NB – I am doing some stuff from my past at my wife’s behest.  Some commentators like it. But the numbers are down so I don’t know whether to keep it up.  I think it too dated.  Please let me know what you think.  A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will suffice.

He was a small, gentle man.  German or Dutch descent.  Pleasant. I am reminded of him whenever I see David Suchet play Hercule Poirot.  He was a doctor recently arrived at the clinic just before I was hired. He should not have been there.

If I had to hire a janitor or a van driver, I could advertise and take almost any one of the first ten applicants.  Maybe one would be really bad, one would be good enough to search through the pile for but, generally speaking, eight or nine of the applicants could do the job and get along with everyone.  Of course, they brought the usual litany of quirks and weaknesses that accompany all employees but the key word is ‘usual’.  You pretty much knew what you were getting.

Not so, the professionals.

The higher you went up the professional ladder the less likely was the chance that the applicant was one hundred percent and it was almost a guarantee that their quirks and weaknesses were not, in the least, of the usual and normal variant.  Many of the applicants revolving through the doctor’s offices were completely nuts.  Some were addicts.  Many were romantics who saw themselves as heroes — but not for very long.  I always had to hire the least crazy doctor rather than being able to choose the best from a capable bunch.  Doctors Wang, Watterman and a couple of others being very rare exceptions.

Dr. A had been on staff only a month or so when he went off on sick leave.  Fair enough. But pretty quickly that seemed to become a pattern.  Dr. A was only at work maybe two-thirds of the time and it started to become a problem.

“Doc, you okay?  You seem to be missing a lot of time.  Do you want me to help out in some way?”

“No. I’ll be fine.  It’s just nerves.  I am getting more and more anxious.”

“About working here?”

“No.  Yes.  Well, no.  Everything, really.”

I made some more inquiries but he said he was seeing a shrink, on meds and presented well when talking to me.  I felt sorry for him but concluded that he needed a place to come to, his work was generally acknowledged by the other two doctors as good.  They did not complain.  I decided to live with it and take a wait and see approach.

Until one day when the receptionist came in and said, “Dave, Dr. A. came in this morning but has not seen a single patient.  I tried knocking on his door but he won’t answer.  I’m getting worried.  I think you’d better go see him.”

So I went.  I knocked.  Nothing.  I knocked again.  And I repeated that a few times, finally adding my voice and raising it enough to be sure he heard me.

The door opened and there he stood.  Shaking almost uncontrollably. He looked like he had been crying.  As I came in, he recoiled and retreated to his chair.

“Doc, you’re not looking so good.  What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this.  I have to go.  They are all here because of me.  It’s all my fault.  I have to go.  I have been giving them whatever they want. They threaten me.  They have knives. They are going to hurt me.  I can’t do this anymore.”

The receptionist and I got him calmed down and the story eventually came out.  It seems that he was more than meek, he was a victim walking.  He had ‘kick me’ virtually written all over his face.  I hadn’t seen that.  Neither had the receptionist.  We just saw a small, gentle presence who kind of disappeared.  To be honest, he was there for a few months and, except for that one day of reckoning, I had never really noticed him.

But the local bad guys had seen it like hungry lions see a gazelle. He was just meat to them. They booked appointments specifically with him just because he was so easily intimidated that they could make him write a prescription for whatever they wanted. He was not part of the solution, he was a key part of the problem and he knew it from the start.  In effect, they had turned him into a drug dealer and it was eating him up.

He left, of course.  He went to the hospital to work.  I was hopeful that such a place was secure and supportive enough for him.  I saw him a few years later and he seemed fine but, then again, he had seemed almost fine shortly before his departure from the clinic.

The amazing thing for me, at the time, was firstly how apparent his victimhood was to those whose lives themselves were so immersed in victimhood.  Of course, that may have been the reason I didn’t see it and they did.  It was their culture, not mine.  I began to see the lowest rung of the victim-bully hierarchy in the area.  I could eventually see it just walking down the street.  It was bizarre.  Each person in Skidrow seemed to have a place on the strength/weakness continuum and their status or position was determined by that. And, when you knew how to look, you could see it.  It really was a jungle out there and there were local predators but all were prey to the larger, healthier society that was just a notch up.

If I walked on the Downtown Eastside on a Friday night all alone and even dressed poorly, I would not have been harmed in the least.  I might have been approached but my position would have been immediately deferred to.  Like Pariahs would to Brahmins in the Indian caste system.  I was healthy.  I was young.  And I was clearly not a victim.  I probably could have walked naked and bleeding and still not been seen as a target so long as I had not been weakened too severely.

But some people give off vibes that are somehow attractive to the vultures.  It is all being played out at a primal level and most of us who are not at the bottom do not see it.  And that doctor, despite his credentials, his so-called status, his car, and nice clothes, somehow conveyed a signal that only the lowest of the carrion-eaters could see.  He was roadkill to them.  They hit him hard and apparently they hit him practically from day one. The guy had been intimidated like a sensitive child in a tough neighborhood’s school.

It was a credit to his inner lion, however weak that was, that he would try as long as he did.  But Skidrow is a bona fide dystopia and he wouldn’t have survived it.  In fact, it was killing him.  It was uglier, meaner and stronger than he was. Right across the hall from me, they had almost finished him off in less than a few months and none of us even saw the attack.

In the Seventies gender was pretty much fixed.  Not like now where it can be dialed in, changed up and altered.  Back in the Seventies men were men and women were women and there were very few who could not distinguish the difference.  A transgender person was simply NOT seen very often and especially not in Skidrow.

