Some years ago, when I was playing at being a businessman, I bought an expensive pair of Florsheim shoes.  Fancy shoes were part of the uniform of the team I was trying to get on.  I wore the shoes for a day and then the heel fell off.  It was irritating and I took them back to the store with a glower.  I was polite and restrained but this second trip was cutting into a busy day and my anger must have shown through.  I was young, after all.

The storeowner replaced the shoes immediately and gave me a couple of pairs of ‘lifetime’ socks (and shoe polish, I think).  At first I refused the gesture saying that it was not necessary.  I had just come in for shoes and shoes were all I wanted.

“Please, sir.  We wanted to make a good first impression and we failed.  So, I really want to make a much better second impression.  I want you to remember this visit and not the first.  If I can do that, you’ll come back.”

I accepted (he was very sincere) and, of course, I went back for as long as I was in the game.  Which, thank God, was mercifully short.

But I never forgot the lesson…………………..or did I?

A few years go I had a disappointing encounter with Superior Propane.  I had signed on due to their telemarketing campaign and then, because I lived where I lived, they withdrew the offer.  They made a half-hearted attempt at a consolation and I use them to this day but, for me, the relationship has always been a bit strained.  They, of course, have many, many customers and, to them, I am just one of many account numbers in their computer.

And like many other ‘numbers’ in any of these machines encounter now and then, my last bill from them was an error.  They had overbilled me $25,000.  Mind you, in retrospect, that is the best kind of error.  Overbilling me only a few dollars might have gone unnoticed.

I had no choice.  I wrote to them and told them of their error and, further, I added a few other complaints to the list.  I was polite but pointed. I must have managed to glower by way of e-mail.  It is an art.

They replied quickly, apologized profusely and told me the billing problem had been rectified.  But then they went the additional step of addressing my other whiny complaints.  I didn’t expect that.  And I confess, I had brought up my disappointment from 6 years ago in my earlier complaint.  They wanted to pursue that.

My response: “That you would ask me about it is good enough. Fuggedabout it. It was years ago. The employees involved have likely gone. The world moves on.  And so do I.  We’ll let it go.”

Superior replied with:  “No sir.  We want to make it better.  We screwed up and we want a good relationship, not a poor one.  We’ll do the right thing by you this time!”

And they did.

Sometimes a faux pas can be an opportunity.  Sometimes it is just another screw-up in a world of screwing up.  But the good part is that a screw-up fixed with grace and sincerity is remembered.  I still remember the shoe store manager thirty-five years later.  But now his file in my memory drawer just got a little bigger.  I had to shuffle him over to make room for Superior Propane.

Let’s hope I get to remember them for 35 years!

Well, it is not really madness.  Not really.  Not so much.  It is just a bit on how moving off the grid was partly (tho not much) fear driven.

I kinda think the world is going to hell in a handbasket and I think that because everyone tells me so and because I am inclined to the dark view by nature.  Off-the-grid?  Maybe moving-off-the-bullseye would be another way of saying it.

I haven’t discussed this part with Sal.  Not much.  No point.  She is of the glass-always-full-and-runneth-over type.  To her, the world is mostly beautiful and full of promise, cookies, flowers and puppies.  No fear, only happy.

Good thing she has me, eh?

Anyway, there is plenty of evidence for a sense of fear-of-the-future, of course.  Documentarians make a good living scaring the crap out of us – just for starters.  And, where they leave off, the scientists and the nut-cases add to the growing general paranoia, what with climate change and pandemics and mass-shootings.  And that was just yesterday! 

Fear is just good-for-business, really.  Hell, the media and the government are in the business of selling bad news (what a concept that is, eh?).   If it isn’t Big Brother warning us about terrorists and celebrities chastising us for hunger and neglect of others, it is Michael Moore and PBS telling me the sky is falling.   There is simply no end to the scare mongering.

And, worse, it is working.  They could be right.  We could be doomed!  DOOMED!

So, my point is this: moving off the grid was partly (a small part) motivated along the same lines as the crazy survivalist fringe who hide in buried shipping containers in the hills of Idaho and Montana.  The ones who get a years’ supplies of MRE’s and store them in caves, pack in dozens of guns and tons of ammunition. Store fuel. Try to hide.  Wear camouflage and paint their face black.  That kinda thing.  Real crazies……….

