In theory, the rot was always there – inherent malcontentism.  It’s part of me.  But as mentioned two blogs ago, most of that irritation with the status quo was fairly well controlled or, at least, veiled in a grey or blue suit and tie with accompanying car, martini glass and house in the cul de sac.  I was languishing at best, aggravated at worst but swaddled in comfort and I took refuge in golf when it got really bad.

I began to play a lot of golf.   

But there’s always a tipping or flash point.  And for me, it came after we had taken the kids out of school early in 1999, spent a few summer months on the road traveling and seeing the bigger world and then, turning home just a bit late to catch the first few days of next-term school…………I remember that moment well:

“Well familia, we’re just coming up to the intersection with the I5 and I will have to turn right to get to Vancouver.  We are definitely on the last leg of this trip!  I am sorry to see it end…………………………..hey!  Why end it!?  Why don’t I just turn left instead and we can go kill a few months in Mexico.  You kids might even learn a bit of Spanish and at least we’d eventually get home with a tan.  It would be extra good to walk into school on January 1st with a tan, eh?”

Sally nodded an enthusiastic agreement with the spontaneous change of plans, her smile beaming brighter.  I had one vote in the affirmative at least.

Seems the kids had other ideas.  Are you crazy!?  What is wrong with you two!?  We have lives, you know.  We have to get an education.  Where is your sense of responsibility?   What kind of parents are you?  You just can’t take kids out of school, you know.  They’ll report you.  Hell, we’ll report you!”   

I didn’t give up easily.  “Look, you guys are smart enough to catch up on the drivel they teach you.  Read a few books and you are ahead of the game.  Read some classics and you’ve improved on it.  You don’t need no stinkin’ school.  You guys will do just fine.  And, anyway, what has your high school ever done for you?  Don’t you think it’s high time to live life to the fullest instead of vegetating in some stupid classroom like the lobotimized sheeple that are your teachers and peers?  Do you want to become just another brick in the wall? Da da dumm!” (I was humming Pink Floyd at the time)

They would have none of it.  “Look!  Just turn right.  Turn right, right now or I’ll phone the cops on you.  Nobody wants to see two old hippies in an American jail, now, do we? Just give it up you old coots and nobody’ll get hurt.  Now turn right!”  

Emily brandished her cell phone as she spoke and I knew that she wasn’t bluffing.  I turned right.  But it was just another nail in my urban coffin.  I could hear the faint rattle of my premature death getting a smidge louder.  This conventionality was going to be the death of me.  It had already taken my kids.  Screw them!  I gotta get out!

From that day on, I could not wholly commit to the cul de sac, good manners, the work ethic or even, for a period of time, to good grooming and returning my calls promptly.  I didn’t realize it at the time but these are the signs of rebellion, modest as they may be.  When the lawn grew way too high, I could see the writing on the wall.     

A couple of years of discomfort in the sac ensued.  I was unhappy just being there.  I hated cleaning the pool (before, it was like a Zen-thing, ya know?).  Golf was not enough.  I was beginning to rebel in other ways, too.  But, at what?  Where was the cause for the resistance?  I had no idea what was wrong just that it was wrong, wrong, horribly wrong and I was starting to see myself as roadkill on the highway of life.

Actually, I was starting to think I might try my hand at writing and it was sentences like that last one that fed the fantasy.

Plus, Emily, at 17, (bless her beautiful little heart) won a scholarship to York University in Toronto and wanted to go.  The voice that forbade my escape to Mexico just a few years prior was now arguing for a parental permission slip to head East.  It was not hard to say YES!!  A thousand Yes’s on you, blessed child!  Away with thee!”  

Ben had already settled in Victoria at UVic and, with Em’s departure, there was nothing holding me back.

Freedom, Freeeeeedddoooommmmmmmmmmm, F-R-E-E-D-O-M!!!!! (Richie Havens)

“Not so fast, big boy!”

Sally had worked her way up the management hierarchy at the WCB (read: managed to get herself jammed into the gearbox from Hell) and wasn’t so eager to flee the scene.  Not so soon, anyway.  There were meetings to attend, re-orgs to implement, draft proposals to vet and a zillion things to do that meant nothing to anyone.  Heady days for her.  Hard to resist the temptations of Dilbert.  And, quite humbly, that driest, most boring, most useless waste of time on the planet seemed too have more appeal than did I.  She had a briefcase and she wanted to use it.  I had to shut up and bide my time.