Until Alan.

Alan was pretty messed up.  Drugs, schizophrenia, malnutrition and an ongoing conversation with someone not evident to me or others.  It later turned out that Alan also had AIDS.  We’d never even heard of that disease in those days. When Doctor Daniel and I went to see him in his room, there was a crucifix on the wall, a bottle of hard liquor, a recently burnt mattress and a small bar fridge filled with plastic bags containing feces, presumably his own.

We intervened.

Over time, with regular street nurse visits and regularly administered medications, Alan stabilized and it was then that he admitted that he was really a woman trapped in a man’s body.  His real name was Alena.  I was surprised to say the least.  “How does that happen, Alan, uh, Alena?  By the way, which name do you want me to use?”

“I am still adjusting to the news myself, Dave.  Have been for a long time.  So, if I am dressed like Alan, then please use his name and, of course, if I have something prettier on, I am Alena that day.  I am not so sure it just happened, Dave.  I think I have always known.  I’m on drug therapy and counseling now and I hope to be a woman soon.”

“It takes more than drugs and counseling to be a woman, Alan.  There are some fundamental plumbing issues and other weird stuff to get familiar with.  Frankly, I think this may be just another bad life choice you are making. What’s wrong with being both for awhile?  Why commit?”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Dave, because that is exactly what my counselor is saying and we have decided that I need to spend more time as a woman to be sure of my decision before I remove my options, if you know what I mean?  I will be living as Alena more and more.  And I need a job.  I want to work here at the Clinic.  I want to be a receptionist.”

“Sounds like a good idea.  You do need a job.  I agree with that.  But, I cannot see you being a receptionist here, Alan.  We have the big unit and she is probably the best receptionist Skidrow has ever had.  And I don’t have room in the budget for two.”

“That’s okay.  I could volunteer.  I need the work experience.  And I was thinking that I could volunteer as support for the street nurses.  They need someone to take their messages and keep their supplies up, right?”

As crazy as it sounded, I thought it might work.  The nurses could use the help, Alan/Alena would not have to deal with the general public and I could see no valid reason to say no.  So, I said yes.

After a while I thought things were working out pretty well. No initial complaints. The street nurses really appreciated having help with their kits and having someone take messages was a Godsend.  Mostly.

“Dave, you may have to have a word with Alena.  She’s kind of getting into the role and making it more than it is.  She’s getting weird and it’s freaking us out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, imagine a very skinny, sick man in his late thirties dressed in an old Forties style low cut cocktail dress and heavily made up, but with short hair and stubble.  He swings his high heels off the end of his feet, fer Gawd’s sake.  That’s more than a bit odd, but that is not the worst part.  The worst part is that Alena thinks a receptionist speaks like an exaggerated drag queen sucking helium and making extreme female gestures while doing so.  And her phone voice is completely insane.  Seriously crazy.  I’m telling you, it’s just getting weird up there.”

So, I called Alena down.

“So, Alena, how are you doing?  It’s been two weeks now.  I notice that you are always on time and never leave until the end of the day.  You OK?”

Squealing and hand gesturing like an epileptic in mid seizure Alena gushed, “I love this job, Dave.  I just love it!”

“Well,  I’m glad to hear that. But, you know, part of learning a new job is learning how to get along with others and that includes the telephone public.  I feel that I have to teach you a few things if you are going to do well in this line of work.  You know, careers have been lost for minor faux pas.  Ya gotta fit in, right?  Like the counselor said?”

“Absolutely (squeal, giggle, shoulder roll).  I’m all ears, Dave.” This was followed with an extremely wide smile and then a rapid and lengthy batting of eyelids and a forward tilt of her head.  It was weirder than weird.

“Well, it is hard for you.  I know that. You are also learning how to be a woman.  Two big challenges.  Female-ness.  Receptionist.  Tall order.  I admit that the two functions are compatible but the easiest way to fail at both is to lay it on too thick in either role.  Real femininity is subtle.  The gestures, the smiling, the eyes…all that stuff. That has to be doled out in very small doses or it loses it’s effect.  Same with being a receptionist.  You have to speak on the phone in almost a neutral voice.  Less is more.  Still feminine, of course, but like a female accountant rather than a girly-girl hostess, ya know?  This is a medical clinic.  We are professional.  You are not a waitress. You are not a cheerleader.  We just don’t squeal with delight or giggle all the time.  That would be weird in any office, Alena, but little Miss Sunshine is completely out of place in Skidrow, you understand?  She shouldn’t even be in the neighbourhood.”

“Too much?”

“Much too much.”

“Thanks, Dave.  I’ll tone it down. Thanks for the input.”

Much to my surprise, and to the absolute amazement of the rest of the staff, Alena not only toned it down but became a somewhat good receptionist.  She was working well by our standards which were not entirely normal, I admit.  But she was dependable and, after almost a year, I managed to find some money so the Clinic could afford to pay her a small stipend.  Alan dropped away, so to speak, and Alena took over full time.

Soon after the change Alena weakened and died. The last time I saw her I was helping a walking bag of bones get into a cab at the front door to the clinic.  She was headed for St. Paul’s hospice.  AIDS took all of it’s victims back then.

We shared a building with the Catholic church.  Actually, they rented half of their building to the clinic but we were as separate as each unit in a large duplex.  The Church housed a proper nave or worship-place, a residence for the brothers and the priest and a convent for the ‘sisters’.  Even though we were very separate in our work, I liked the brothers and I particularly liked the last grouchy, old, plain-speaking, hard-drinking Irish priest. We got along well.

