A true beach hippy story from 1973
What not to do in a canoe
We were very young. I was 18. I had just birthed my first child. He was born on the beach, that summer. We were beach hippies. We did everything on the beach.
We had already said goodbye earlier that year, in February, to three of our men folk. We lost them to the ocean or something, at Brooks Peninsula, one of them was the father of my child. I was a widow and a single mother. I was just as lost as the rest of our tribe. The young men’s bodies were never found. For unknown reasons the Canadian Coast Guard refused to do a search. The Coast Guard said it was because it had been 6 weeks since they went missing. But they would have searched for the Prime Minister’s son. That we knew. We didn’t trust ANYTHING to do with government. Some of us think there was more to the story. Stay tuned for more on that mystery in another story.
It was a sad summer. We drowned our sorrows in gallon jugs of wine, pipes of hashish when we could get it, and pots of coffee when the wine ran out.
Sometimes we carved wood by the light of the full moon.
Each of us had come to the West Coast of Vancouver Island looking for Nirvana. That’s what we all thought. Deep down we were actually looking for healing and for inner peace.
It was 1973. The Vietnam War was raging. The US was using napalm on innocent civilians and calling it a justified war of idealism, against the so called RED threat. We watched that on our colour TVs. It was disgusting and truly traumatising. Us children and youth were expected to cope with this knowledge, these horrifying images, we didn’t.
The nuclear threat was real, and constant. Our parents didn’t understand our genuine sensitivities to these issues because they were a post war generation. All they could think about was how grateful they were to be alive. They celebrated by having lots of babies, us, the baby boomers.
He was 19 or 20 I don’t remember which. He had a jaunty outlook and didn’t think much could touch him. Most of us had the same outlook. We were wild and unpredictable. We had been made to believe that our generation was probably going to come to an abrupt end with a nuclear global war. So we cast our Fates to the wind, we lived that way, every day.
I remember not being able to imagine myself living past 30 years of age. It seemed impossible the way things were going.
Just to make a few things clear in case assumptions are being made.We were wild and unpredictable but we didn’t have orgies or make a habit of trading partners as most people assumed. We didn’t swing. Sexually we were pretty straight laced as we all came from “good Christian homes”. Us women in the group held the line on what was acceptable, we considered ourselves liberated. There was only consensual sex going on. We only accepted heterosexualism and we even used nasty words like fag and lesbo in our parlance.
We were not a commune. Although we did some things together we were definitely very programmed in our thinking , we behaved more like rugged individuals. In the summer we hung out together, naked, during the day, in a camp right on the beach and usually pooled our resources. Our feet got very tough because we never wore shoes in the summer and wore rubber boots only in really bad weather in the winter. In the winters we each had our own beach shacks made of plastic, driftwood and split cedar boards. There was a lot of available wood on the beach if you knew how to process it. Logging booms would let many logs escape and they washed up on shore for us to use at will. Some of us got fancier than others but mostly we were simply interested in survival. We loved the storms because they were as wild as we were and that felt validating.
Another friend had come to visit the summer before. He fell in love with Flores Island. Flores is the settler name, the original inhabitants of the island, the Nuchanulth peoples, call it something else. Their village on the island is called Ahousat. That is the name on my son’s birth certificate because it is the closest settlement to the beach, Cow Creek, that he was born on.
Flores Island is in Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.
The previous fall our other friend went to work as a cook at a logging camp to raise the money to buy a canoe and supplies and to come and live as a squatter on the outside coast of Flores Island on what was known as “Crown Land”. (It was actually stolen land, stolen from Indigenous peoples by avaricious, brutal and racist colonials in the name of the monarch of Britain). He worked at the camp over the winter, saved his money and, in the summer, quit his job to join our numbers. He paddled up from Tofino harbor with his newly purchased canoe, all his gear and his supplies. It was admirable, he had the best of intentions and we all wanted to see him successful.
Of course when he arrived it called for celebrating and out came the booze. Don’t ask me where it came from. We were quite a long paddle from town, 10 miles through harbour, channels and open ocean, so somebody must have brought it up to the island. Maybe it was our other friend himself. I don’t remember that detail. Well, as we all know, booze and boating don’t mix. We had to learn the hard way. They had to learn the hard way.
We did our celebrating at a northern beach. Our other friend’s canoe was at a southern beach.
He, the 19 or 20 year old, went down to the southern beach and somehow convinced our other friend to take his empty canoe out through the surf, into the bay to have some fun on the water. Of course they were both under the influence of alcohol and oblivious to the danger they were actually in.
Did I tell you that we never wore life jackets? We just didn’t believe in them, that cynicism came from our acceptance that our days were numbered anyway because of the constant threat of nuclear war.
The two of them, young men both, were out in the bay. Not that far offshore, possibly a quarter of a mile maybe less. They were laughing and joking and having a really good time.
This was all told to me by the 19 or 20 year old, (who had very recently become my partner) much later that day, that awful, terrible day.
So the jaunty one, the invincible one, told me he had said, to our other friend, “Let’s see what this canoe can take”. He began rocking it back and forth from side to side underneath him. The canoe just had the two of them in it, no ballast, nothing else. And wouldn’t you know it one rock too many and over it went.
