Читать книгу Disaster in Paradise - Amanda Bath - Страница 4

Prologue

Christopher and I fell in love on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, in the summer of 1992, two years after we first met at his family’s summer cabin there. We sat down together on the rocky shore, as the moon scattered a pathway of diamond light towards us across Lake Huron, and made plans for our future. “Could you live in Canada, do you think?” Christopher asked me. I assured him that I most certainly could. One city was much like another, right?

“Right,” he agreed. “How would it be if we moved west to British Columbia?”

I kissed him and concurred, my mind’s eye already envisaging a tidy condominium apartment a bit like my home in London, England, but overlooking Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean.

Christopher went on to tell me about a place called Johnson’s Landing, a remote rural community at the north end of Kootenay Lake in the southern interior of British Columbia. His sister, Renata, had just moved there with her partner, Reid, and their three daughters, and lived in a house rented from the local potter. Christopher described his sister’s delight at its large, sunny gardening space, and the abundant food they grew. In my urban ignorance I wondered why they’d go to so much trouble. Surely they had shops?

As summer waned, I made decisions that shifted my life’s trajectory. I decided to abandon a financially secure, intellectually rewarding research job, a home in London near my parents and the comfort of safe routines, in exchange for a much less predictable existence. We’d be travelling for a while with no fixed abode and our financial outlook was precarious. In order to work I had to apply to become a landed immigrant in Canada. Love gave me courage and I barely paused to consider the implications. I was confident of my future path beside Christopher, wherever we chose to go, and excited by the novelty of it all.

We left Manitoulin for Minnesota, where Christopher’s father, Hanno, and stepmother, Julie, had their home. From there I flew to England, resigned from my job and emptied out the apartment in London. I gave away most of my possessions, stored the remainder with my parents, kissed Mummy and Daddy goodbye and was back in Christopher’s embrace within eight weeks. We packed, prepared for the long road trip and, in early November, left Minnesota in the “White Whale,” Christopher’s Dodge van and home-on-wheels. A luxurious queen-sized mattress filled the back; as a concession to the sensibilities of his English sweetheart, Christopher put up curtains.

We crossed the border into Canada at Creston, BC, and made our way up the east shore of Kootenay Lake. The highway was winding and narrow, the day stormy and overcast. We only just made the ferry to the west side of the lake—ours was the last vehicle waved on board.

Even under heavy clouds and in the face of a biting wind, the mountain scenery was dramatic. A lifelong city girl, I’d never seen anything like this place. The lake, a one-hundred-kilometre trench of deep clean water, lies between two rugged mountain ranges: the Selkirks to the west and the Purcells to the east. Its water drains into the vast Columbia River system.

Johnson’s Landing is one of the most remote communities in the West Kootenay. We drove through the village of Kaslo (population one thousand) and continued north. At the head of the lake we turned right and crossed the Lardeau River. Then another sharp right turn sent us south, once more on the east shore of the lake, beside the Argenta Flats, a wetland area and rich wildlife habitat. The road south was a gruelling twenty-two kilometres of unpaved dirt road: a juddering, corrugated dust bath in summer, and mud porridge in early spring, so Christopher told me. The road was at its best during winter freezes when snow and ice filled the ruts and potholes, and after the grader put a coat of grit overtop.

Johnson’s Landing’s “centre”—a community hall, a bulletin board and a bank of green mailboxes—was too small to be called a village. A broad spread of acreages extended over a bench of land above the lake and along the shoreline, ranging in size from half a hectare to just over twenty hectares, thirty-six properties all told, with some forty full-time residents. The community was named for Algot Johnson, a Swedish miner and trapper, who came to Kaslo from Colorado in around 1895. The story goes that in 1901 a storm drove his rowboat into the bay of what was to become known as Johnson’s Landing, while he was out fishing. He liked what he saw, saved his money and in 1906 bought sixteen hectares of virgin wilderness on the bench of land above the shore.

We found Renata and Reid, that grey November day, in their home adjoining the Johnson’s Landing pottery studio, with their daughters Rachael, Delanie and toddler Margie.

The place didn’t have a single shop or amenity. What was the allure? I pondered this question a day or so later, sitting on the half-rotted dock, gazing out across the lake with not a house in sight. Maybe that was it: an attraction of opposites, a place and way of life I had never experienced or imagined. The views, the peacefulness and the spirit of the tiny community quickly convinced me. I had no hesitation telling Christopher this wild, remote place was where I wanted us to live.

