by Rob Wood
This alarmed the ER doctor enough for him to jump outside the box and come up with an intuitive guess as to the correct diagnosis, which turned out to be a very rare and almost always fatal condition described medically as a “Dissected Aorta.” The ruptured lining of my aorta was not only constricting the primary arterial blood flow, it was leaking blood into the cardiac sac and putting increasing external pressure on my heart, thereby steadily decreasing its function. So it then became a race against time to get me down to Victoria’s Royal Jubilee Hospital for surgery. But first they had to stabilize me enough to survive the helicopter air ambulance (AA) flight.
The AA chopper eventually left Campbell River about ten o’clock that night. Apparently it was touch and go whether I would survive the journey but I did. They had trouble finding a surgeon at short notice, but the one they found told me later that he was just out in the park walking the dog when he got the call. He actually called Laurie, who was being driven down to Victoria by some friends at the time, to ask her permission to operate on me. He said he would phone in the night if there were any problems. If she didn’t hear anything she should show up for visiting hours at nine in the morning.
Open heart surgery started at 11 o’clock that night and lasted eight hours through the night. They had to completely replace three inches of the ascending aorta with a Dacron graft and also repair the aortic valve in the heart. This required not only bypassing the heart but also bypassing the heart/lung bypass machine by freezing my body down to 20°C. This cooling closed my whole circulatory system down except the very core of my brain, into which they pumped oxygenated blood through a peripheral artery in my shoulder. They almost lost me a couple of times because after they had completed the stitching job, reconnected everything and started the heart up again, the graft was still leaking and they had to start the whole bypass procedure all over again, twice.
When Laurie, Kiersten and my sister showed up at the intensive cardiac care unit for visiting hours at nine o’clock next morning, there I was, unconscious and full of tubes, with a nurse at the bedside working full-time on monitoring all the life support systems. Against only 3 per cent odds of survival, I was still alive.
The same time on the following day, I was sitting up in bed smiling, totally oblivious of my narrow escape, and everyone who came in saying, “Gee, you look great!”
“Huh?” I replied. “What’s going on? Why shouldn’t I be looking great?”
Many people ask if I had any profound revelations from my near-death experience. There was nothing dramatic. After all, I was unconscious through the worst of the crisis, and after I woke up, I was still heavily drugged. Apart from a few sleepless nights tormented by hallucinations, I was infused with very positive feelings of security and well-being that, like the hallucinations, were no doubt induced by the pain-killing morphine. However, during the eight days I was in the hospital, as I was weaned off the heavy drugs and became more aware of what was going on, I became increasingly impressed by another source of well-being and security: the technical proficiency and the dedicated care of the hospital staff, well above and beyond the call of duty.
I particularly remember an incident on day three of my stay in the cardiac ward of the Royal Jubilee Hospital. I had just had a phone call from my oldest sister in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She had offered to help pay our bills so Laurie and I did not need to worry about that end of things for a while. I was suddenly overwhelmed by such a powerful wave of emotion that I was shaking with a fit of uncontrollable weeping and sobbing. There happened to be a male nurse close by who came and sat on my bed. Embarrassed, I was trying to apologize for my crying.
“Don’t you worry about crying,” he said with a strong East Indian accent, “It’s perfectly natural. After such a life-threatening, near-death experience, your hormones and emotions are all over the map. That’s quite normal you feel like you have been born again.” That cheered me up right away.
“Where you from?” he continued.
“Up near Campbell River,” I replied.
“No. No. Where are you really from?”
“Okay. Yorkshire,” I countered without hesitation
“Oh my God!” he retaliated, “That’s Geoffrey Boycott country!”
Boycott is Yorkshire’s and England’s most famous cricketer.
“I never saw him play,” I conceded.
“You didn’t miss a thing,” he proclaimed in mock derision.
At that point my breakfast tray arrived, and lifting up a lid he proclaimed with even more derision, “Oh my God, it’s porridge! I can’t stand the smell of it. I had too much of the stuff at boarding school in India, and don’t mention pudding.”
So deeply moving was the wave of humanitarian empathy embedded throughout this conversation that it will stay with me a long time.
The number of well-wishing phone calls, emails, cards and visits I received was surprising. I had no idea people cared about me so much. There’s no doubt in my mind that this incredible dedication of the Canadian rescue and health care system and the loving support from family, friends and community had a lot to do with my survival and initial recovery from this horrendous ordeal. I did not exactly see any bright lights, but on the other hand, I can’t believe that what everyone agrees was my extraordinary survival was just a matter of luck or random chance. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that.
No one can endure the kind of life-threatening illnesses that Laurie and I did without some serious soul searching, especially concerning the central questions of cause and prevention of recurrence.