On one occasion I noticed that one of the brothers had not been seen doing his normal brotherly thing recently in the area and I asked the priest, “Hey, where’s ol’ Bob-the-brother.  He OK?”

“Oh, yeah.  Helluva thing that.  But he’s fine.”

But I never saw Bob there again.  NOT in the DE anyway…..

A few years (decade) later I bumped into him in an office building uptown.  He told me his story.

“I fell in love with one of the sisters.  She fell in love with me.  We did what loving people do and then we felt real guilty about it and went to confession.  A lot.  We were forgiven but we found that we kept doing what we should not and finally the priest suggested that maybe confession was not enough to get the sin out.  So, I went to a doctor.  A Catholic doctor. He knew what to do and did it.  I started taking estrogen.  After I week or so, I doubled my dose. Every time I saw Sister Sue, I swallowed another handful of pills.  But we both had to keep going to confession despite that.  This might have continued on for a long time except, after about a year, my boobs were bigger than Sue’s.  It was then I decided that neither drugs nor abstinence was gonna do the job.  I quit the church, proposed to Sue and we have been together ever since.”

Drugs and sex  – Vatican style.

I once asked one of the other elderly priests (really old at 65!) about God and religion and all the foofarah associated with it and he said, “Oh, Hell, don’t believe all that nonsense. That’s just story. None of it is true. Just crap”.

“Geez, that doesn’t sound quite right coming from a priest.  Are you sure you wanna say stuff like that, having committed your life and all to it.”

“Oh yeah.  I really committed my life to telling the truth, actually.  Being honest.  And then I committed it to helping people. Then I went down to basic general goodness, day to day, kinda.  And then I kinda committed to scotch for awhile.  But I am back to truth right now. Things change, eh?  Go with the flow, man.”

I liked him.  He seemed to be telling the truth.

We had more than a few religiously motivated workers in the DE.  They were all pretty good. Pretty nice.  Very brave.  One old guy was a real hell-raiser.  He’d get into it now and again with the locals.  Regular punch-ups.  That was always good PR for the local United church.  I liked him, too, but he was a little whacked.

Probably the best of the bunch was May Gutteridge.  Saint James Social service.  She was in her fifties when I was in my twenties and she had been there for decades.  She would last a few more decades after I left.  May was the mother Teresa of skid row (“If you judge people, you have no time to love them”) but she was also a tough person.  She and another old woman, Margaret (Chisolm, I think), ran their ‘services’ like drill sergeants.

These two old ladies would yell at and manhandle big, dirty, bad guys all day long.  Some of the guys were crazy, most of them were angry, drunk or stoned, some of them were armed. Made no difference to them.  Either of them would push Shaquille O’Neal out the door if they were ticked.  And they were always ticked.

I had a few problems with some guys myself now and then.  One story would curl your hair.  But I would never mess with the two old ladies.  No one sane would.  Somehow they conveyed more power and fury, more threat and malevolence, more strength and commitment to do battle than anyone they ran into.  Like Sun Tzu, they always won by simply showing off that they possessed a much greater force and were ready to use it.

The odd thing was that there were likely more women than men doing social work down there at any one time, in any one service.  And, if the numbers were even, the positions weren’t.  The women were always in charge.  There was me, and maybe two or three other operations run by guys but the majority were run by grey-haired old women (15+).

Even most of my clinic staff (37) were women.  When you think of skid row, you generally tend to think of danger, madness, violence, drugs and being amongst the walking dead. And you would not be far off.  But when you think that the majority of the workers down there were old women, it is sobering and illuminating.

….and none in the media are saying it.

Harper’s oil-centric and Scrooge-like economics is the root cause of our current economic problems.

The economy does not really ‘run’ on 3-months quarters.  Everyone knows that.  The economy really runs on a rolling five year or longer cycle.  Government policy IMPLEMENTED in year one has it’s major effects by year five if we are lucky.  The reports are quarterly but they are reporting on actions taken years prior.

So, there we had our idiot past prime minister campaigning on his party’s business acumen that too-soon saw our economy plunge into the toilet mere weeks after the election that ousted the ten plus year Conservative reign.  Why isn’t the media reporting on that?  Why aren’t fingers being pointed?

I know, I know, I was NOT going to do politics for awhile.  And that nauseating Trudeau posing and speaking in cliches has beckoned me frequently to do so but I resisted.  Even that puke-inducing Vogue photo shoot will go largely uncommented on because, well, it speaks volumes in itself.  But Harper was wrong.  Harper was destructive.  Harper was a bad economist and his gang of thieves and liars are likely to STILL claim that they ran the country well and “look at it now!”

They haven’t even said it yet (well, Ambrose implied it in the House of Commons last week) and I am mad just in anticipation of what they will say as soon as they get up the chutzpah.  So, for the record: our economic woes are a direct result of Harpernomics and don’t forget it.  The voting public has a tendency to short memory and that has resulted in the Cons getting re-elected now and again.  And they screw up every time because their basic economic philosophy is wrong.

“Dave, that battle has been fought and won!  Give it a rest, old boy.  Calm yourself.” 

You  are right.  I am sorry.  I should go back to #@$%! whales and ravens.  But part of the reason for my anger is that I do not see much of a change in the business as usual model even though Harper has been sent to the showers.  “Just-in, get your head out of the Vogue centrefold and get it into the game!”

Canada needs a built-in-Canada approach to the economy.  NOT a built-by-trade agreements version modeled on a global economy, the world bank policies and other major corporate-backed shill organizations like the World Trade Organization.