But I’m not that crazy.  Not yet, anyway.  Mind you, I do find myself wanting to store more food.  And a couple of AK47’s with a case lot of ammo doesn’t seem like an over-reaction anymore.  With no road here I can’t really use a blacked out Hummer and no one looks directly at my face by choice anyway so I don’t need to paint anything black.  But I must admit, I think I look good in camo.  Like a cross between Danny deVito and Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf.  Kinda.

The point?  Well, the world continues to turn.  The hugely crippled economies still make bread and pump gas.  And most people are just fine, thank you very much.  So the fear levels promoted all day long are hard to sustain against a reality filter.  Sometimes even a Montana militiaman dug deep in the hills has to think, “Geez, what a beautiful day.  Think I’ll go down to the lake, get a burger, take the kids swimming”.  It can’t be all that bad.  Not all the time.  Not really.

But I confess, there is a part of me that feels that way.  It is not a huge part.  But it is a part.  Moving off the grid was – a little bit – getting off the bullseye.  If not getting off the bullseye, certainly shedding some of the cushion, some of the protective padding that comes with living in the embrace of the social comfort systems.

Living off the grid has reinforced my sense of independence and, in turn, it has also increased my awareness of survivability.  It has to.  And it has.

Maybe it simply comes from being a step removed from supportive society.  Maybe it is simply living more focused on basic survival.  Maybe it is a perspective thing – I just see things differently from here.  I really don’t know.  But I do know that I am more inclined to basic survivalism and that, I think, increases one’s sensitivity, one’s awareness, and yes, one’s sense of possible dangers.  I have a smidge of paranoia.  Call me crazy.

When speaking seasonally, there is a time of contemplation that arises every year ’bout this time.   Despite living off the grid and loving it, we still anticipate the need to leave it for a month or so in the winter.  Most winters, anyway.  But it is not a respite from living off the grid.  Instead, it just a respite from the winter.

It can get a bit dreary and bleak out here in the depths of January or February but, truly, it is a cumulative thing.  Dreary starts in November and just adds up.  So, in anticipation of that, it is time to plan a temporary remove and nothing prompts us more than the last few days of October.

So, we are currently in contemplation mode.  To go south or not to go south – that is the question.

Complicating matters is our changing attitudes towards travel.  We have always considered ourselves travelers and, in the earlier years, even adventurers (so long as it was safe and clean with regular showers and a glass of wine at the end of the day, we were game for just about anything…….well, I don’t like too much dirt, heat or bugs either……..but other than that we were like a fat Indiana Jones and Lara Croft.  Somewhat.  Kinda.).

But that seems to have changed.

Travel doesn’t seem like so much fun anymore.  Airports, of course, are a major part of the problem.  I have added them to my hate-and-avoid list.  And our last trip to El Salvador took an extra bit of stuffing out of us.  It was ugly.  Usually we find something or someone redeeming on a trip but El Salvador was memorable for having nothing but fear and loathing as a memory.

Age is also a factor.  Our way of traveling is, despite the comfort requirements listed above, still hardy-ish requiring lots of local living experiences, hiking and immersion in the ‘real’ culture (or so we think).  We don’t do five-star hotels and fancy restaurants.  Or three or four-star, for that matter.  We take chicken buses.  Stay at B&Bs and hostels.  Eat in the local cafe.  In Thailand, we toured on a scooter amidst the constantly wheeling madding melee – that sort of thing.  The point: we are getting on and we have limited endurance for that sort of thing now.  And too limited funds for the five-start method.  And not much interest in that anyway.  (Well, maybe five days or a week of cushy pool-side would be tolerable.  We can try anything once.).

So foreign travel is diminishing as an option, I am sorry to say.  Not counting the USA, I guess.  Technically still foreign soil and definitely prickly and weird in way too many places, the US is also home to many friends and places of genuine interest and fun. I can still enjoy myself in the US but we are talking golf, BBQs and larger-than-life experiences like Mardi Gras, Burning Man, NASCAR and Las Vegas (only one of which we have experienced).  The US offers up a constant smorgasbord of huge and bizarre for me but getting ‘down and local’ doesn’t have much appeal.  I guess I think I know what it is like to be immersed in local US culture.  I live in Canada, after all.

