Notes from the simple life in Haida Gwaii. Words :: Susan Musgrave.
As I crumple an old newspaper to light a fire in the wood stove, an article catches my eye: Every day, a teacher in a remote corner of southern China treks an hour and a half up and down craggy peaks to reach his students on a mountain ridge in a limestone cave, “without electricity, running water or any other amenity that would identify it as a home for residents of the 21st century.” Sounds like home sweet home to me.
The newspaper is dated December 11, 1993, but the news hasn’t changed much. Weapons of mass misery, genocide, political blunderings—the so-called real world seems a long way from the misty, mystical isles that I call home. Here in the wilderness of Haida Gwaii, I encounter a different sense of time, where my days fail to follow orderly paths, unfolding instead in unpredictable ways. I reset my body and mind to a cosmic time frame, plan my activities around the incoming and outgoing tides, the rising and setting sun.
When people find out where I live, they often ask, “Don’t you feel isolated, living out there, away from it all?” I even had a taxi driver in Toronto ask me if I came from an “excluded” sort of place.
Living in seclusion, or exclusion if you like, does have advantages. People are forced, by circumstances, to be polite to one another. You can’t risk running the local undertaker off the road because he turns in front of you without signaling—you may need his expertise one day. Living in a small town, you never have to use your turn signals, anyway: Everyone knows where you are going.
When people find out where I live, they often ask, “Don’t you feel isolated, living out there, away from it all?” I even had a taxi driver in Toronto ask me if I came from an “excluded” sort of place.
At the north end of the world, home to any number of social misfits who have fled from the normal stresses of modern living, the barter system is alive and well. If you want all your garbage hauled away, you leave a reefer on top of your can as an incentive for the local collector. In the old days when they hired strippers at the hotel, one now-famous local beachcomber is said to have offered an exotic dancer 50 pounds of shrimp to pass the night with him.
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Life is simple here, pared down to the bare necessities. We have only one traffic light, for instance, and few other signs giving directions. There is no such concept as mañana on Haida Gwaii; no word exists for even that kind of urgency. A tourist once stopped for Buddy—a local character who spent his days walking the five miles, back and forth, between Skidegate and Daajing Giids—and asked him if he needed a ride. “No thanks,” Buddy replied, “I’m in a hurry.”
But the simple life can get busy here. Between cleaning crabs, gutting deer, canning razor clams and picking huckleberries for pie, I finally find time to finish reading the article about Yang Zhengxue and the limestone cave dwellers. The only modern appliance they possess is a battery-operated plastic alarm clock. Twice a day its owner lets it chirp on and on, for 45 minutes or more, “not to tell the time, but to entertain, like music from a Stone Age radio.” Those cave dwellers sound too high-tech for me.
Haida Gwaii. No place else compares to living where you can see three rainbows in the sky at once, count 25 eagles perched on the same rock, or lie out under the stars in August and watch the Perseids, the Northern Lights and forked lightning all at the same time. And when the winter storms start howling and the plane doesn’t come in, when the ferry is stuck in Prince Rupert and supplies are running low in the Co-op and the Government Liquor Store, there’s no place on this earth I’d rather be.
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