THEIR HOME, THEIR WAY

Lasqueti Island Is Home To 350 Souls. To Some, It's Nirvana

With his long beard and longer ponytail, Laurence Fisher doesn't look like
a land baron.

He's got that loose-limbed, beaming-from-the-inside-out look of a
sweet-natured, unreconstructed hippie, which is what he is. Which is why he
isn't a land baron. Instead of getting rich selling off his property, he
turned it over to his friends.

The 55-year-old could have subdivided the forest into 10-acre chunks, or
even tried building Laurence's Lasqueti Sunshine Condo Retirement Village,
or whatever. Instead, he decided in the mid-'70s to cede control of the
land to the people he had allowed to live there. There are now 30-odd
people in the Magic Mountain Land Co-op, governing their 850 acres by
consensus.

"I was a young, idealistic hippie," he shrugs by way of explanation. "I was
intelligent enough to know that if I wanted to live in a nice place, it
better not get subdivided."

This is indeed a nice place, albeit danged hard to get to, and inconvenient
to live in. Lasqueti Island has no car ferry, no B.C. Hydro, no jobs and no
secrets. The people think it is nirvana.

Plunked in the Strait of Georgia, the island is an exercise in the
unconventional. Artists, dope-growers, retirees and latter-day pioneers
co-exist in a tiny, self-reliant, tightly knit community, free of the
pressure to conform to mainstream norms. Its links to the rest of the world
are tenuous, which is how its 350 permanent residents like it.

They live, like Laurence, in homes found at the end of long, bumpy dirt
tracks through the woods of an island that is just five kilometres wide and
21 long. The tracks are unmarked; no need for house numbers on an island
where everyone knows each other. Many people are chasing the same ideals
they were chasing 30-odd years ago.

This is not the land of Big Macs and Wal-Marts. Near the False Bay dock are
two tiny stores, a hotel/pub, a gift shop and a bakery. The lone pump
dispenses gas for 91.9 cents a litre. The recycling depot and free store
are across the road from the Internet access centre, not far from the
school. After that, it's just a dusty road through the trees.

Islanders must be resourceful and self-sufficient. Power comes from diesel
generators, windmills, solar panels and waterwheels. Veggies come from the
garden. The ambulance is a coast guard cutter from Vancouver Island, or, in
extreme cases, a helicopter touching down in the schoolyard. Vehicles are
barged over ("The beater, the better," they say) and it's best to know how
to fix them yourself.

Everything else -- every bag of concrete, every sack of flour, every can of
Coke -- comes off the Centurion VII, the private, passenger-only ferry that
makes the one-hour run from French Creek. And it's all carried by hand.

"Everything in your life, you pack off that boat," says Laurence.

Fisher came to Lasqueti from England as an 11-year-old boy in 1959, moving
onto property that had been in the family since the end of the 19th
century. But it was just a year after their arrival that Laurence's
ex-British army dad, brother and two sisters died in a boating accident.

Laurence and his mom hung in on Lasqueti for a while. He then left for
seven years, but came back in 1971 as a tie-dyed-in-the-wool product of the
'60s. "All of us hippies were moving back to the land."

And much of that land, almost 1,000 acres of bush, was inherited by
Laurence. He shrugs off suggestions that he was being selfless in
transferring the bulk of the property to the co-op.

"A lot of people misinterpret it that way."

The truth is that he couldn't afford to keep the land, wanted to protect
it, wanted to live on it among people with similar values. It would have
been harder to give away 10 acres than a thousand, he says. "It's absurd to
think that you could own such a thing. It's not as though you could put a
fence around it."

Laurence and his California-raised wife, Kathy, settled in and had three
daughters. They all lived in a 16- by 24-foot miner's tent for 16 years --
Kathy, Laurence, his mother, the girls, two dogs and three cats. The goats,
chickens and ducks stayed outside. "It wasn't a house, but it was a home."

Home now includes a sprawling, barn-sized woodshop, a house for Kathy and
Laurence, and, just over the hill, another for daughter Sarah, 28, and her
two children. Everything they built there was hauled in with their own hands.