Homeland Security and ‘get-on-the-ground-NOW!’ stormtroopers freak me out a bit but, being old, fat, white and sporting a short-cropped hairstyle exempts me from most of the usual hassle.  I look like a retired one of them.  I even have a few khaki shirts and, when wearing them, I sometimes sport mirrored aviator sun glasses and call people ‘son’ and say ‘Hoo Rah!’ now and then just to establish a little ‘merican street cred.

……but I digress…………….what to do this winter?  It’s a big question.  A challenge.  But, honestly…………?  Isn’t that a great thing in itself?  Our biggest challenge is how to spend the winter?  Gawd!  Even Saudi Arabian princelings  have more responsibilities than we do.  Isn’t that great?  Face it – this is a wonderful dilemma to have.  Do we leave paradise just because the lights have dimmed?  Or do I just start another deck?    

One might be forgiven for assuming that living at the cottage results in better health.  Living simpler, minimalist and hardier lifestyles, eating local, getting exercise and sunshine – these are the staples of the current and prevailing health myth, as we know.  Cabin-man: the new senior’s health icon!

They could be wrong.

By that myth’s promises, I should be gorgeous and robust, a picture of senior health.  I should be the poster boy for CARP.  I am not.  I am still built like a fridge with a face like a potato.  An old potato.  In fact, I seem to be generating a lot of “How are you feeling?’ and “Are you OK?” comments lately.   When I went to see my doctor not so long ago, he walked into the room and, without so much as a ‘howdyado’, almost screamed, “Chest pains!!?” I had to calm him down.

To be fair, my personal health seems good even if it obviously isn’t obvious.  Mediocre to good, anyway.  I think.  I’m pretty much OK but I don’t have a coterie of grey-haired groupies chasing me around, that is for sure.   Just as well.  I can’t run very fast anymore.

And, unlike in my youth, I’d have to run now.  I couldn’t handle a group of groupies.  A single groupie, maybe.  If we were given a whole weekend.   Preferably a long weekend.  But a single groupie is an oxymoron and, to be frank, any old, grey-haired groupie chasing me around would be, most likely, an oxy-moron with failing eyesight who looks like Frank.

I admit that I was kinda hoping for more.  You know; tanned, weathered face, harder muscles and a slightly less Hitchcockian profile?  Sean Connery-esque?  That kind of thing.  But I am not stupid.  That is not likely to happen – even in another lifetime.  And I have taken steps to cope with that.  There has not and there never will be a full-length mirror in this house, I can assure you.

I still think it is a healthier lifestyle, though.  And so it has been somewhat proven these past few years as I have weathered visibly, rediscovered the odd muscle group and hardly bought a stitch of new clothing.  I have come to think of myself, in comparative terms anyway, as being physically better than I was when I left the city because I am now a bit craggy where before I was a bit saggy.  Admittedly, I am also raggedy but there are few who notice that.  Not out here; the recycled clothing centre of the universe.

But I am writing about all this because I am beginning to have second thoughts about the health benefits of healthy living.

Firstly, because I am so much more active, I ache all over.  All the time.  My back has been sore for months.  And, worse, dirt seems to be accumulating in the newly formed crags and I think some things are starting to sprout!  My skin looks like a garden box in early spring!

Forget about eyesight.   Which is not hard to do because forgetting is so much more prevalent, too.  But my eyesight is abysmal.  I can hardly see the forest for the trees.  Literally.  There is no question I am pushing the physical envelope and some parts are pushing back in protest.

For instance, I have inexplicably become selectively hard of hearing whenever hard work is mentioned.  “Huh?  You talking to me?  Can’t hear you!” And hard work is mostly mentioned by Sal so she is taking it personally.  I am becoming one of those old guys who can only not hear his wife.