Of course, we have to trade internationally. And, of course, we will adjust to common practices.  But we need not be bound by their system.  We can trade when it suits us and we should be able to NOT trade when it suits us.  So far, these trade pacts are like bondage and servitude to us and they are NOT serving Canadians.  They are not in our overall best interests.

But that is not my main complaint.  I know corruption is part of the system and systemic corruption is what we have.  My main complaint is that we do not trade within our own borders as if we were friends and neighbours.  We do not have a domestic plan.  We have accepted the modern and international interpretation of Capitalism as our own and we are simply not in a position to do so.  We need a built-in-Canada plan.

Put in a way that everyone understands: gasoline in the US is $2.00 a gallon.  Yes, there is a currency adjustment.  Yes, there is difference in the measured gallon.  But, here in BC, we pay C$5.00 a gallon or $3.60 cents for a US gallon.  Almost TWICE as much.  And the irony to this observation is that most of US imported oil comes from Canada (a bit more than OPEC) and it is all SUPPOSED to be somehow equalized under trade agreements.  Really?  It should NOT be equalized.  Canadians (since we live greater distances) should pay less for OUR OWN resources than do those we export to.

Just-in?  Are you listening?

I am kinda messing around here….playing with a part of book 2….your indulgence, please….

Typically, the fresh-start OTG’er has made some kind of conscious choice to exercise conscious choice.  Like I did.  They want more of a role in deciding how their lives are lived.  They want some real freedom.  And, after reading about living off the grid and making the un-plug decision, they decide to ‘go for it’ and, in our society, that means paying for it.  Somehow.

Think about that….first concrete decision to achieving a freely chosen life is to get some money and buy something!  (or conversely, buy your way OUT of something!).  Harry Brown once wrote a book about that called, HOW I FOUND FREEDOM IN AN UN-FREE WORLD.

And, for many, that first fiscal act is to buy a piece of land in the great hairy outback.

And, perhaps we should talk about that.

There is so much to know.  So little time. 

Let’s start with the dream of wide open spaces.  Isn’t that what first comes to mind? Doesn’t off the grid imply that?  Not every one needs wide open spaces but everyone I have ever met off the grid seems to think they do.  I did.  They may not have to own all that they can survey but they do not want anyone else to, either.  So, the idea of living off the grid quickly takes on the almost un-doable task of personal, mini nation-building.  You need acres.  Hundreds of them.  Maybe square miles.  How else are you going to get your remoteness on and your grid off?

Start by giving your head a shake.

First off, not everyone who lives OTG and can see forever without glimpsing other people owns the land under their feet. Not everyone even needs to own the land under their feet.  In fact, many just own the boat they are on or, in a liberal definition of OTG, the vehicle they are driving.  Some own nothing.  Off the grid does not mean having to own land.  In fact, when you think about it, owning land is almost antithetical to living freely and off the grid.  It just doesn’t have to be that way although, if you have the money, it is made a smidge easier if you buy some.

But the point is: most of us do not even think there might be another way.  I didn’t.

There are many other ways.  There are reputedly not just a few non-owners of the land they are on squatting illegally in BC and Canada.  In the USA, they have vast tracts of land that fall to the Bureau of Land Management and these BLM tracts are somewhat notorious for comforting and welcoming the poor, itinerant, landless and the wandering.  You don’t need title to land to exist.

But, let’s just say you do – just for fun.  Anarchy does not yet rule your perception of freedom.  Land title still means something to you.  You have decided that you want to own some land even though it is a ridiculous concept. It will not be the first ridiculous concept you will subscribe to.  Or the last.

For the record: It is impossible to own land.  You are encouraged in this mad, societal delusion and mass agreement because so many people think they own land, so many people make a living off people who think they own land and you want to delude yourself along with all the others.  Great.

Call a realtor, a banker, an accountant, a shrink, a marriage counselor and a financial planner.  Propose marriage to all of them.  They’ll accept.  Kiss freedom goodbye.

But, seriously; you can never own land.  If you are over 35, you should know that by now.  I will admit that you can buy and sell land.  You can live on land and hand it to your kids when you die.  You can borrow against it, log it, farm it, mine it and build on it.  You can even make money in the land game.  You can do a helluva lot of stuff to the giant ball on which you reside but you can never own it.  And that is because, they tax you on it all the live long day.  And in so many ways.

Don’t pay your taxes and they take it away from you.  Lose a lawsuit and they take it away from you.  Carve out a piece of that giant pie that happens to be where the government wants to build a prison or garbage dump and, you guessed it, they take it away from you.  And, if that wasn’t enough to erase your make-believe faith in ownership, you DO know you are mortal, right?  You do not live forever.  You might ‘rent’ that dirt, borrow that dirt or otherwise think that dirt is yours but, once you are dead, it is no longer yours.  It goes to someone else.

You never own land. Maybe the great undead (corporations and government) can own land but the mortal never can.

Once you have wrapped your mind around the truth of that great lie, you might wish to reconsider just how much of your limited life’s blood – as measured in the money you have earned – that you want to give away to claim your right to the delusion.  I am going to suggest that you spend whatever is required to get whatever you need to build on and have a garden on it but no more.  Buy that two to five acres next to a national forest, monument, park or so far from hell and gone that no one can or will build near you.  That’s not so bad.  You will only own a small piece but, for all intents and purposes, you have a large space around you.  That should be the goal.  NOT ownership.

I have a friend who owns a piece of land surrounded by Provincial Park.  There is one small bit of freehold, he has it and yet all around him is nothing but miles and miles of forests.  He has trespassers all the time, of course, but they are of the wildlife kind and they don’t respect the Land Titles Registry anyway.  He thinks he owns half the world.