I was a patient rebel with a working wife and no real cause from which to argue. I started to fix dinners and even put on the laundry a few times (Sal quickly put a stop to that after things went a bit awry).  How pathetic is that!?   

It was a hard time for me and it became impossible without the salve of scavenging to keep me focused and happy.  I began to haunt junkyards and garage sales, second-hand stores and auctions, scrap metal dealers and crazy, whacked-out collectors of junk and debris that, somehow, I felt a kinship with, a bonding-thing.   We were brothers in this amorphous blob of a rebellion and even though we didn’t know why, we recognized each other.  I made not just a few very weird friends.


“Watch your back, ol’ buddy!” They’d say.  “Stay locked and loaded.” I’d counter.

I really should get a gun.   

I was beginning to relate closely to the old, completely mute geek in Ladner whose backyard was filled with great junk like 64 sft plate glass slabs one inch thick, large S/S barrels, old hand-logging paraphernalia and various motors and gearboxes, tools, gizmos and all sorts of great stuff.  He did not discriminate in any way. The guy knew something.  He was like a junkyard Yoda.  I didn’t know what it was but I wanted that knowledge.  I wanted the force.  I kept at my training……………whatever it was for.    

Pretty soon I was doing some serious collecting of my own.  The garage was full of large steel things, old greasy tools and boxes of weird stuff that promised to be of crucial importance at some not-so-distant future.  I frequented Popeye’s almost every week.  It is a marine second hand shop.  I was also a regular frequenter of BC Hydro’s salvage department.  I got some great stuff.  Even greater stories.

Bunch o’ crazies attend Popeye’s and BC Hydro so watch yer back, bro! 

But here I have to stop and remind the reader that all of this was happening at an almost unconscious level.  I had no idea that I was going to build a cabin in the woods.  I had no idea I was going to go off-grid.  I was really just giving vent to a weird urge.  Honest.

OK, not-quite-so-honest.  Somewhere along the line, maybe half way through this collection fetish, I started to visualize building stuff.  And the inspiration for that was Mother Earth News.

For some unfathomable reason, I googled Mother Earth News sometime around the year 2000.  They had forums.  I joined.  Over the next five years I was to meet all sorts of personalities from NRA freaks to dreamers, from urban roof-top gardeners to Old Order Mennonites (OOMs) in remote enclaves.  I met ranchers, poor people in rural Mississippi, long distance truckers, farmer’s wives and lonely old hermits.  And we talked about ‘getting out’ and living off the grid.  I had a community. 

And so that was another part of the answer to your question…………..

“Stop with the answering already.  I am not asking the question.  I do not need to know why a nut-bar goes nutty.  I just accept it!”

“Well, it helps to know the nut-bar’s motivation and inspiration.  And, anyway, I have to start this book in some way.  So just bear with me.  There’s more to come.”    

Temperature dropped last night.  Another threat to the water system which can best be met by draining the system.  So, I did.  No big deal. 

‘Course, I make it a big deal by choosing to wait until both Sally and I have had our showers and then, naked and with wet hair, I slip on my boots and (are you getting that picture?) trip under the house (across the slippery, bendy plank in the dark) to close and open valves, draining the water and shutting off the pump and water heater.  The exercise is pretty automatic now but it still takes about ten minutes.  The worst part is standing there in the below zero temperature waiting for the water to drain out.  Naked.

Every single time draining the system is undertaken, it is when it is dark, the temperature is freezing and every single time I do it, I take the expedient route of going naked.

Five minutes into the exercise I wonder (yes, every single time!), “Why the hell don’t I put something on before I come down here?”  While I am mulling over that particular glitch in my programming, the system drains and I return to the house only shivering slightly.  Of course, the best way to warm up is either standing in front of the woodstove or cuddling up with Sal. 

Which do you think I choose?

Honestly, the stupid things I do on a constant basis amazes even me.  I will not describe my use of the chainsaw.  It defies logic, safety and even the survival instinct and will eventually become clear to you when you visit me in hospital some day.  We really should book a time.  It is inevitable. 