We didn’t know what caused the breast cancer or the torn aorta or if there was anything about our life that we could or should be doing differently. On the surface it’s hard to imagine a healthier lifestyle and diet than ours. We ate more fresh fish and vegetables than most people, and Laurie, at least, was always so positive, cheerful and active. You had to know her really well to have noticed any suffering or unhappiness. Even though there was a history of some breast cancer in the family, including her mum, apparently it did not stack up as a worse than average predisposition to the disease – and yet somehow she got it. We both felt the cancer and the high blood pressure, possibly in some degree a genetic predisposition, were most likely caused by some uneasiness inherent in our lifestyle. Something in our lives must have been out of balance.
We have always been aware of the potential danger of too much self-reliance, which, while rewarding the natural self, can starve the social or cultured self, resulting in isolation and social poverty. It was not uncommon in our neck of the woods to see people with “cabin fever” who were “bushed”: individuals who spent too much time alone or couples who had difficulty maintaining vitality and freshness in their relationships, especially when confined indoors together for long periods during the dark winter evenings.
We had to admit that our personal relationship might have been getting a bit rusty as many of our co-op neighbours had drifted away from the island not to return, except as occasional summer visitors. Although the community continued to exist, it had become geographically scattered. The kids remained close friends but they rarely came together on the land anymore. Laurie and I are now the only remaining year-round residents. I had always wanted to live in a village, albeit a remote one, but an isolated homestead was not the ideal we had bought into in the beginning. We now suffered from a disappointing isolation and a lack of resonant social energy to recharge our batteries. The personal difficulties it engendered between the two of us may well have contributed to significant deficiency in the wellness that can be derived from a loving environment. The health crises rocked us both out of our complacency, however, and taught us not to take for our love for granted.
An additional cause of frustration was our increasing economic dependence on the system. The downside of living adventurously out on the edge is the economic uncertainty, which we admit was very stressful. Being self-employed, and only partially so at that, we never knew where o
ur next dollar would come from. In the past we had lived a very rustic and materially Spartan lifestyle. In other words we were voluntarily poor. Since the other folks around us were equally poor it never seemed to matter except when we went to town, which we rarely did. Part of our managing to stay on the island while other people had left, however, was due to our succeeding in making ourselves more comfortable, though still living strictly within our means without any debts or subsidies. Although we had more income these days from my increasingly successful home-based design practice, it meant more running into town and back as well as more responsibilities and stress. Striking a healthy balance between dependence and independence was easier said than done.
As soon as we could we took the opportunity of a long holiday abroad to focus on these central questions, to reflect on the lessons we have learned from living close to nature and to read up on some possible alternative new directions for ourselves as well as for society.
Inspired by hot tropical beaches and cool mountain breezes, we returned home with a renewed sense of commitment to the self-sufficient lifestyle but with a much broader understanding of what we meant by “self.” We concluded that far from the conventional idea of rugged and independent individuals, our true self-reliance resided in our connectivity with both our social and natural world. Our new-found conscious intention was to strengthen all the various relationships that make up our field of care, our love.
-14-
OUTER ISLANDS COMMUNITY
“What kind of community do you have now?”
FORTUNATELY FOR US, JUST AS our co-op community was fizzling out, the larger but still local outer islands community, centred around the school, the post office, the community centre and the dock on the next island continued to flourish. There still remain a lot of year-round residents, and quite a few newcomers have arrived who have chosen to live in the area mainly because of the natural beauty and the lure of the off-grid lifestyle. Funnily enough, some of them keep on having children, so the presence of the community school is still a strong attraction.
Unlike our co-op, which started with grand ideological aspirations that couldn’t be sustained, the outer islands community has evolved smoothly and continues to thrive because it has, at its core, not so much ideology as live experience of sharing both the natural beauty and the inherent adventure of travelling on the water and through the forests. Consequently, when people congregate at the centre they invariably bring some of the natural high energy, as well as humility, that comes from engagement with the wild natural environment. Everyone is keen to help others when they are in trouble, especially on the ocean, because they know that next time it could easily happen to them. We all look out for each other. Living off grid is not so much about solar panels and baking bread as about paying attention and being fully present in the moment. This honest sincerity builds on itself to form an authentic sense of community that combines capitalism’s self-interest with socialism’s sharing to form a new undefined ideology, neither left nor right, meeting somewhere in the middle or round the back. Although each family has its own unique livelihood, with considerable diversity of income levels, there is unwritten subliminal agreement that, rather than how rich or poor people are, it’s enjoyment of the beauty and adventure of the place that counts. Because of this essentially green experience being its main foundation, the community could be considered an eco-village.
Although this new kind of village has the all-important central meeting place of a more traditional model, complete with even a public green space and direct and convenient public access, it is more spread out. Many of the folks live along the shorelines of the neighbouring channels, each with their own private dock and boats that link us all together. I have recently heard us all referred to as “the boat people.”