That is the feeling we are after.

And there is more than one way to skin that cat.  I have more than a few friends who just own boats.  No land.  Just boat, engine, anchor and chain.  They go where they want to go, drop the hook and stay there until they desire a change of scenery and then they move.  They think they own half the world, too.

So, living off the grid is not that hard of an entry.  You can do it.  You can even do it poor.

It’s more fun with some money but not by much.  Most of the fun in living freely and by choice is that you ‘do’ stuff.  You ‘experience’.  You learn.  You feel alive.  Money can facilitate that but it also can and does buffer the experience.  It’s a judgment call not just a little influenced by the time you have left.  If you are young, you can spend time instead of dollars.

You are, as they say, what you eat.  But you are also what you do and the sum of those experiences.  If the sum of your experience is gazing at video screens or pressing buttons all day, then that is who you become.  A drone.  A cog in a machine, a living battery in the Matrix.  But, if your life is full of solving problems, meeting challenges, inventing solutions and being curious about the natural world around you, then you become the sum of that experience and it is so much more fun at the very least.

I met a guy the other day who, upon learning I lived off the grid, exclaimed, “Wow!  That’s great!  My wife and I are planning to do that, too.  We are building a house.  It is all green technology and has panels and stuff.  It is going to be so cool.”  But he was not building it.  His wife was not helping him work on it side by side except by working for money to pay the contractor.  He did not really know about alternative energy except that it was cool and all the rage so he was ‘into that’.  The real joke was that he was building his OTG, green home in the city so that they both could still go to work.  And shop.  The house was a status symbol.  New green house technology with granite counter tops is not cheap.

He will miss the best part.

He was a doctor.  She was a teacher.  And they weren’t going anywhere.  They were going green to be hip, to follow the trend, to look good.  They couldn’t really go OTG because they were specialists in a culture that valued specialists.  Gone were the role models who could do everything and do it anywhere.  Now the role model is he or she who can make money in one demanding field located in a licensed, restricted, urban centre which requires huge up front buy-in and life allegiance to the system.

They may have missed the concept.

The average price of a modest home in world-class Vancouver is almost two million dollars.  Get a job there.  Buy a house there.  Where you gonna go after that?  How much real freedom can you afford to exercise every day? How much of your life have you pledged in advance?  And to which bank?  Twenty years?  Go the extra distance and have a child and you can double that answer. Getting accepted into that exclusive club is very, very restricting.  You are not free to do as you please at the Vancouver Club.

Ironically, the other special private club in Vancouver is the Terminal City club.  That name accidentally says even more!

People incarcerated in a federal prison for forty years do not feel comfortable outside of the prison.  They can’t handle the freedom.  They want to go back.  Think about that.

…get up at 7:00.  Brave the stormy seas.  Make the 10:00 ferry.  Do the shopping (Sal is at a quilting bee).  See the doctor.  He’s South African.  Seems good.  We talk.  “I love it here.  Can’t see why people want to live in Vancouver.  Too expensive.  No quality of life. This is great.  I live five minutes from the office.  I see the ocean from my house and from the office.  Why do Canadians want to live in the city like that?  It costs way too much!”

“No idea.  I did it.  But now that I have done this, I have no idea why I did what I did.  Just didn’t look up, I guess.”

“Down there in the lower mainland, you have no time to look up!”

Side note: my salivary gland is OK.  No worries.  One side seemed a bit dry.  It is. But it still rates a 7 out of ten according to the ear, nose and throat guy.  I am good to go. So, I go.

I buy some wiring from the electrical supply store.  35 year old guy at the counter just moved up from Victoria.  Couldn’t stand the pace.  “Man, I was spending over half an hour in traffic.  The cost of living was crazy.  I love the forest.  We came here.”

“But you still live in the city, albeit  smaller.  Still town.”

“You are right.  I gotta get away further.  But, for now, this is like heaven.”

Go to the next place.  The guy asks for my address.  I explain. “Oh, God, I am 100% onside, man.  Gotta get out!  My wife and I are building an all-green house.  Going off the grid although we will stay in town, you know, she likes shopping.”

“Off the grid means no roads, no power, no water, no sewer.  And no services.  But you are doing alternative energy and that is 90% of it.  Good on ya.  Do you know what you are doing?”

“Our contractor does.  He knows that stuff.  He’s a real green-guy, eh?  All solar and compost and all that.”

“Well, I’ll give you a small tip: do not spend too much on your first set of batteries.  We all seem to kill our first set and most of us manage to kill our second set, too.  So, buy 8Ds or L-16s first.  Maybe ten years from now, they will have Li-ion worked out or better.  Don’t spend a lot on your first set of batteries.”

“Batteries, eh?  Hmmm….I’ll have to talk to Jack about that.  He’s our contractor, ya know?  All green, he is.  This is great!  We’re going green and you have already done that. Cool.  Was that D-16’s?”

Did I mention the doctor was an hour behind schedule?

Did I mention that Home Depot did NOT have the three things on my list?  Did I mention that………….?

……………never mind.  The world is mad.  I keep thinking it is all getting crazier and crazier out there every day and then I see who is running for the US presidency and all of a sudden, it all looks sane by comparison.

Perspective is everything.

” I heard voices again last night.”

“Me, too.  About midnight?”

“Yeah.  I was asleep but I woke up enough to hear ’em and then listened for a bit and then rolled over and back to sleep.  Weird, eh?”