It is not so much that I am stupid (although that is something to be considered but, obviously, not by the subject in question, right?) it is rather that I operate on an ‘exceptional’ modus operandi.  Meaning:  This in an exception………’Just this once……..I can run naked across the log, fetch the end of the rope and just ‘nip’ back to tie it up before the log rolls and spins me into the sea.  I am sure.  Pretty sure.  Well, let’s give it a try.  It is easier than going to get the pike pole.  It’ll just take a sec’.

When I was younger, that kind of ‘shortcut’ worked for me 9 times out of ten.  A little balance, a bit of timing, a dash of dare-devil and a dollop of luck and I was done!  Quick, easy and efficient.  The one time out of ten it did not work out rarely killed me (can’t think of a single time) and only resulted in some bleeding or bruising plus a slight embarrassment now and then.  It seemed like a fair trade or ‘rough trade’ as it were to get the job done quickly.

But this getting older syndrome eats into your balance and timing.  It is not as easy to leap from rock to rock or jump the gap or balance on one leg while hanging over a cliff trying to get a bolt in to granite with a slippery crescent wrench when you are post 60.  The odds have dropped.  I am now as likely to hurt myself as not.  I am no longer a safe 9 out of ten on NOT-likely-to-screw-up-scale, but more like a 5 out of ten or, for you math freaks: one out of two!  Those ain’t good odds.

I am really going to have to opt for the road less dangerous rather than the path of expedience or the shortcut of impatience.  Otherwise, I will become the man with few functions and even fewer digits and limbs.   I really have to smarten up.

Dressing warmly when it is freezing is a good place to try out this theory, I think.  I may just give it a try next time I drain the system.   

Why?  Because time is catching up with me and, if it does, it is likely to find me naked.

We can’t have that, now can we?    

This confession may come as a mild surprise: I am, by nature, a bit of a malcontent.  A whiner, if it must be stated out loud.  I believe this is somewhat surprising to anyone who knows me because I clearly have it ‘made in the shade’.  I am, without a doubt, the luckiest, happiest person I know living the best life in the world with the greatest partner to have ever walked the planet.  Our kids are perfect.  Even our stupid dogs are really pretty good (but they are still dogs!). 

So what’s to complain about?

Not so much, really, but discontent with life is not so much a fact-based condition as it is a personality quirk and I have it.  I am well acquainted with Churchill’s black dogs (I see the glass half empty) and I also particularly like change as a partial response to those black dogs.  I, therefor, don’t like the status quo by almost any definition.  And I don’t usually even like what is going on at any given time.  Ergo – I am a habitual malcontent.

Scotch helps. 

The key word in that self-admission, however, is ‘bit’.  I am a bit of a malcontent.  There is an element in my character that predetermines a minor but constant irritation or frustration with everything but, of course, that can be and has been largely controlled.  A great deal, if you must know.  And, for a long time.  All testosterone-infused men have had to do this to some extent if, for no other reason, than to get laid or have dinner (depending on age, whereabouts and with whom).  We are boiling cauldrons of rage.  Kinda.  In my case, more like a cuppa soup but, still, a rather hot cuppa soup.  At times, anyway.

I am, like most men, a testimony to willed-harmony-with-others-to-get-what-I-want.  I go along to get along.  One must try to get along, mustn’t one?

A couple of thousand years ago, I would simply have chopped off their heads instead.  That option still comes up now and then, if you must know, but it runs into the willed-harmony thing most of the time.  It would be so much easier to chop heads rather than learning to live happily within polite society but, in the long run, that is a recipe for ostracism and loneliness if not becoming prematurely bald myself.  I chose the easier dinner route. 

But, of course, there are some things that just ‘set me off’ despite my gargantuan will to contain-the-hot-soup.  There are some circumstances that I just can’t tolerate.  There is a state of being I have no choice but to reject decisively if not violently.  It seems that the one thing I just can’t handle is ‘polite society’ as it is taught, written, expected and promoted.  It just bugs me.  Ya know?

Just to illustrate by way of a small example: I hate town planners.  I hate the idea of town planning.  I can barely tolerate Official community plans, even.   Weird eh?  Don’t get me started on playground design, playground rules or even queueing at bus stops.  It took me years to accept the idea of stop signs and I am totally rejecting the idea of renewing driver’s licenses and passports every five years!  And that is just the beginning.  I could go on.     

