At Home in Nature

by Rob Wood

  According to Jim, “there are two types or outdoorsmen: Happy Warriors versus Whiners and Bitchers.” I interpreted the latter to mean holding our own subliminal fears in abeyance by being fully focused and grounded in the moment and taking full responsibility for the consequences of our attitudes and behaviour.

  Part of that responsibility, which he practised to a high degree himself, was what he called “stewardship of the land.” Jim and others had been fighting successive waves of despoliation of Strathcona Provincial Park by government-sanctioned industrial resource extraction, mostly without success, since its inception in 1911. When, in the mid-1980s, the BC government of the day announced plans to open up 25 per cent of BC Parks, including Strathcona, for more mining and logging, on top of financial difficulties of running the lodge, it all became too much and Jim succumbed to pancreatic cancer. The Orwellian vision of what such government policy might mean for the future of society moved me to pledge to Jim, in his final days, that I would do everything I could to continue his opposition to such a world.

  Fortunately, I was not alone in my pledge of allegiance to Jim and the park. My old friend Stevey Smith and his wife Marlene also picked up Jim’s baton and vowed to run with it. They too had spent many days hiking in the park and shared the love and inspiration for the subtle vibrations of the deep wilderness environs. Marlene described that feeling as “having your spiritual batteries charged.”

  Like David confronting Goliath, we never imagined we could win the battle, but neither could we stand by and watch our mother being raped; we were compelled to do something. So we started a citizen’s action organization called “Friends of Strathcona Park” which soon enlisted huge support from all the communities surrounding the park. A Courtenay contingent organized a rally, attended by 600 people, with speakers emphasizing the spiritual, physical and mental health value of wilderness as well as clean drinking water. Others spoke to the economic value of tourism. A Campbell River group organized a peaceful “sit in” that blocked the highway through the park and temporarily stopped the trucks coming out of the existing mine. This “direct action” attracted the attention of the media and the event was broadcast on province-wide prime time TV news. At a huge demonstration on the lawn of the legislature, in Victoria, 50 blue herons circled overhead.

  When “exploratory drilling” started, we organized a permanent camp vigil near the site, even though it was midwinter with challenging weather conditions. On weekends we formed a human chain around the drill rig, preventing its operation. When the police arrived to remove us there were volunteers who refused to leave. They were arrested and taken off to jail. All this drama was captured on live TV over a period of several months, and each time we had the opportunity to broadcast our message. We taught the cameraman how to keep warm and dry, and even he was inspired by being present on the land. That may have come across on the TV, because the sight of all of these decent-looking people being arrested caught the public’s imagination, and when they heard our message support for our cause escalated dramatically. Particularly effective in this regard was the sight and sound, as each arrestee was dragged away by the police, of one of one our elders, a very dignified old lady, Ruth Masters, playing, “Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee” (slightly off key), on her harmonica.

  When public opinion polls indicated that as many as 75 per cent of British Columbians wanted their parks protected, the government backed off and withdrew their policy of downgrading not only Strathcona but all of BC Parks. The subsequent government increased the proportion of the land area of the province in parks from 5 per cent to 13 per cent and consolidated their protected status.

  All this did not come about by chance or good luck. There was a phenomenal amount of voluntary hard work, many sleepless nights, vast numbers of phone calls, strained family relationships, time away from work and meetings, endless meetings. Tremendous sacrifices were made. Decisions were made by consensus and we used the First Nations method of keeping order by passing the speaking stick. We used Jim Boulding leadership techniques we had honed in the mountains to promote and maintain group synergy – when to push hard and go for it and when to back off and listen. Fortunately, as the protest escalated, new leaders emerged to help relieve the burnout syndrome. We received fantastic support from the environmental network and First Nations. One Native elder addressing a rally in the park said, “If we destroy our environment, we destroy ourselves.”

  Throughout it all, we were unquestionably guided and motivated by the unifying effect of the love we all shared for the land. Those of us who led this rare environmental victory have no hesitation in attributing the success to the survival imperative of Gaia (the living organism of the earth and its biosphere) expressing itself through our unconditional love for the park, which then synergistically resonated with the collective consciousness of British Columbians.

  -12-

  CANCER

  “You must have had some setbacks over the years. What were the worst things that happened to you both?”

  “WELL, LAURIE HAD BREAST CANCER. That was pretty bad!”

  At the end of a ten-day skiing expedition in the Waddington Range, Quintano had just pulled in to our dock with a boat full of ecstatic guests. As I stepped off the boat, Laurie greeted me with the news that “the results of the tests were positive!”

  Breast cancer came as a complete surprise. Surely nothing like the big C thing could possibly be happening to Laurie of all people. She was always so fit and strong. It took us quite a while to get used to more and more bad news that took us progressively further down a road we had never wanted or expected to travel. It was like being out in a storm, always thinking the weather would get better but then having it just get worse and then worse again. So we had to adjust and adapt.