“Very.  I mean, there are no boaters, no kayakers, no campers nor even any neighbours. It’s winter and we are still hearing voices.  It’s like they are just down the shore.  The part that keeps me awake is that I just can’t seem to make out a single word.  It’s conversation for sure and it has to be English because it doesn’t have any weird tones or whatever. And yet, I cannot make out one single word.”

“Ghosts.  Gotta be.”

Sal and I have been here for more than a decade and approximately three or four times a year we hear these voices.  Usually at night.  Sometimes late, sometimes at dawn.  The voices sound like a nice, fun, but-not-wild campfire party happening about 3 or 400 yards away. Loud voices but not yelling.  Constant.  Sounds like six or seven, maybe eight people.

At first we were pretty sure it was ghosts and, of course, we made them out to be First Nations ghosts.  But the general sound, the tempo, the tone, the similarity to a summer BBQ just seemed to rule out FN’s languages.  And every ‘hearing’ sounded the same.  It was as if the same group was gathering at the same place each time and, even more strangely, having exactly the same party.

One summer night we heard it so distinctly and so much earlier in the evening, we went in the boat, turned the corner of the point and headed to the place kayakers sometimes gather to pitch camp.  Sure enough, there was a fire and a bunch of kayakers sitting around talking and having fun.

At first we thought the mystery was solved.  But it was NOT.  Most of the time we hear the voices, it is very late, after midnight.  Sometimes early morning.  Both those facts could still be consistent with a kayaking party but not when the aren’t any kayaking parties out there.  No groups kayak in the winter. Occasionally, some lone adventurer heading to or from Alaska or some place way north will paddle by in December but it is very rare.  And the lone kayaker is the definition of quiet.  Even two such adventurers wouldn’t make the sound of a party.

This is a gaggle of voices persisting for up to an hour in much the same location and showing up at all times of the year.  They party in the mid evening, wee hours and dawn. They leave no trace.  They sound the same every time. The communicate in an English-like speech pattern but with not a single word distinct enough to make out.   It’s the same group.

I tend to believe in ghosts.  I have experienced a couple.  Sal has, too.  But Sal won’t commit  to believing (which means she doesn’t believe but she admits that she did see one….?  Think about that….that, in a nutshell is how our minds differ.  I hear dead people and live with nutty ones!).  But this is a mystery that just keeps on giving and, despite our lack of discomfort and tendency to accept the voices now as just part of the world in which we live, they still surprise us when then show up. We still listen to the voices trying to pick out some words.  We still wonder who they are and what they are saying.  And we still don’t know.

Wanting to change, yearning, feeling, dreaming.  These are all necessary stages in thinking that everyone undergoes when they embark on a journey or adventure or a learning and personal growth quest.  It does not start with the first step, it starts with the first thought.  It takes several steps from there to get to the first well formed idea.  The first real-action step is a long way off.  You have to mentally remove yourself from where you are, imagine where you can go and then start taking the necessary steps to make it happen. Motivational speakers call it visualization but they can say that because the people they are talking to have already moved through several stages simply to get themselves into the audience.

Visualizing is several miles down the road from the initial feeling.

I started my change virtually the day we returned from the grand family vacation.  I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time but, I followed that odd personal urge, that itch, that je ne sais quoi feeling and the path started to become somewhat more clear.  NOT actually clear, more like straining to see through a dirty window.  It took me close to five more years before I took the real first step that was conscious, intentional and in the direction of my vision.

And I still had no clue.

To be fair, I was still half dreaming, half planning, half learning, half doing even when we started.  I am inclined that way.  I like the dream stage.  I was committed to change but it was not until the house in the cul-de-sac sold and we had no home that I was really totally committed – to getting a new home at the very least.  I was totally committed to NOT camping, that was for sure.  I hate camping.  And even though I knew the new home was off the grid, I had no idea what that really meant I was committing to even as I was building it.

Sal was even more naive than me.  She did not spend much time in the dream phase, she was too busy keeping the family, our house and the home together while I wondered off in search of something I couldn’t describe.  She got on the train well after it had started to leave the station.  Sally somehow imagined that going to live off the grid was just some kind of modern, hip phrase, like yuppy or baby boomer or dinks.  Or maybe some kind of mid-life phase that could eventually be integrated into ordinary life.  She knew it was NOT that but it was some kind of cottagey, fun, country-thingy that we could play at for awhile to see if we liked it.  She imagined a new all-jean wardrobe.  She bought ‘kicky boots’ for the photo ops.  She thought that the lifestyles section of the newspaper might do a feature on it.  She did not look back to see that most of the main bridges to our old life were slowly burning.  She didn’t have a clue.

I honestly do not think Sal had really committed until we were half way through building-to-lock-up and I was noticeably fading fast.  It was not until she looked at the boat shed as her very likely winter home that Sal got fully onside.  Sal glimpsed her future as a west coast hillbilly and was not amused.  I am glad she clicked into gear.  She became the primary driving force for the last and hardest stage of our transition to really living off the grid.  The house would not have made it to lock-up that first summer-ending-in-October without her indomitable spirit.

Sal is not a dreamer.  She lives in the real world.  She does what needs to be done and doesn’t like to see a job unfinished.  She could see that I was running on fumes half way through and kicked it and me up a notch. When the going got tough, Sal got going.  And when Sal got going, the job was well on the way to getting done.

And most of that story is in Our Life Off the Grid – an urban couple goes feral.