Routine, order, rules-for-no-reason, authorities, even ‘professional organizations’, unions and overall societal expectations get under my skin but when any of that actually interferes with me, what I want, I get increasingly irritated.  When I have endured that irritation for any length of time, I get annoyed and frustrated to the point of acting out – a little, anyway.  Like writing a blog or a rant to the editor of the local newspaper.  And when I can’t seem to inject into life variety, creativity, spontaneity or even argument and debate-without-suppression, it is time for me to move on.

“Dave, where is this going?  I am starting to get irritated myself!”

Well, it is part of the answer to the question: “Why did you move off the grid?”

“I didn’t ask that question!” 

Somebody out there must have.

Anyway, it is not the entire answer by any means.  I will elaborate more on that later on (if anyone does, actually, ask the question) but it is part of the answer.  That minor discontent, that pea-under-the-mattress, that-burr-under-the-civil-saddle is just part of me and it has resulted in lots of different jobs, different careers, different lifestyles, different politics, different friends and now, for a completely different change of pace, a remote, off-the-grid-lifestyle that is unlike anything before.

Ooooohhhh………and that is just part of the answer!    

We pay taxes.  Everyone pays taxes.  We complain about them now and then – but not often.  Everyone complains now and then.  Taxes are annoying.  We hate taxes.  We especially hate taxes on second hand items.  To my mind, there is no rationale for taxing a second hand item.  It is ‘green’ to recycle and, more to the point: the government has already taken their ‘bite’ when the item left the shelf when new.  I hate taxes like that.

But, like I said above, I don’t usually complain.  Not often, anyway.  First it seems pointless.  It is like complaining about the weather.  There is nothing I can do about it so I try to ‘accept’ that which I cannot change.  I try to live by the “!%$##$%” Desiderata whenever I can.  “Gawd, give me the patience and the understanding…………..blah, blah, blah”.

But the main reason I don’t complain is because we get a tax-supported benefit that is invaluable.  We get a gift from the government that is to die for.  We swoon over this.  We love them for this alone (there is nothing else to even like them for).  I am talking about Books-by-mail.  It is the library for the alone, the remote, the isolated, the social pariah, the loner, the hermit and, well, us and the likes of us.

This how it works: we go online to the library and order a book.  It shows up on our screen with the expected wait time – not unlike going to your local library and putting your name on the list.  Typically, you wait a week or so for a ‘normal’ book that has been out for awhile and maybe as long as two months for a recent or popular one.  So long as you have enough books ‘on order’, you are generally well supplied with reading materials.  I go through a couple of books a week, sometimes more.  It is absolutely one of the best societal benefits I have ever experienced.

It may be the only reason I count myself amongst you. 

And yes, that statement remains true even when compared to health care.  ESPECIALLY when compared to health care and doubly so when compared to public education.  Best bang for my tax dollar?  No question – the library.

But not lately.  Lately, things have gone awry.  Two years ago the ‘old dear’ that was the library linchpin for the remote retired and they hired, in her stead, Isabelle Incompetent and her assistant Suzi So Stupid.  It is like being served by morons.

Ironic, don’t you think, to have idiot librarians?  I mean, if they can read, they should be able to package, address and mail.  Ya know?  Not true for our duo of dumb, our cuckoo couple, our tag team of twits, our librarian loons!  For the last 6 weeks, nada!  No books!  It is almost enough to make me listen to the CBC!

OK, I am exaggerating.  Nothing can make me listen to the CBC for more than the news.  And even then………….. (yesterday a ‘main’ news item was about a Quebecois film that is up for an Oscar in the foreign language category.  They hadn’t won or lost yet.  They were just nominated.  THIS is CBC news!)

“Well, Sharon, something might happen somewhere, but we are not sure.  This is Larry Flaccid reporting from a comfortable Vancouver office.  Canada lives here !”  

(whatever that means)

“Thank you, Larry, tee hee, ha ha, heh heh heh. 

They have recently taken to hiring fourteen year-olds who ‘laugh’ as they are talking.  You can ‘hear’ the grin in their voices which is punctuated at the end or the beginning of every sentence with a little ‘half-giggle’.   If there is a better way to announce to the world that you have suffered recent brain damage, I can’t imagine what it might be.