I’ll be 65 in a few months.  They’ll give me a gold card.  I can ride the ferry on weekdays for free.  But that is just another myth, really.  The car isn’t free and most seniors can’t walk all over Campbell River carrying outboard motors and three weeks of groceries as they go about their business.  So the car is necessary and the car has to be paid for.  And, surprise – the price of the car on the ferry has gone up 100% in the last few years.  So they have managed to claw back the free part of the senior’s ferry ride and then some.  They must think us stupid.

Which brings me nicely back on topic.  You really can’t beat the aging process.  To expect to do so is, in fact, stupid.  Steve Jobs was a health nut his whole life.  Vegan.  Bottled water.  Slim.  And he died young at around 57.  A friend of mine’s father was a war victim and ate every day as if it was his last meal and the more and the fattier the better.  He never walked and even had one of those ‘scooters’ old people use to ride around Walmart.  He made it to 95.

I came out here partly to live a more healthy life.  And it is definitely a more pleasant and enjoyable one.  I think it is even healthier.  But the results only come in when you check out and so you only know if it was healthier when the information won’t do you much good.  So, the point:  live off the grid because it is more fun and interesting.

Healthier?  We’ll see eventually, I guess.

Almost done the upper landing deck for the new ramp.  Sal and I worked all day on it yesterday.  In the rain.  It was good.  Kind of refreshing, actually.

It was pretty funny, too.  Two steps forward, one step back.  All day.  Cha cha cha.  The deck is small but our work-out put was smaller.  We have almost as much to do again today.

One thing is becoming increasingly evident in our lives: our work output is generally diminishing.  What used to take us a day (mostly because we didn’t have a clue) now takes us three days (and we have a bit more of a clue this time!).  Mind you, it is still only a teeny clue but you’d think we’d be quicker, not slower.  Of course, we still don’t know what we are doing.  Not really.  But at least we have some familiarity with tools and materials and such now.  We should be better and we are not.  Could be an ‘age thing’.

Mind you, we have also had conventional expectations of efficiency and deadlines stripped from us as a result of island living these past eight years.  We don’t expect to make the schedule or even make an estimate of it anymore.  “Let’s get on that deck, eh?  With a bit of luck we could finish today.”

“Yeah!  Right!  We’ll get on it and then we’ll go for tea and then we’ll have a bathroom break or a friend will drop in.  Finish today?  You must be mad!”

“You’re right.  Even tho we only have a few boards to do, we haven’t got a hope, do we?  Don’t know what I was thinkin’.”

“Want some tea?”

It is hard to explain.  I have lived and worked in an environment of great expectations all my life til now.  Parents, teachers, bosses, friends, society.  Banks.  It seems that expectations were always being created and I made my fair share of them.  But, out here?  Not so much.  Not anymore, anyway.  If you live out here for any length of time, the ‘construct’ of expectations, the actual ‘mind-set of it, gradually disappears.

“I have got to get the garlic in.  I am already a week or three late.  They should be in the ground right now or else we won’t have garlic next year!  Aaaaarggghhh!!!”

“Go do it, then!”

“Right after my tea.  I will.  For sure.  Then I’ll go to the bathroom.  We’ll finish off the deck and then, for sure, I will plant the garlic.  For sure!”

That was yesterday…………..

Wind’s howlin’.  Seas are up.  Bits and pieces of trees are whizzing by.  Winter is almost here.

Neighbours aren’t, tho.  The last of ’em left Saturday morning. Miles and miles without a soul around but us.  Fantastic!

Even boat traffic has dropped way, way off.

That kind of loneliness grows old if extended for long but, out here, it is usually a brief thing.  There are still long term neighbours.  They are just a bit further away.  They’ll come.  We’ll go to them.  Eventually.  There will be companionship.  But there is always a feeling of separation around this time – this time of the summer people leaving.

The rest of us tend to use this time to begin hunkering…..however that shows up.  It usually means getting in the wood from the shed, planning some indoor activities, trying to finish a few late outdoor ones.  It is a time marked by making sure the door is kept shut and the larder is full and all the fuel tanks are up for the first half of the winter.  It is a time of not planning off-island activities although, to be fair, I have been slowly dropping those for years.  Hunkering down for the winter is not what it used to mean in the old days but it is still a phenomena out here.  We still tend to hibernate a bit.