  First, there was a “suspicious” lump, but it might have been benign. No, the biopsy proved it was cancer, so she had to have surgery, which removed not just one lump but two, and which also showed that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. This meant that it was not just Stage One cancer, as we had hoped, but the more serious Stage Two. By the time we got to the bottom of the bad news, Laurie was getting numb to suffering. When the female oncologist said, “The first surgery has not left a clear margin and, though a second surgery may be sufficient, we recommend a complete mastectomy,” her emotional floodgates opened and she experienced the full depths of the despair that makes this such a fearful disease. To give the specialist credit, she gave Laurie the choice and allowed her overnight to think about it.

  Next morning, to my amazement, she got on the phone and told the specialist she didn’t want a mastectomy but would gamble on the second surgery being enough. This time the positive thinking paid off and the second surgery showed a clear margin. We had finally reached the end of the bad news. Laurie’s intuitive decision had been right. The storm wind had changed and now she was finished with diagnosis and ready to start treatment and recovery.

  Because the cancer had metastasized, chemotherapy was required to flush it out of the blood system. This was almost as frightening as cancer. Four three-week courses of an injected cocktail of heavy-duty drugs were prescribed to kill any cancer cells roaming around her body. Unfortunately, there was massive collateral damage, as it also killed all the other fast-growing cells, including all her hair and white blood cells, which are such an important part of the immune system. As well as making her vulnerable to infections, it induced dizziness, vomiting and exhaustion. About this time, we had a visit from Laurie’s cousin Cathy who, by a strange coincidence, also had breast cancer and was also doing chemo. They made each other laugh by goofing around with various fancy wigs and hats. They started what Monty Python would have called “The Ministry of Silly Wigs!”

  It was winter and there was a heavy flu epidemic happening in town so we were staying very close to our remote island home except for the routine visit every three weeks to the hospital for another hit of chemo. We had a scary period when Laurie picked
up a dose of the flu right at the worst time in the cycle, when her immune system was at its lowest ebb. She was laid up in bed with a high fever, tossing violently from one uncomfortable position to another and coughing so hard that it strained her diaphragm. Living where we do on a remote island, we could not simply call an ambulance or drive to the hospital. The doctors agreed that we were better off on our germ-free island so long as we could get in to town quickly if we had to. Normally, we could make it within a couple of hours, and even faster with an emergency helicopter evacuation, but now our anxiety was heightened by a raging storm preventing any prospect of getting to town quickly. Even helicopters can’t fly at night in really bad weather.

  I had done as much as I could think of in the way of nursing and was alarmed by her increasingly high fever and deteriorating condition. Even through the previous months of successive bad news, she was pretty good at looking after herself and not letting things get her down, but now she was starting to lose it and was reaching out to me for help. Nursing did not come naturally to me and I was frantically running around trying to figure out what I could or should be doing. As a last resort, I came and sat on the bed holding her hand. I was desperately trying to calm myself as well as her.

  “Let’s try taking some deep breaths,” I suggested as a particularly strong gust shook the house and rain splattered against the roof right above our heads.

  “I can’t,” she gasped, “it hurts too much.”

  “Just listen to that rain,” I said, nervously filling the silence as much to ease my own anxiety as anything else.

  As we both concentrated on the sound of the rain spattering on the roof and the wind shrieking in the trees, the orchestra of sound alternately ascending and diminishing with all the drama and intensity of a Beethoven symphony, it gradually absorbed our attention and lifted us out of our predicament.

  “Just like being storm-bound in a tent in the mountains.” I reminded her of times we had had together, precariously exposed to severe weather conditions, unable to go anywhere or do anything to improve the circumstances. Resigned to conserving energy by attempting to relax and go with the flow, we had experienced a blissful dream world halfway between wakefulness and sleep and had often joked about how people in California paid big bucks for that kind of therapy known as “lucid dreaming.”

  “Better be a good tent,” she murmured as the coughing stopped. I was mightily relieved to see a faint smile cross her face as she drifted off to sleep.

  Next morning the fever was down, the sun came out and she was up and about and back to telling me what to do.

  On another occasion, near Christmas with short days, we headed into town for the last chemo injection. In the middle of the day I left her at the hospital for her hour-long treatment while I blasted off to do the shopping so we could beat a hasty departure back home to our island before dark and also get her away from the hospital and town germs as quickly as possible.

  As we started the return journey the sky darkened and it started to snow. As we drove up the 15-mile-long remote dirt road on the next island to ours, the snow was accumulating fast and suddenly there was an articulated truck jackknifed across the road, completely blocking it. After considerable messing about trying to help the truck driver move the damn thing, we decided to put the chains on our jeep and four-wheel drive her nose down into the ditch to get around the truck. This went well but we were losing a lot of time and it was already starting to get dark.

  Although we could drive the boat the two miles back to our island through the tidal rapids in the dark, the prospect of a snowstorm blocking visibility altogether was extremely daunting. Worse still, the snow was really piling up on the road, and of course there was no snowplow and there were no tracks because no one else had gotten around the truck. Normally, the prospect of spending a night out in the back of the station wagon, even in winter, did not faze us because we were used to that sort of thing, but with the possibility of Laurie getting chilled, it was unthinkable. Now there was so much snow accumulating on the road that we were starting to worry about the jeep high-centring 12 miles out in the sticks with another four to go. Then, suddenly, there was a big alder tree down across the road. This time there was no way round it.