Our own Catherine Rolfsen (a local) is the exception, of course.  

OK, this may just be the ‘bush’ talking.  Seems one can get a little ‘bushed’ staying the whole winter up here.  People get a bit odd, it seems.  It’s a regular occurrence.

For them, tho, not me.

When most people in the city come to visit you, they bring a bottle of wine or, perhaps, a nice bouquet of flowers.  It has become somewhat traditional in polite society, I gather (Sally covers those bases for me, as a rule.  I just have to show up – a duty I am increasingly failing at ). 

People behave much the same way out here, of course, but the items presented at meeting vary more.  We have had wine and flowers, of course, and at least half the wine is home-made (Rieko’s is the best) and the flowers are usually in clusters and lumps and presented in plastic bags.  The point is to plant them not just vase them.  Vegetables come that way, too.   

A dozen eggs would not be unusual.  These would be your real free-range, home-grown, wandering-amongst-the-orchard-chickens we’re talking here.  Real chickens.  Real eggs.

Just as likely we’d get a few pounds of apples in the summer or a nice fish (sometimes salmon from the fishing guides) – had a few of those over the years.  Even had a few pounds of prawns from the commercial guys in trade for an apple pie.  And Judith once gave us (the dogs, really) a bunch of deer bones with plenty of meat and blood as a nice bonus. 

Books are naturally and freely exchanged but that is not so much hospitality as it is simply community consideration and, sometimes, a little not-so-subtle ‘influencing’.  We get books on issues dear to the heart of the giver.  The more ‘dear-to-the-heart’, the more of an obligation to read them.  Movies are equally as freely distributed.  In fact, one of the locals set up a lending library that boasts about a hundred or so titles.  We do the same with some clothes, too, if they are pretty much intact.

Naturally, hardware, boat items, bits and pieces and garage-sale-type items are also  exchanged and money is never involved although one can ‘carry the debt’ if the item given was pretty good. Mind you, there are exceptions to that, too.  For the Q-hut woodworking shop we have been given outright a lot of stuff from electrical supplies to tools, from the generator to the wood required for the workbench.  Most things are just gifts.        

There is a lot of give and take up here and no matter how hard you try to keep it square, it seems that there is always a lot more giving going on.  These are very generous people.

I have to say, though, that it would be hard to top our last ‘hostess’ gift.  It came from one of the Dougs.  Last week we were talking ‘pecker poles’, the long (thirty foot plus) logs that are essentially too small to mill.  They float out there amongst the bigger logs.  Typically, they are no more than eight to ten inches in diameter but I suppose one with the thick end at twelve inches would still qualify.  Pecker poles are used for posts when building small buildings like wood sheds and such.  I had mentioned the desire to ‘get me some’ of those ‘pecker poles’ some day.  Doug had mentioned that he goes pecker pole hunting all the time.  I mentioned that I’d join him some day.  And that was that.

Today, Doug dropped by with a nice, small bouquet of pecker poles in tow.  Four of them.  Smelled bee-yoo-tee-full, they did.  He stayed for a coffee and a visit and we talked boats for awhile and then off he went as Sal and I went upstream again to clear debris from the water pick up.

When was the last time someone dropped in with a nice bunch o’ logs for ya?  

There is off-the-grid and then there is OFF-the-grid………..ya know? 

No? 

No, I didn’t know that either.  Turns out that we (Sally and I and our neighbours, generally speaking) are ‘conventionally’ off the grid but there are quite a few sub-categories.  Some of them are whacko.

According to Nick Rosen, (www.off-grid.net) there are over 500,000 off-gridders in the US alone and the numbers are growing rapidly (15% a year).  He wrote a book about it.  Nick is a Brit and he says that there is a similar phenomena going on in Great Britain though, by dint of the density of the island, there are fewer living remote.

And in Canada, by dint of it’s size, there are likely more people OTG than in most first world countries.   

But then it gets interesting.  When I say ‘off-the-grid’, I generally mean that you are living too far away from conventional services to hook up to any.  Like us.  Like many rural Canadians.  But Nick includes those who are close enough to the grid but choose not to hook up (a minority), those who live on-the-grid but choose to prepare their house for the eventuality of the grid collapsing (a larger minority), a bunch who live partially off-the-grid (have a road and electricity but their own well and septic) and those who are ‘off-the-grid’ politically in that they have refused to file income taxes or have credit cards or phone numbers. 