But, eventually the initially thrilling adventure part ends.  Eventually you get to where you wanted to get.  Eventually, you think, you will be done.  And, once you are firmly entrenched off the grid, you realize that is not so – this story never ends.  We finished stage one.  Almost.  We still have a few things to do but that is unlikely to ever change.  A large part of living off the grid is working a never ending chore list intended ironically to build things to make the chore list easier.  Like I said, a never ending story.

But we have been here almost twelve years by now (and will be by the time second book gets printed).  We have graduated from freshman.  We are sophomores now.  We are no longer planning and constructing, we are no longer dreaming and hoping.  We are actually living the dream.  We are here even if here, like the universe, is ever expanding.  We are doing what we planned to do even if we didn’t have a plan or a clue.  For a minute or two around the seven year mark, it felt as if we had arrived but we have not.

We just got past the first barrier is all.

Getting to the front door of the university is not getting the degree.  And getting a bachelors is not becoming a doctor.  In fact, we are really starting our lifestyle learning phase now. And like all unconventional lifestyles, all learning and growing endeavours, that statement can be made every year.  We learned to build.  We learned to do what we needed to do to be able to live.  It was great.   Woohoo.  The first seven or eight years was a book.  It was change writ large – for us, anyway.  It was a real, bona fide, risk-taking adventure.  But we have really just arrived.  A different kind of adventure now awaits.

Phase ll – the learning years have been formally imposed and, looking back, they probbly began maybe a year or two after we moved in.  I am not really sure when the climb up the steep cliff began to flatten out.  But there is no doubt, the journey continues but the steepest part seems over. There is still so much to do, so much to build in the way of add-ons and supplements, systems and conveniences, routines and work.  And so we are still hiking up hill.  But the path has leveled out some.  Longer stretches are straighter and easier. The footing is better.  We didn’t see the actual transition from trying to live off the grid to actually living off the grid but we are.  There is a huge difference.  And we have no idea how far we still have to travel.  But it is clear there is more to come.

We are still much alone in the wilderness, after all.

She was one of the kids in the group home cum therapeutic community I worked at when I was 21.  I liked her.  There was nothing very special to like or dislike but, for some reason, I liked her.  She was quiet. She was meek.  She behaved most of the time when she was there.  She was almost 15, homely in a too-hairy-swarthy Mediterranean kind of way, not too bright, a user and an abuser who likely came from the same kind of environment.  And she was a hooker.

She suffered from low self esteem, the file said.

It was bedlam at the centre every day and somedays it got even crazier.  Literally.  We all used to call it Alma House, Crazy House.  We had about twelve kids at any one time in residence and they were all bad actors.  The odd one was evil or soon to be but most of them were just messed up. They had been classed the worst of the worst, the most delinquent of the delinquents and no other facility would have them.  We took them in at the centre, a huge old Shaughnessy-style home located at 2nd and Alma and the staff tried out their version of Gestalt therapy.  It was a gong show.

Looking back, I think the problem was ignorance and naivete on the part of Children’s Aid. This was still the beginning of the drug era and no one save X-Kalay had much of a handle on what kind of multi-headed monster of a problem that was about to become.  We didn’t.

The therapeutic idea was to manifest some kind of family, albeit hugely artificial, while the so-called family was kept totally unstable by revolving rosters of staff, changing faces amongst the kids and the madness of what we took to be counselling sessions. There was clearly too much acid being dropped and dope being smoked and that statement applied to some of the staff as well. It was around 1970 or so and I’d estimate that there were ten staff and, looking back, I think maybe half were sane.

Lilly and I used to talk.  Usually when I was on kitchen duty.  Sometimes when I was herding the kids into their bedrooms getting them to sleep.  Mostly it would be just her an me.  I was busy.  She was the quiet type.  We kept it short.

“So, Lilly, I heard that you gave all the kids record albums.  That was nice.  But, I have to ask where you got the money.”

“Downtown.”

You aren’t turning tricks again, are you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Geez, kid.  That’s not healthy.  Worse than that, it can be dangerous.”

“No, it’s not.  I just go to a private gambling club in Chinatown.  Do some of the old guys.  They have small dicks.  I’m only there for an hour or so.”

“Shoot.  That sounds pretty bad to me.  What do you charge?”

“$4.00.  Sometimes five.  I leave when I get $75 or 80 bucks.  Then I go shopping.  I’m home before dark.”

“Lilly!  That’s crazy.  It is wrong on so many levels I can’t begin to explain.  And I should be struck dead for saying this; you are a very bad businesswoman.”

She thought that was pretty funny.  I was horrified.  Still am, actually.

Ten years later, I was running the clinic in Skidrow.  A wrecked and strung out mess of a woman was dragging her emaciated, unhealthy self through to the doctor’s office.  She looked late forties.  Hair was thin and falling out.  She had that no-teeth, yellow-grey look. She looked like death.  It was Lilly.  We talked.  She was much the same person but less so. I took her for lunch after the examination.  I didn’t ask what was wrong.  It was obvious.  Heroin.  Disease.  Malnutrition.   She was pretty much done.  She died within the next few weeks.

I did not know too many like I knew Lilly and I really did not know her all that well.  We had a bit of a connection is all.  But there are at least a few dozen who would belong in that same tragic file.  Maybe three dozen.  And they all surprised me with the end of their story.

One small girl was arrested with two huge black guys robbing a bank in Seattle. Shotguns and bullets and the whole Dog Day Afternoon thing.  She was 16 or 17, maybe 100 pounds.  Strawberry blond hair.  Cute as a bug’s ear.  And the list just goes on and on.

You can see how that kind of life burns out the players and it doesn’t take long to burn out the rescuers, either.

