As a child I always wanted to live in the country, but in my late teens and early twenties I loved being in Amsterdam.
Leaving my native Netherlands all started with my husband being a geologist. There is a serious shortage of rocks in Holland.
Canada was wide open, and we knew one fellow student who had gone there and got work in the Calgary oil patch. So we packed up our lives and went to Calgary. It was a great adventure and I loved it.
Chris eventually ended up finding work not in Alberta, but with a mining company in Grand Forks, B.C.
I got dragged away from Calgary kicking and screaming. I had an opportunity to go to Graduate School and I did not want to be a stay-at-home anything. I even spent the winter living in a friend's basement so I could finish my courses. Every weekend I took the overnight Greyhound to Chris in B.C., a 14-hour trip each way.
But come summer time there I was, in Christina Lake near Grand Forks. With neighbors who had a big vegetable garden. And intriguing people nearby who had settled into abandoned farm houses in the hills, without running water or electricity. We shook our heads at the folly.
Then I made friends with one counter-cultural couple, and before you knew it our home was grand central station for quite a few people who used it for phone calls, baths, and as a crash pad.
The photo below is from the facebook album "Old pictures" by Carol Nye, Carol Leon at the time. The baby on Carol's lap on the left is my dear 'daughter-friend' Christine.
Civilization was supposed to come crashing down around our ears any day now, and we'd all better be holed up on our self-sufficient homesteads. Forty years later, with the 'prepper' movement going strong, us old hippies don't know if we should laugh or cry. Anyway back then I became obsessed with the notion of owning my own chunk.
We went land-hunting during the Thanksgiving weekend of 1970, and ended up with an undeveloped ten acre plot near Nakusp that was only $3500, the equivalent of $35.000 in today's money. I sincerely believe I had Guidance. We could never have bought at any other time in our lives. Land prices went up and our income went down.
As for the tipi, a year later we came home from a summer in the geology field to find our friends had been joined by a new couple who lived in a tipi. We shook our wise old heads some more. But when we went to visit the new folks we found they were actually quite cozy, even in mid winter.
A few years later our financial fortunes took a nose dive.
We had planned to move to our acreage some time in the far future, after we had earned the money to build a house and install water and electricity and other necessities of life. Instead we bought a tipi and just went there!
The first year was fun. The picture at the top was taken in the first fall. That is our daughter in the door opening. The transparent door was my husband's brainwave. It was a "white man's tipi" with a solid wood heater, propane for cooking, a round kitchen table and two chairs, and the rear seat of a car as couch.
I can't remember when we acquired the wooden shoes. Did my parents bring them when they came to visit in September 1975, or did I buy them on my visit to the old country the following year? We never wore them in Amsterdam, that's for sure. Anyway, wooden shoes with thick socks are perfect foot wear when you live in a tipi and are always dashing in and out. I am so sorry I never took a picture of them parked in front of the dwelling. At the time it was just life.
The second year was a bit much, especially since the summer of 1976 was cold and wet and the baby was a toddler now.
By the time the first floor of the log home was ready to move into, fall 1977, the 16x32 foot dry space was absolute heaven.
Never mind that there was still no plumbing and the windows were covered with plastic.
I call myself an old semi-hippie rather than a full-fledged one. We were on the edge of the whole thing. Apart from some small experiments we never got into the drugs and we always looked presentably straight and had jobs. We had times on unemployment insurance, but never welfare.
As for the drugs, it is definitely true that trying marijuana will lead to harder stuff. I never took to pot. It makes me want to sleep and eat, activities at which I excel without help. But it took twenty years to kick the nicotine habit that I acquired in order to practice inhaling.
P.S. My daughter has started to blog her childhood memories, fun!
http://brokenmice.blogspot.ca/2014/01/pointy-tents-are-made-for-babies.html
And after the tipi there was the log cabin.
http://freegreenliving.blogspot.ca/2007/11/proud-tradition-of-diy-housing.html