There are also those who live in their car or RV (or boats!) but they are very dependent on the grid even if, technically, they are not permanently hooked up.  Some are criminals and some live as if they were – on the lam and off-the-watched-and-tracked-grid.  Then, of course, there are the homeless.  And there are the ones who are simply ‘flying under everyone’s radar’ (couch surfers, house-sitters, etc.).  By most categories that he employs, we are pretty damn straight. 

But even amongst those of us who live off-the-grid because we simply choose to, there are sub-categories.  Some are rich (Leonardo de Caprio has an island as do a few other celebrities like Johnny Depp).  Michelle Pfieffer lives not far from us!  Virtually all of those living on Stuart Island just North of us fall into the rich-but-not-celebrity niche of O-T-G’s. 

There are the religious ones (Waco, the Amish, Bountiful).  There are the ‘survivalists’.  There are ‘freedom seekers’.  Many are poor (squatters, etc.) and many are ‘minimalists’ trying to live within their means but not so much in poverty.  We like to think of ourselves in that category despite some obvious signs of slipping.  

Then there are the ‘ostracized’ and we have some of them but mostly our ‘O’-people chose first to go rather than get pushed (we like to think of ourselves in that category, too).  But he describes the mad, the traumatized and the deviant as amongst the ‘O’ people too.  Ours are just eccentric. 

We hope. 

I guess what I am saying is this: you can be off-the-grid while living in Burnaby.  You can do it be buying an island or a piece of forest somewhere.  You can do it by living in an RV or in a cardboard box.  Some are off-the-grid because they were pushed and some are off the grid because they went willingly and still a lot of people simply just aspire to it.  It seems there are a number of ways to check out of the system and, quite extraordinarily, many are making that choice.   Or are planning it.

Wild, eh? 

………’cause I never wrote it up. But this took place last year.

I was planning on renovating the old Q-hut but didn’t really know what I was doing so I asked one of the Dougs to walk up there with me and look the situation over. 

Doug is a ‘let’s-get-ér-done’-kind-of-guy’ but he doesn’t usually wait long for others to come along.  He just get’s her done with or without help.  He recently built a 30 foot sailboat from scratch and ‘scratch’ means first logging the trees and milling the wood.  Doug lives on a boat and building another while you live on one anchored in the wilds away from the grid ain’t easy.  Suffice to say, power tools are minimally factored in.

He had more than a passing interest in the Q-hut as it was billed as a ‘boat building shop’.  It has since been renamed a woodworking shop, however, in the interests of appealing to a broader community but his interest is still high.   

“So, Doug, imagine you have a $1000 and some time on your hands.  The community is giving us the Q-hut but it is in terrible shape.  Where would you start?”

“Well, I’d bring my tools in and build a boat.”

“No, you know what I mean…….we have some guys and we have some materials and we are standing in the wrecked old Q-hut.  Where do we start?”

Doug surveyed the length and breadth of the building, stared at the wood stove for a bit, shuffled his feet and said, “Well, now that depends on the boat we are going to build.”

“OK. OK.  I get it.  You don’t think we have to do much of anything to the building.  You think that if you want to build a boat, you just get on with it.  I get that.  But, let’s just pretend for a minute that we are a work party, see.  And there are say, five of us, OK?  And, like we have a few thousand dollars.  What would you do then?”

“I’d start several boats at the same time.”

“Doug!  You have ten guys, ten grand and no one wants a boat!  They want to fix up the Q-hut.  Where would you start?”

“I’d go up to Jack’s and start a boat up there.”

And that is the kind of humour and character that has surrounded the building of the Q-hut.  Each guy is unique and independent and each has a level of expertise that transcends conventional construction.  Larry can build anything and do it expertly.  He has been a professional carpenter all his life.  Dan has homesteaded in the deepest fiords up the coast and either builds or invents whatever he needs (that’s right, he i-n-v-en-t-s!).  And Herb is the same and can also weld and do machining as required. 

Honest to God, I am pretty sure that this group could build just about anything short of a 747 and, with Rod (from another island), another Doug and Sammy, we could make a pretty passable attempt at a DC3.  These guys can do stuff!