Yesterday I began to fill the indoor woodpile from the outdoor shed.  We stack a week’s burning inside to dry it out a bit more and to have it handy.  It is a tiny chore but marked because it signifies the seasonal shift.  Officially, it is now the ‘cold’ season.

Sal went through our clothes-at-hand and put away the summer stuff and pulled out the long-sleeved stuff.  Again, a minor chore.  But symbolic.  And so the next week or two will go.  Things put away.  Other’s pulled out.  We now seem to mark the seasons quite consciously and even, to a significant extent, live by them.

This year is, however, a bit different.  We are also at that age when some friends are dying.  It is pretty harsh but, I suppose, it is the way of things.  The reason it feels so harsh is that it has not been the way of things for us – not my generation.  Not yet.  Not so much, anyway.  Age taking people in clumps is a loss felt generationally and usually only once albeit drawn out over twenty or thirty years.

With too many tragic exceptions, the basic way of things has the 65 year olds beginning to say goodbye with only a few 90-to-one hundred year-olds around to hear it.  But in many cases we also start saying goodbye to our own generation at much the same time as the one that has preceded us.  Sixty plus is the introduction to exiting.  It is a tough course but no one, it seems, fails to pass.

Of course, I mention all this because we currently have the prospect of soon losing some of those connections.  And it will be hard. It may be the reason I feel that the cold season is so soon upon us.  Seemed like only yesterday it was sunny.

A friend requested a bit of back-story about cutting the umbilical cords from the city.  How did we do it? 

I think the first umbilical that was severed was the desire and/or need to be there.  At a certain point in one’s life, the city has a basic appeal.  But that allure is eventually satisfied and the initial purpose of the city diminishes in many fundamental ways.  It is, after marriage and children, no longer the desired bigger and best gene pool, for instance.  For most people in their say, forties, interest in the gene pool wanes.  But, by then, habit has taken over.  Inertia is often the major influence behind how many people live.

After taking the kids away on a long journey one year, I came back with ambivalence towards urban living.  I don’t quite know how that transition happened exactly but the ‘family adventure’ marked the beginning of my antipathy to the cul de sac. Somehow my inertia was moved.  That was likely step one.

I then kinda aggravated my condition by ‘virtually’ exploring different lifestyles on the internet and quickly settled on off-the-grid-ism.  Part of that attraction was the people I met on the Mother Earth News forums.  I just started to look away from the city after our extended trip in 1999.

To be fair, the actual move was made much easier for us by our children soon being away at school.  Both of them went to other cities to study.  And that helped a great deal.  After making sure they were settled in, we just told them that we were going and that their home would soon be gone.  “You are officially fledged”.  But a new home would soon be available up on a remote island.  They handled that very well (just minor fledgling-like squawking and screeching).

Secondly, I have worked most of my life on my own.  With a few short exceptions, the last twenty years were as a self-employed mediator and arbitrator.  So there was no boss (‘cept Sal) and my work obligations were only as long as the current case.  I really wasn’t tied to a career or a company.

Sal was, though, and so we waited until departing felt right for her.  That took a couple of years.  But the time was spent productively with me learning and salvaging, planning and dreaming.  I put the time to good use.  In effect I was in school.  Put succinctly, even though our umbilicals were many, they were not strong and it still took us two years to cut ourselves free.  More like four when you factor in the mental adjustment and learning time.

The actual umbilicals were pretty simple.  I had eight telephone lines.  Home, business, three cell phones, the kid’s phone, a dial-up internet and a fax.  We had four TVs.  Three cars.  And cable TV.  We had a lawn service, a pool service, cleaning ladies and two needy, insecure hair cutters that expected us every month.  Plus, of course, we had friends and social circles, community activities and expectations to deal with.  We were towing multiple drogues even when the seas were calm.

Probably the most illuminating moment in the whole process was a month or so before we left for our long family adventure around North America and Europe.  Sally told me that we had to leave ‘money for the house’ while we were gone.  We had just paid off the mortgage and so I was caught somewhat off-guard.  “What for?”