"I don't regret it," says Laurence of the effort. "It's not easy to live
here, but it's a gift to live here."

There's no point putting on airs on Lasqueti. In a community this small,
your flaws are soon apparent to all. "Everybody knows who I am. I'm not
hiding anything." There's something liberating about that. "You know you're
surrounded by people who accept you the way you are."

That last attribute is also valued by Tony Seaman. "We do attract a lot of
eccentrics," says the 60-year-old. "They're accepted. It's a very open
society here."

A painter of some note -- he did some of the original Woodstock art --
Seaman also praises Lasqueti's good-sized arts community, its closeness to
nature and the lessons of isolation. "It makes you much more self-reliant.
If you break an axe handle, you make another one." He doesn't own a car,
getting where he needs to go by boat.

The life isn't for everyone. There's a 20-per-cent turnover in the
population each year, the people who moved in during a sunny summer
deciding to move out after a grey, gruelling winter.

Seaman has been here since 1970, arriving as a Vietnam-era refugee from New
York. ("I saw a bumper sticker one day. It read 'America, love it or leave
it.' I said, 'Hey, great idea.' ") He bought a boat in Vancouver, set sail
for Alaska, stopped on Lasqueti to let off a seasick friend, and never left.

As the island's postmaster, and therefore having steady employment, Seaman
is something of a rarity. "The one thing that Lasqueti doesn't have is
jobs," says Laurence.

"It's very, very difficult to make a living here."

Residents compensate by reducing needs, by being self-reliant and
scrounging work where they can. "You can actually live on nothing here."

Laurence doesn't live on nothing. His well-equipped shop is the home of
Wildwood Works, which uses salvaged wood from logging operations to make
products ranging from buttons, picture frames and clocks to bentwood boxes
and hair clasps.

At one time Wildwood kept 30 people employed on Lasqueti. Now it's down to
two or three. First the decline of logging choked off the supply of wood.
Then Osama bin Laden struck. "We were just getting on our feet when 9/11
happened," says Laurence. With 80 per cent of Wildwood's products sold in
airports, business went south.

Of course, for those short of work, there's always dope-growing. Lasqueti
has long been synonymous with outdoor marijuana cultivation, though some
islanders grumble that this is an unfair stereotype. They argue that
there's way more pot grown indoors around Parksville, but it's Lasqueti
that attracts those annoying RCMP helicopters like moths to a flame each
summer.

They may have a point, if only because the logistics now conspire against
Lasqueti's marijuana merchants. Indoor grow shows on Vancouver Island are
harder to detect, have better power supplies and fewer shipping obstacles.

Laurence figures the scale of dope-growing was always exaggerated, and that
it was never the easy dollar people thought it to be. The typical Lasqueti
grower can expect to see 20 to 50 per cent of his crop ripped out, whether
by cops or robbers.

Still, it's a big piece of the economy. "If it wasn't for the growing,
there are a lot of people who wouldn't be living on Lasqueti," says Laurence.

Others agree. Sitting outside Lasqueti's bakery, Rod Wiebe says he often
runs across marijuana gardens while hunting in the fall. The growing still
creates rifts on the island.

Certainly longtime residents like Pat Forbes weren't happy about the advent
of the growers. She still doesn't go to some community functions where the
air grows thick with smoke. "It's the underground economy."

But Forbes, 73, thinks the Wild West dope days are in the past. Many of the
original growers, who were once organized enough to buy fertilizer in bulk
and orchestrate their own marketing and security systems, have gone on to
other pursuits.

At least the trade is more circumspect. Nobody has raffled off a bag of
marijuana as a school fundraiser recently. (Still, there is no permanent
police presence on Lasqueti, and it shows. On the lawn overlooking the
dock, a couple of middle-aged guys quietly smoke a joint while waiting for
the ferry. Almost all the cars have current licence plates.)