  “Okay. That’s it. No chance of getting home tonight and no chance of driving back to town, so now what?”

  Fortunately, we had some friends who lived two miles back down the road, and we parked at the end of their mile-long driveway because we didn’t want to risk getting stuck in there. By this time it was pitch dark and snowing like hell as we bundled up and started wading through knee-deep snow down the long, narrow driveway through the forest using a Bic lighter as a flashlight. Branches were snapping like machine gun fire all around us in the forest as great dollops of wet snow came crashing down like avalanches. Heads bent to the storm, arm in arm we soldiered on and eventually saw the lights of our friends’ place. Thank goodness they were home and answered the doorbell.

  “Ho, Ho, Ho!” we laughed, mightily relieved.

  “Happy Christmas! Come on in.” Just as if it were the most normal turn of events. “You’re just in time for dinner!”

  They laid out two extra places and we laughed ourselves into the blissful warmth and safety of their nice, warm king-size guest bed. Next morning they ran us back home to our island in their boat, and I went back for our car a few days later.

  As the days got longer and spring came on, our spirits rose and Laurie’s strength came back along with her hair. By the time she had to go down to Vancouver for an 18-day session of radiation, she was ready for some rock climbing therapy; radiation in Van in the mornings, climbing at Squamish in the afternoons.

  While Laurie was taking on this challenge I had been reading Bernie Siegel’s book Love, Medicine & Miracles. In it he describes how he discovered that approximately 15 per cent of his patients got better, regardless of what he as a mainstream physician did or did not do or say. Similarly, another 25 per cent would not get better regardless of what he said or did. Rather than quitting practice, which was his initial response, he decided to research why this should be the case. He came to the conclusion it was the placebo effect. Some people believe strongly enough that they can get better that they do so. They take responsibility for their own well-being, which has a very beneficial therapeutic effect. Further research indicated that this kind of conviction can only happen with high self-esteem, which in turn depends on loving support. The people who believe they will not get better do not experience loving support and are not able to take responsibility for their own well-being. This phenomenon is reminiscent of Jim Boulding’s “Happy Warriors versus Whiners and Bitchers.”

  No one who knows Laurie had any doubt, and least of all her, that she would recover, and she has in fact done so. With a lot of help from friends, family and community support groups, as well as the Canadian medical system, she’s now well past the critical five-year test for long-term survival.

  -13-

  AORTA ATTACK

  “Bravo, Laurie! What did Rob do to beat that?”

  “HE DAMN NEARLY DIED. IN fact he did die, several times in one day,” she answered.

  Several years after Laurie’s cancer, it was my turn to suffer a very serious illness: a ruptured aorta put me at death’s door. Apparently, during an epic evacuation from our island home, 12 hours in Campbell River hospital emergency room, and eight hours of open heart surgery at the Royal Jubilee hospital in Victoria, I went partway through that door several times before a medical miracle brought me back to tell the tale.

  About nine o’clock one September morning I was alone down on Quintano, tied up at our dock, when I was hit with an intensely sharp pain inside my chest. I managed to stumble backward onto the bunk inside the cabin. Although the pain eased as I lay down, I was sweating profusely and felt wickedly dizzy. I knew right away that I was in big trouble. All I could think of was how to get Laurie to help me. The marine VHF radio was right above my head and for once
I had the right piece of equipment, in working order, at the right place, at the right time. Without hesitation, I reached up and turned it on to Coast Guard Channel 16 and called a marine emergency distress signal, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”

  I gave my name and location, told them I was having serious chest pains and asked them to phone Laurie to coordinate further help.

  It turned out that a neighbour up channel heard the Mayday call and phoned Laurie before the Coast Guard did. In what seemed to me like no time at all, a bunch of people, including Laurie and Fern, the neighbour who had phoned, showed up, and very soon a big military helicopter that had trouble finding a place to land. Luckily for me, it was low tide at the time and the chopper was eventually able to land on the beach close by. I can remember seeing it manoeuvre backward into the beach and put down four hydraulic legs like a giant insect. The neighbours congregating at the dock lifted me into a small boat and took me over to the other side of the bay and then, as if in a scene from “M.A.S.H.,” the military dudes bundled me into the chopper like a sack of spuds and off we went to town. Less than one hour from the initial incident we landed at Campbell River hospital.

  I noticed that it took forever after the engines had shut down on the helicopter pad at the entrance to the emergency ward before anyone came out to get me. It turned out the paramedics were on strike and would not cross the “picket line.” Eventually two emergency room doctors pushed a gurney out and took me in. That’s about the last thing I remember for the next two days.

  Incidentally, I subsequently heard that the same helicopter, just one hour later, had to do an emergency ditching into a lake because its main transmission had failed.

  Then I went through a very serious 12 hour medical ordeal in Campbell River emergency room during which they had trouble figuring out the problem. I had a lot of the symptoms of a major heart attack and yet they could not find anything wrong with my heart. Having concluded after six hours of tests that I had had a “silent” heart attack, they gave me a blood thinner, at which point, apparently, my eyes rolled, I turned blue and my blood pressure dropped off the scale. “Upsydaisy.”