Now they were both in the water. They tried to right the canoe but that’s much easier said than done. It takes practice, something we had never done. We never cared that much about safety, we just wanted to have fun, be on the water and be invincible. It was a big “fuck you world” motto that we lived by. Deep down we were absolutely livid about the threat of nuclear war and every other capitalist threat to Mother Earth. We hated the “establishment” with a fervor.
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So we lived our rage and we turned it against ourselves. We were the kings and queens of defiance.
Sometimes that rage came calling and took its toll on all of us. Indeed, we paid the piper that day.
The ocean on the west coast of Vancouver Island is cold, it takes a lot of energy just to tread water. After being unsuccessful at righting the canoe the 19 or 20 year old suggested they swim to shore. He didn’t realize he was in much better shape than our other friend who had spent the winter cushied up in a logging camp. We who lived on the beach were rugged. We were tough. We spent time in the cold water body surfing on hot days with no wet suits. We spent time paddling our canoes long distances.
Often enough, summer or winter we would dump our canoes when surfing ashore or leaving the beach. While learning the surf’s many tricks the canoe would shift broadside in the wave and then it was inevitable. We found ourselves in the water scrambling to get our paddles and our gear. We spent time hauling stuff in heavy packs back and forth along the beaches and over the trails, we were conditioned to the wilds our other friend was not.
The 19 or 20 year old swam to a rock offshore of the closest beach. He struggled hard but climbed out through surf, scraping himself on sharp barnacles. Our other friend was there with him but still in the water. The 19 or 20 year old shouted to him, because, by now, the surf had picked up and was loud, crashing on the rock in rhythmic waves “Don’t waste your energy getting out, let’s keep swimming to shore.” Our other friend nodded in agreement.
The 19 or 20 year old got back in the water and swam hard to shore believing that our other friend was right behind him, but he wasn’t.
I can’t tell you what his reaction was when he realized our other friend was not there with him on the beach. He didn’t tell me that part. We can imagine it was severely emotional and definitely traumatising. I often wonder how it has affected the rest of his life. We are no longer in touch, not for more than 30 years.
The rest of the story is remembered by me but it’s a little bit fuzzy.
He didn’t show up at the northern beach that night. I felt something was askew. Another young man of our tribe joined the 19 or 20 year old. They were waiting for our other friend’s body to wash up on shore. It did, sometime in the wee hours of the night with the incoming tide.
The next morning, early, I can’t tell you what time it was because we didn’t have clocks or watches, only the tide and a tide chart, I was looking down the beach at Cow Creek and there they were, two of our men in the distance both wearing black and a thick cloud of heavy. It hung around them like a stink. It was awful, dreadful, waiting for them to arrive at our outside summer fire pit. My gut had told me something wasn’t right it was the way they were walking, very slowly, reluctantly.
They told us very briefly that our other friend had drowned getting back to shore. They had to get another boat to take our other friend’s body to town to report the incident.
One of our tribe at the northern beach had a speed boat, a boat with an engine that is, speedier than a canoe. Off they went on their grim task into the surf, across the bay to face the music, as they say.
The 19 or 20 year old hadn’t told me yet what happened. We were all left flabbergasted and wondering.
The rest of us, our small tribe of ten or twelve, had a quiet day of watching the surf roll in and feeling the mighty power of the Pacific. She takes what’s hers. We came under her authority. That we already knew only too well. So many fisher-people were just making a living on the water when tragedy struck, maybe with a navigating miscalculation, or an unexpected furious storm. Sometimes it was the propane stove blowing up that took the boat, crew and all.
The sun moved through the sky. Our hearts were in a tailspin as the shadows grew. We tried to make sense of it, all the while fully aware tragedy makes no sense. We may understand a little better if we are permitted to get older and possibly wiser.
I wondered what was happening to the 19 or 20 year old. As we built up the cooking fire into a crackling blaze for the long night ahead we began to hear an unfamiliar engine coming towards us. The tide was out. The ocean was uncharacteristically calm.
While writing this story I just remembered, my friend, a sister in the faith and a confidant, who had also lost her man at Brooks Peninsula, and I had picked salal berries. They were in season. We made beach hippy style salal berry pie. It was backed on the coals in a cast iron frying pan with coals placed on the lid to cook the top crust. It kept us busy and feeling as hopeful as we could muster.
At one point we realized we had extra berries so she and I painted ourselves with salal berry juice. It was some kind of unconscious ritual. No plan, no precedent, just two grieving young women faced with death again, painting themselves with the dark purple plum pigment of salal. It was a way to say farewell to our other friend. It was a way to say without speaking to the 19 or 20 year old that he was always a brother, no matter what.
The engine got louder and louder until it was all we could hear. When it got close enough we saw it was a Canadian Coast Guard hovercraft. It came as close as it could get up onto the rocks on the edge of the beach and then hovered there while we saw the 19 or 20 year old hop onto the rocks and begin to make his way towards our camp.
He told us he had been thoroughly grilled by the police, or “the man” as we called them then.
Our collective mood was somber as you would expect. The empathy was flowing all around.
I’ll always be grateful that my partner was delivered back to us that way, to our home on the beach, by the Canadian Coast Guard. It felt like for a brief moment they understood us and made no judgement on our lifestyle even though a life had been taken so unnecessarily.
It brings tears to my eyes to remember that moment now more than 50 years later.
Our fire that night was bright. Everyone was very quiet staring into the red, orange, yellow and blue flames, vacantly, like zombies, as stars began to appear and the tide came back in as it always does.
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