OpHippie: Mackenzie Beach Sunset

So maybe living off the grid with a bunch of unpredictable hippies in a cabin named after Jean Lafitte’s pirate hideout in the middle of nowhere at the End of the Road (literally, there is only one road in and no roads out except the same damn one, backwards) near a place known as Tuff City wasn’t the most stable of choices.

Still.

From the Department of Did Not See That Coming:

After a year and a half of my good friend Shahee making a (very!) modest living trying to get the Symbiosis Ecovillage going on the property known as Poole’s Land, the property owner has decided to pull the plug. The property itself has been for sale the entire time, and one gets the feeling he’d just as soon sell it to one guy who already has the money as wait around for a spontaneous group of moneyed hippies to somehow manifest and unite, Transformers-style, into a single twinkle-fingered ConsensusBot which somehow has three quarters of a million dollars.

Which is down from the two million price tag I’d heard about a couple of months ago.

Still.

The upshot is, we can all stay and carry on as usual except that working for Michael, the property owner, suddenly outranks working for Symbiosis in our daily Workshare regimen, because it is now not going to be Symbiosis. That, I’ll remind you all for lo, all of you except those in inherited houses are working far more to keep yourself housed, is two hours a day working at various tasks from keeping the common areas clean to shoveling the humanure composting bins out to spreading broken tiles in the potholes (with the result that our potholes have rainbow auroras and look like they were made by Dale Chihuly at a Greek wedding) and the like. So now, all the long term planning tasks are gone, replaced by “let’s get this place in shape for summer short term campers” tasks.

Which is not simply a change of labour, but also a significant change of direction and thinking.

All of this, combined with the fact that Shahee, the one who convinced me that moving here was a good idea, is probably leaving to find work, has brought things rather to a head. Into my head. Which is already pretty crowded and busy, if you ask me.

Yesterday P left. He’s a wacky, cheerful, tall, blond surfer with a part-time job at the gas station and a habit of materializing at the most improbable times simply to hang out in silence for an hour, then leave, calling the experience “peachy” and wishing me “a beautiful experience today,” accompanied by the prayer hands and little bow gesture that probably has a proper yoga name that I don’t know.

Today S was raging, or as close to raging as a man who is constitutionally incapable of rage can be, about how he came here and stayed here not because he wanted to camp in the swamp and be a hippie, but because he wanted to be living rough now and working to build something for his future, so that by the time he’s 26 or 27 he’ll have a place to live, and he’ll have built it with his own hands. And who’s to tell the man he does not have that right? But he can’t do it here; he’s now too busy weeding the kale fields and hauling lumber to clear the campsites, to say nothing of not, you know, actually owning the land.

So here I am, having received (at a guess, but I’m pretty goddam good at guessing) $500 worth of gifts and cash (returned $200 because YAY, had gotten a brief paying gig!) from a handful of generous souls who wish me well on this adventure and want to support it, and having spent a great deal of my own money to get to the place and equip it (rather glad I didn’t spring for my own axe, thank god), I am now wondering whether to chuck it all in.

This ecovillage is dead. Long live the ecovillage.

Symbiosis will carry on. It just won’t live here. And that’s actually okay, because here, objectively speaking, is 17 acres of swampy rainforest with a protected salmon stream and within the town limits, so subject to building codes, thus ruling out pretty much any structure you could really call an “earthship.” Which is what ecovillages are generally made of, not abandoned Chevy vans circled like musk oxen against predators.

Now, the question becomes do I tag along with Shahee, should he bolt, and land in some other ecovillage, or on the property of an obliging hippie type looking to ecovillage-ize? Even though I don’t actually have a bus or even a tent? Or do I close the Grand Experiment and truck all this sophisticated camping gear back to The Big Smoke, where I have nowhere to live and couldn’t afford it if I did? Or do I sit tight, work on my Secret Project (Oh, I didn’t tell you about the Secret Project? THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S A SECRET!), get my healthcare and paperwork and ID up to date, get a driver’s license, continue to talk to S2 about a work/trade for the bus she has for sale, convert the bus like Shahee‘s into an incredible mobile home, and save money until the passport comes in, as was the Whole Original Plan in the First Goddam Place?

Well, is it really a question?

Any situation, however chaotic, that I am already in is always my default choice as compared to any new situation unless the new situation comes with paid-up housing that includes deep bathtubs suitable for hours-long soaking, and that is simply a fact. I often say of myself that I’d put more effort into avoiding crises if I didn’t take such pride in my ability to cope with them, to which the friend who knows me best said, “That is the most self-aware thing you’ve ever said.”

This preference for stasis will no doubt come as a surprise to most of you who are familiar with my rather adventurous-seeming lifestyle, but then most of you didn’t see the mildew on the apartment that I’d hung on to for thirteen years. As long as I have a place to come home to I’m perfectly content to go to some crazy dangerous places on day trips, or even overnights, provided there’s wifi, I assure you.

So. Sunrise. Sunset. Sunrise? I’m still about 10% on the fence, but for now it looks like I’m staying.

But it definitely looks like I won’t be giving this blog URL to the landlord.

PS: for what it’s worth, the rainbows are still following me.  All the way from Port Alberni, in fact. I hope it’s a good sign.

OpHippie Rainbow means pot AND gold at the end? What if I don’t like pot? Can I just get a nice Guatamalan poncho instead?