After Sal’s lengthy listing of monthly payments from Hydro to phones, from car insurance to BC Medical, from lawn and pool care to personal insurance and cable and miscellaneous, I understood.  We had to leave $1800 a month for five months or $9000 for a house that we were not living in!!??  I estimated that, at current tax rates, I was obliged to make at least $2500 a month NOT to live in my house!!??

It was then and it is still is, complete madness to my way of thinking.  More than that — it is a form of enslavement.  It was not right, healthy or even productive for me to live and work to pay for stuff that was attached to me like leeches. It horrified me.  I was nauseated to think to what extent I had become a host to so many parasites.

You might argue that the umbilicals were not parasites but services.  And the argument would, on the surface, be a good one.  But for one thing: most of those services were only in aid of my being able to work.  I did not have eight phones for fun.  I did not have a lawn service because my legs did not work.  All these umbilicals were supports for me to continue paying for the supports.

By the time I figured out where most of my time went, my gasoline went, why I had the clothes I did and how we lived our lives, I was convinced that, despite the golden hues, the umbilicals, habits, behaviours and overhead of it all were just subtle handcuffs.  I was living to work, not working to live.

It was not in the least difficult to cut the umbilicals then.  In fact, it was impossibly hard to stay after that realization.  I couldn’t cut them fast enough.

Some bureaucrats came out to pay us a visit.  Nice folks.  Friendly-like.  They came to see the final portion of the road on the adjacent island that leads down a steep hill to the shore and our community dock.  This dock is where we park our boats when we head in to so-called civilization. But we also bring our small boats onto the beach next to the dock to load heavy supplies and equipment directly from our vehicles.  Getting down the final hill to the water is critical to bringing out building supplies or taking in an outboard for repair.

But it seems there’s some kind of question about whether the portion of road in question is a road if it is not officially called a road and is thus not recognized as one.  It may not exist.  Even if it is there.  And even if cars drive on it as a natural continuance of the real road.

“Well, this isn’t a road.  And, if it was a road, it wouldn’t be a road we recognized.  And, if you disagree, the best way for us to determine if it is a road is for you to take us to court.  If the judge says it is a road, then it is a road.  Until then, we are pretty sure it isn’t a road.”

He’s talking about the road he just drove down to meet me.

The ‘Phantom’ Road

“Well, I am happy to take you to court.  But I don’t really wanna fight the government.  Too exhausting.  If we take you to court, will you argue with us or just roll over?”

“My job is is just to present the facts.  I don’t argue one way or the other.”

“All right then.  Thanks.  I just may see you in court.  In the meantime, do you want to walk down the road, cross over in my boat and head over to our island? We’ll walk up the other road and go for some lunch?”

“I’ll take this trail here to your boat.  ‘Cause I don’t see a road.  But this trail will do.  Then I’ll take the other trail on the other island.”

So, off we went in a real boat on the real ocean though I may have been delusional at the time.  As we traveled, I was thinking of serving them an empty bowl and calling it lunch and, if they looked surprised, I’d say, “Well, take me to court.  Maybe the judge will see this as lunch.  And if he or she calls it lunch, then it is a lunch.  If it is not officially a real lunch, then I’ll serve a real lunch.”

But I am not a petty man.

In fact, I was having some real (or maybe not) existential angst the whole time.

But it was not so bad.  I kinda like this bureaucrat.  He laughs at my jokes.  And he seems harmless enough.  Some of them ‘crats are pretty evil bastards but this one is retiring soon.  He’s pretty benign.  And that’s how I like ’em, benign and retiring.  Invisible is good, too.  A not real bureaucrat is a good thing.  I kinda hope they downsize the Ministry and there is no replacement.  That would make him really not real.  And then there would be no road and nobody to tell me there was no road.

‘Course, I’d still drive down it now and then.

It’s funny about a trip to town especially one that goes on for a week or more.  Your sense of being changes.  Everything feels different.  Little ‘city’ tentacles reach out and touch you, little feelers, sticky cobwebs.  It is like the ‘urban thing’ is an entity and it wants you back.