Forbes may exemplify the straight arrows who lived on Lasqueti before the
head-in-the-clouds hippies drifted in. She moved to the island from
Vancouver in 1948 as a teacher -- 16 students, grades 1 to 4, in a one-room
school. She married Peter, who was something of a coastal legend, a logger
who went on, with a partner, to build up a fleet of fishboats and a
shipyard at Lasqueti's Scottie Bay. It was a rugged life. Their son Bill,
toiling on the seiner Lasqueti Sons in the shipyard, recalls his
after-school ritual: picking 25 alders before being allowed to play.

Peter died 21/2 years ago. Pat remains co-owner of the fleet, maybe a dozen
boats in all, but her four sons all live on Vancouver Island.

A different breed populates Lasqueti now, she says.

"If you hire someone on Lasqueti, you have to hire them on their own terms."

The construction of holiday homes is creating employment opportunities --
"The biggest industry other than marijuana is carpentry" -- but the island
mindset must be accommodated. Sometimes people work a full day, sometimes
they show up at 4 p.m., put in a couple of hours, and head home.

The arrival of the back-to-the-landers had its bumps, she recalls.
Established islanders bridled when lectured by those who had just
discovered the rewards of rural life. "People on Lasqueti were already
living frugally, were already at one with nature."

Pat cooked on a wood stove until a year ago, grows a garden that keeps her
in tomatoes until Christmas, knows to charge the batteries when firing up
the generator on winter laundry days.

But if islanders don't all share the same world view, they have at least
learned to get along. It's a necessity. Get in a squabble with someone at
night, and he's still going to be there in the morning, right in your back
pocket.

Not that it's easy. In a small place like this, one person's problem can
become everybody's problem, and relationships can become strained.

"It's very much like family," says Sue Kay, kneading dough at the bakery.
"You may love them to death, but you don't necessarily like them very much."

But sometimes you like them a lot. Pat Forbes is greeted with unfettered
joy upon arriving at the Fishers' home in the woods.

Laurence and Kathy are there. So are daughters Sarah, dandling baby Sampson
on her knee, and Kate, 24, just back from France. A third sister, Meghan,
26, does humanitarian work in Africa.

The girls loved growing up on Lasqueti, their half-hour walk to school
taking twice that long because of the need to examine every tree and bird
that caught their fancy. It was safe: no traffic, no strangers, no bears.

"We would roam from house to house," says Sarah. "There was nothing to
worry about."

Kathy was the hippie mom, trying to teach the kids hippie values. She would
wear mismatched socks, to show that cosmetic things didn't matter, but
alas, she laughs, her girls wanted to be ladies.

Kathy moved to Vancouver with the girls for their high school years. That's
a fairly common arrangement on Lasqueti, where the two-room school only
goes up to Grade 8. Some kids go to boarding school. Others are farmed out
to relatives. Pat Forbes remembers her daughter going to Vancouver and
being fascinated by the hands of the first black person she had ever seen.

"I was happy to leave," says Kate. "You'd get too sheltered living here
through your high school years." She still misses Lasqueti when away, but
allows that it can drive you a little nuts when you're back.

Sarah returned to Lasqueti when her daughter was born eight years ago. "My
family's here, and it's a safe place to raise my kids." She was attracted
by the healthy lifestyle. "We're always outside until bedtime."

It's a lifestyle that doesn't seem destined to change soon. Most of the
back-to-the-landers are still there, committed to the same dream. A 10-acre
density law restricts growth on Lasqueti. Few clamour for B.C. Hydro lines,
or a car ferry. (The existing ferry is like an extension of the island. Its
bulletin board carries an ad for "curative massage, hyperspace healing and
transformational breathing." Another notice reads "If you lost a Caribou
sleeping bag, it's at the post office." A lone sock is thumbtacked to the
cork. Maybe its mate is inside the sleeping bag.)

It remains hard to get to Lasqueti, and hard to stay. That's OK by Laurence
Fisher. He likes living in a destination, not a stopping-off place.

"No one's coming to Lasqueti to go somewhere else."

Our continuing summer series looks at seldom-reached and oft-forgotten
places tucked away in the less-populated corners of our Pacific paradise.
Next: Yuquot