Even the folks who live on the same island as the village centre and walk or drive off-highway vehicles to get there have had to travel by their own private boats to get to their island, there being no direct public road access. Although outboard motors are not green, they do connect the more remote homesteads with each other and with the village centre. Not all of the remote homesteaders within a five-mile radius of the community centre care to participate much in community affairs, but many do, and just about all the 100 or so year-round residents come to the village dock and post office at least once a week to collect their mail, which arrives three days a week by float plane.
A weekly market and lunch, held on the public dock on Wednesdays, brings people together in all kinds of weather to socialize, collect their mail and trade their produce. This event is also becoming a popular, unique tourist attraction in the summertime. This helps the peripheral homesteads, like ours, to be more efficient through specialization and division of labour. For instance, we sell or trade our surplus eggs and seasonal vegetables there on a regular basis. The community market provides a bit of cash flow and welcome social entertainment, all of which contribute to strengthening the symbiotic relationship between the homesteads and the community, making them both more sustainable.
A monthly newsletter greases the communication wheels with information, debate, entertainment and intrigue. The soulful old buildings that were built by the hippies are now being used by their grandchildren. The bunkhouse, for instance, continues to function as a community centre and has recently been refurbished with a brand new kitchen extension. The old school building has been renovated and converted into a community woodworking shop. Both these projects depend largely on volunteer labour and donations of local materials, although some grants from governments and private charities have also been enlisted. On the write-up for grant applications, part of the stated “intended use” of the bunkhouse kitchen was the more humorous than realistic notion of teaching men how to cook, while the crafts shop was to teach women how to build.
A project I volunteered a lot of time on was building a new dock at the public road end access. This is the gateway to the outer islands if you are on the way out from town or the gateway to the rest of the world if you’re on your way in. It’s where we change out of boat mode into car mode and vice versa. The rough dirt public road, connecting as it does with the main provincial highways and ferries, was always there, but in the old days it was barely usable, and most town trips required a ten-mile boat ride which, in winter, was right into the teeth of the southeasters on their way up the Georgia Strait from Seattle. While contributing to all kinds of wild adventures, this also made life in the outer islands more dangerous, especially for those folks with marginal old boats. It was one more additional and expensive factor in whether people were able to hang in and remain in our area or not.
More recently the road was improved and a private float was installed which enabled boats to tie up and be left reasonably safely, and a few people started using it. The main catch was the 30-foot gap between the float and the shore. There was a makeshift raft on a pulley and the obvious unwritten understanding was to always pull the raft back to the float when you’d finished using it. Unfortunately, all too often some bozo gapped out and left the raft on the shore side so the raft got hung up on the rocks as the tide went out, resulting in the next users having to strip off and swim to get back to their boats after a tough day in town.
A few years ago our local regional district councillor and I brokered a three-way partnership deal between the local government, a local fish farm and the local community to build a properly certified small boat dock for public pedestrian use. The local council would take over the lease, ownership and insurance and provide a grant for a new ramp; the private company would donate recycled galvanized steel and Styrofoam-billeted floats while the local community users would volunteer labour and materials for a new landing stage.
When at last, after years of bureaucratic contortions, we were ready to start construction, it was midwinter and we needed a really low tide so we could pour concrete pads for our pilings on the intertidal foreshore, but at this time of year the low tides are at night. So there w
e were at ten o’clock at night on the slippery beach with an icy northerly outflow wind blasting arctic cold air out of Bute Inlet from the Interior Plateau. We had generators running for floodlights and cement mixers, with a gang laying out forms, another carrying buckets of navy jack from a pickup truck at the bottom of the hill across the beach to the site and yet another mixing cement and wheelbarrowing it into the forms. With at least a dozen people working hard to keep warm the job got done, and just in time before the rising tide wetted our forms. We all dispersed into the blackest of winter nights, some of us bucking a huge flood tide to boot – quite a relief to get back home for a hot toddy and a warm bed!
This small project, though fraught with bureaucratic delays, was very rewarding in itself, serving as it does to make the outer islands more accessible to the public and the rest of the world more accessible to the islanders; it was a great boost to community spirit and the most successful of my experiences with the mainstream public process.
-15-
OFF-GRID HOMESTEAD
“What’s your place like now?”
OUR HOMESTEAD IS THE HEART of our field of care and a good place to focus our conscious intention to consolidate our relationships with our environment. It occupies a two-acre clearing in the forest that opens out onto a mossy bluff overlooking the ocean. Most of the clearing is a grassy south-facing meadow with some recently planted fruit trees that have now become an orchard. We also have about half an acre of garden fenced off with an eight-foot-high cedar picket fence to keep the deer out.