This weird feeling of inanimate seduction comes naturally enough by just driving familiar streets and encountering friends and acquaintances.  We part after our brief visit with ‘See you at Xmas!’ or ‘Why don’t you come up?’.  And – there you have it – you are back in the loop.  Not a tentacle so much as a ‘sticky’ of some sort.  Something that re-invests you back in the ‘old world’.

Sometimes it is more direct:  “Oh, we have one of those.  We’ll send it to you.” Or “Can I send you my lease renewal for a quick review?”  Our recent re-emergence reminds people of our existence and we come back into their consciousness.  And then we, in effect, re-entangle with them and the larger grid through that friendship or some small business.  And that is OK.  More than OK, actually.  But, sometimes it is just weird.

When Sal and I got back, she was contacted by a small firm that values her editing services on a piecemeal, ad hoc basis maybe once or twice a year.  We hadn’t visited them, hadn’t contacted them.  But their consciousness was  somehow ‘rekindled’ and they made contact.  Probably just a coincidence.  But it happened to me, too.  An old client is now back in touch.

Sal met an old neighbour while shopping.  Another distant old friend left a message. We dropped in to see someone and they put us in touch with………well, you get the idea.

I know.  It is no real mystery.  Just people connecting.  But it does seem weird sometimes; people with whom you have not heard a peep in three years, all of a sudden in contact.  Out of the blue.  And that kind of thing always seems to follow a visit.  It is like we leave a trail of spores or something and these old contacts sniff them in the air.  Hard to explain.

Well, I did leave my raincoat somewhere last time and so that works as a reminder to someone, too.  But, trust me.  I am not talking about leaving my clothes all over town and then wondering why people get back in touch.  This is more subtle.

And, in an equally strange way, the country kind of rebuffs you as well, like you have stood them up or been late to the party.  Two neighbours went to the hospital.  A baby was born.  A wedding took place.  The ravens got into the freezer.  The water system developed a hiccup.  A bottle leaked in the cupboard.  When we left, we hadn’t had the fire on but, one week later, it was obvious that we needed it now.  Just subtle, weird little natural reminders that ‘you were gone too long!’

“Dave!  You’re going nutty on us!”

“Yeah.  I guess.  This stuff isn’t magic.  There is no giant consciousness knowing and caring about our whereabouts.  It is just coincidence or my  overactive imagination.  The weather has changed because the season has changed.  The summer people just left because, well, the summer is over, not because we had just left.  But everything just feels different and…….well…………I am 99% sure it is just a coincidence.  Probably”.

Came home to a littered cliffside.  The ravens somehow managed to open the outdoor freezer and, over the past week, ate the entire contents.  About 40 pounds of raw dogfood, 3 steaks, a whole chicken, a few pounds of bacon and a miscellany of ‘leftovers’ including three plastic yogurt tubs of chicken stock.  We are pretty sure they are so bloody heavy they walked in for the last few meals and we are going to ‘track them’ by their heavy footprints back to their hide-out  What little, fat bastards!

Still, all in all, it is great to be home.  We may have to forage farther afield and a bit sooner for sustenance – thanks to the aerial bandits – but being home is so incredibly great it is hard to complain.  Ravens do what ravens do.

One thing is for sure: I will give them a vociferous piece of my mind when I see them next and that will be the last piece of anything they get from me for a long time!

A heavy yellow pall hung over the sky as we came home.  No idea why.  Looked like urban pollution from Nanaimo to Comox. Much the same on the Vancouver side.  Got over to the next island at dusk and the pristine air there was literally sweeter.  The view unimpaired.  Water was calm and all seemed right with the world.  And then we unloaded to a beautiful ramp on our side that made the chore a fresh breeze!  House fired up (water, gas, electricity) and it was GOOD.

When we go away for any amount of time, we arrange for a neighbour to drop us on the far side so that our vessel can remain at home.  When we return, that same neighbour picks us up and we take our own boat back over to the island-next-door and we load up and then navigate the last mile or so back home.  This is a difficult arrangement when there is no neighbour.  So, I am proposing that we never leave.  Sal is mulling that over.

Community day today.  So no rest.  Wicked work to get done.  I’ll report again soon.