that sees all this as a great opportunity to move to the woods and live the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle? Maybe I’m deluded, but I’ve kind of been waiting for this my whole life.  It takes one hell of a lot of brain activity and luck to make modern urbanism work, spiritually. Let the hemorrhage begin!”  Pietra Woolley

I also simply expected more of an exodus.  A naturally occurring one.  I really did.  Frankly, I still expect it and I think you are all just procrastinating.

One reason for that is that, historically, older people seem to gravitate to cottages.  It’s a natural-aging kinda thing.  Like golf and gardening.  Ya, know?  So, like, don’t you guys think you are getting old? Are you in denial about this?  Is that it?  Is it the yoga, the plastic surgeon and the viagra that is holding things up (in more ways than one)?  Where are the typical ‘going-to-the-cottage’ types?

Another reason – and I know this sounds a bit egocentric – but what has, in the past interested me, seems to have also interested a majority or a significant number of others.  Much to my horror, I have come to accept that I am not unique in the least and that, in fact, I could be the poster boy for Stats Can’s average man.  Advertisers could save a helluva lot of effort simply by following me around.  What I do is manifest mainstream living.  I am average.  I am the average Canadian.  I am Canada.  Well, I am baby-boomer Canada, anyway.

So, if I like it, shouldn’t everyone be doing it?  I mean, really?  If I am only half as average as I think, doesn’t that still translate into a rural-living boom?  Shouldn’t solar panels be flying off the shelf at the very least?  Are we the only ones with walkie-talkies that actually get used?  Doesn’t everyone compost nowadays?

‘Cmon!  We had four TVs when we lived in Tsawwassen.  Now: none.  We took several newspapers.  Now: none.  Three cars: now one.  We ate processed cheese, for God’s sake!  Now: well, I don’t know from cheese but you get my drift.  We not only moved but we moved on. The world is changing and we went green and rural and I thought others would, too.  Seems the vast majority are going ‘condo’ instead.

I am shocked.

My friend Bill moved.  He’s on a southern Gulf Island.  That’s one who saw the light.  And a whole lotta people were out here already (the earlier cutting edge).  So, I know that it is an attractive alternative lifestyle.  But I hafta admit that there are only a few escaping the city and most often as just a means to get a summer cottage to supplement their several other homes in London, Paris and Vancouver.  The homesteader of limited means is nowhere to be seen.  Hell, the lower-middle income worker getting economically killed in the burbs isn’t showing up either.  And the youth?  Most of them are flipping burgers and playing X-box.  In town!  Those who seem to be ‘getting it’ are gazillionaires and/or are really just wealthy retirees getting a part-time retreat.  The advent of the exodus-of-the-aware-and-scared just isn’t happening.

Mind you, David Suzuki lives out here.  I am pretty sure that he knows something………..

I guess, in the end, it doesn’t matter.  Home is where the heart is.  And, if most people feel at home in the city, that’s just fine.  It’s a nice place to visit and an even nicer place for us to have friends to stay with.

So, anybody buying bullets?