Our great good fortune, the following year, was to become the caretakers of a beautiful property in the Landing, a rustic lakefront house with a stunning view south towards the Salmo–Creston range. A meandering driveway crossed little Gar Creek over a tiny bridge, and led down from the house to the garden and the “post office cabin”: a one-room log house dating from the 1920s that had served as the community’s post office in the early days of settlement. I found a date stamp hammered into the hand-hewn cedar wall: Johnson’s Landing 21 Dec 1951.

The first white settlers were farmers and orchardists who planted apples and cherries and shipped the harvest out to market on the sternwheeler ferryboat that came up Kootenay Lake once a week with the mail and provisions. There wasn’t a proper road until 1957. People thought nothing of walking to and from Argenta (home to about a hundred and twenty people), seven kilometres each way, for a community event, a square dance or a celebratory meal. Life was hard work but straightforward. You either hacked it or you moved to town.

The house we lived in was built in the late 1960s by Ruth and Frank Burt, who bought the large acreage with two kilometres of waterfront from Jack Raper. After the marriage ended and Frank left the Landing, never to return in Ruth’s lifetime, numerous individuals helped finish her house. Ruth was a Quaker who welcomed every passing stranger. In the late sixties and early seventies these strangers included many young men of draft age who left the United States to avoid being sent to fight in Vietnam. Evidently, more than a few of them had never wielded a hammer in their lives. The over-constructed bathroom door, for instance, was a massive jigsaw puzzle of heavy wood off-cuts, with elephant-track hammer blows around each nail.

Designed by Elmo Wolf, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, the house had a pleasing upward sweep to its shed roof. Inside, the cedar plank ceiling angled up towards large picture windows that looked straight down the lake. We had what realtors call a “million-dollar view.” A glory we never took for granted.

This was our paradise. We often called it that, immensely grateful for the privilege of living there. After Ruth Burt died her son was our landlord for more than a decade. Like Ruth, he endorsed our initiatives to improve the house and exterior landscaping. Always supportive and generous, he encouraged us to regard this beautiful place as our permanent home.

Returning was always a joy. We’d slide back the bar of the curious old Dutch front door that opened outwards, step over the threshold and inhale the faint cedar perfume. Enormous elk antlers hung on the wall over the staircase. We climbed four steps to the main floor: an open plan kitchen, dining and living room. Also, latterly, our bedroom, while the actual bedroom was under reconstruction.

We lived within a minute’s walk of Gar Creek and the lake. I seldom crossed the bridge without stopping to pay my respects, as though before an altar. I usually looked upstream, and watched the water as it gushed towards me round the bend, under the horizontal root of an old cedar stump, and chattered onward between mossy boulders, down to the lake. Wild blackcurrant bushes nodded on the bank. The creek was, to us, a living presence with a soul, a spiritual place. We often heard voices there. I sensed its blessing as I passed on my way to the garden.

Our garden over the years became a study in driftwood and rock decoration. Christopher is an inspired landscape designer who loves to beachcomb and play with what he finds. Our garden gateposts were two upended driftwood tree trunks, their root balls standing tall like hairy-headed giants. The gate was also made of driftwood, and more pieces wove their way along the fence and marked out the garden beds.

Inside the garden, a motley collection of perennials greeted us every spring: rose bushes, clematis, phlox, hydrangeas, campanula, lilies and anemones. A grapevine crawled along the fence and Virginia creeper clambered up the gatepost. Several trees took up residence over the years, including a very fruitful mulberry, a snowball tree and an English oak grown from an acorn. I made a stab at growing vegetables but found it a bit of a struggle. The garden stood in partial shade, on top of beach gravel, and every crumb of nutritious soil had to be made or imported: compost, manure, mulch. Trying to feed the plants and prevent the beds from drying out in the August sun was a full-time task.

From Johnson’s Landing we came and went. I had a small, utilitarian house in Kaslo, purchased in 2001. I was the coordinator of the Kaslo and Area Hospice from 1999 to 2007 and sometimes needed to spend the night “in town,” as we said. Later, we rented the house out for several years but in 2012 I told Christopher I didn’t want to look for another tenant, even though we’d have been glad of the income; I wanted to enjoy it myself.

Kaslo was one of the most beautiful villages I’d ever seen in British Columbia. But we always loved getting back to the Landing. It meant hearing the chuckle of water in the creek as we opened the car door, inhaling the clean forest air and, best of all, being greeted at the door by our beautiful black cat, Ozzie. He always pretended to be angry at our absence but was palpably overjoyed to see us. I would scoop him up and bury my nose in his fur. His fragrance was the reassurance and confirmation that I was back, I was home.

Ozzie, curled up on the bed where he enjoyed many morning naps.

Photo: Renata Klassen