When I ran the clinic I was pretty wet behind the ears.  I knew enough to know good work by the staff when I saw it and I knew how to account for the money provided by the government, but I was a bit naive about crime and all that people were capable of. That changed pretty quickly.

We had twelve street nurses.  They were not registered nurses in the professionally accredited sense.  They were ex-addicts, idealists, and Eastside types who were comfortable in the area and assorted characters who wanted to do good work and were willing to work for peanuts.  Some were good.  Some were great and some were saints.  But I saw them all, initially, as idealists doing good work.  I was wrong.

My first bad worker was a guy called John.  Pleasant.  Smart.  Engaging.  A bit older than most of the others but still young in his early thirties.  He was a bit burnt out but that hollow, haunted look was not uncommon among our mostly fallen-but-redeemed non-professional staff.  The clinic had a policy of trying to hire locally for obvious reasons, but also to give people a second chance.

I heard a rumour that John was dealing heroin while doing his rounds.

That posed a challenge.  How do you fire someone for committing a crime so severe  that criminal charges would have to be laid and a proper investigation would have to be conducted and all sorts of interruptions to patient care would ensue?  How could you NOT fire someone who did that sort of thing?  How could you prove it without duplicating the processes that were required by the entire justice system.  How could you put any more patients at risk?  And addicts faced greater risks from their suppliers than from most other people so, if true, John was worse than the average dealer, he was a dealer who was in a position of authority over his clients.

“John, come down to my office, would you.  We need to talk.”

He came down, smiled, cracked a few jokes, made nice.  I liked John.

“John, I am thinking of firing you.  If I do, I have to do it right now.  This minute.  You can’t even go back upstairs to the nurses department.  I will walk you off the premises.”

He went nuts.  Called me names.  I calmed him.  He sat down.

“John, I have no right to fire you.  I know that.  I have only heard a weak rumour.  That is all.  It is NOT fair. So, if you want to, all you have to do is say that you want a suspension instead and you want to appeal to the board.  I will not only understand, I hope you choose that route and I will fill out the forms for you.  But, you see, if you do choose that way to respond, I have no choice but to chase down the rumour.  And, in the process of doing my own investigation, I will have to ask others to get involved because the rumour is serious. I will have to involve the police. That kind of thing.  Nothing behind your back, though.  I will introduce you to everyone involved in the investigation.  If there is nothing to hide, you will be back in a flash and I’ll apologize.  I’m sorry.  But I have no choice.  What would you prefer I do?”

John thought it over, (taking way too long to do that), looked at me as asked me if he should resign instead.  I agreed that he should, but I still walked him out of the clinic.

The other nurse gone bad was a tough, young, single mother with a bad attitude and a nasty mouth.  But that pretty much made her normal in that group.  It was almost a requirement to be that way sometimes down there.  She was, however, smart and sneaky as well.  One day she came to work and asked if she could take her holidays in a week or so.  I said yes and simply asked that she notify the department coordinator.  And off she went.

She spent ten days in Hawaii.

She’d been back a few weeks when I got a call from a social worker who had a caseload in the Downtown Eastside.

“Hey, Dave, did you know Joe Smith died last month?  He was one of the guys under your team’s care?”

“No.  I didn’t know.  But, then again, a lot of patients die down here and I don’t personally keep track of them.  Why?  Something amiss?”

“Don’t know.  I just know that Janie was administering his accounts and, when he died, I had to do the paperwork and there was not a penny in the bank.  Doesn’t mean much but administered patients have bank accounts and I have never had a situation that had a person at zero unless they died virtually at the end of the month.  Joe died on the 7th.”

I thanked the worker, checked the dates and realized that things looked odd.  I called the bank and asked them about Joe’s account, told them why and, as this was a time when things weren’t so rigid, they told me.  I got the answer I needed.  In the monthly statement they issued the month before Joe died, there had been $1,400.00.  For a guy on welfare, so sick that he was restricted to his room and mostly his bed, that was a huge sum.  The records showed that his balance in the years prior was usually low.  But in the last year (for as long as he had been in our care) he had somehow managed to save $120 a month.  At the time, his living allowance was just a bit under $500. It seemed impossible for him to save anything.  Unless he was not being fed properly or not receiving other needed items or services.

I inquired with Janie.  She was angry from the start.  Then she said, “He was gonna die anyway.  I just took what he wanted to give me.”

I fired her.

And then the story got really ugly.

She grieved the termination.  The Board of Directors agreed with me.  Janie contended that I was singling her out because she was an ex-addict, a single mother and I didn’t like her. The last part was, by then, true.  But then she got some support from the other nurses.  I was stunned.

“How could any of you support her for doing what she obviously did?”

The answer made my blood run cold, “Hey, none of us are perfect!  We’ve all taken some money from some old guy’s account.  Now and then.  Not that much but there’s no harm if he’s dying, is there?  And when he’s dead, the money just goes back to welfare.  And that’s stupid!”

I said, “That has to stop.  I will be checking.  If there is even a nickel missing from now on, you will be fired.  I am inclined to fire you (the department head who had given me the answer) right now for simply having knowledge of this, let alone participating.  I won’t because too many people need the care you give, but I swear this will not be overlooked ever again.”

The sad part was that it was mostly a bluff on my part.  There was a reason there were twelve street nurses.  They had almost two hundred patients.  It was a revolving roster.  Some patients were short term and were not vulnerable. Some were NOT administered by us (meaning they controlled their own money) and others were pretty smart old geezers. But there would always be at least a dozen who could be taken for small sums and no one would ever know.

It was ugly down there.  And not all the ugly came from the client side.