When I first got here, I thought that I’d slip in unassuming-like and blend in with the scenery. Kind of hang around the periphery of the community in a way that an ethnologically-minded journalist might, collecting stories that weren’t theirs. Or to use more military terms, infiltrate the target population or embed with a friendly company. Apparently, posting videos in real time on the Internet is a good way to out yourself as a cultural narc. The interesting dynamic of meeting new people while pointing a camera at them is another topic that I’ll perhaps talk about another time.
More to the current point, I hadn’t counted on drinking the Kool-Aid and wanting to become ‘one of them.’ Going native, so to speak. But it’s happening. I pushed through the initial 6-months of slogging, settling into somewhere new and getting over culture shock and am likely now in a honeymoon phase where I dig everyone and think that everything about this place just, rocks.
A long, dark winter and my first serious interpersonal conflict should temper that love but I can safely say that this place is unique and the people who inhabit it are a truly special collection of folks. For me, it’s a decent version of paradise (a little more sun and few more single women would be nice, though).
As I’ve started to bang on about now in my vlogs, the eye-opener for me in this experience so far is what an important factor community is for quality of life. Having never lived in a small town, I’ve experienced that effect here more than anywhere else. I realize that I’ve experienced weak strains of it back in the city. You know that inexplicable joy that you get when the server behind the counter at your favorite coffee shop knows your order and takes the time to trade some idle chitchat with you? Here, it’s like that but hooked up to hydroponics.
You get the kind of community interaction here, you can only dream about in the city. Riding the train into Tokyo everyday, moving amongst 20 million people, I can’t recall once making eye contact with the person seated across from me, much less striking up a conversation. There are fewer people living at this end of the island than there were in my high school. After a while, you can’t go anywhere without waving to people, talking to people. Or having people talk about you. (Some call it ‘gossiping’ but I’ve heard it explained that even if 20+% of what’s said is patently untrue, they still do it because they care about what’s going on with you.)
And people will just look out for you. There was one curmudgeonly local, who lived here at the end of the road before he passed away, who told a friend that he knew that he was accepted as part of the community when he’d flipped his truck into the ditch one long night out and came back the next morning to find that someone had righted it and put it back on the road for him. Nowadays, people mostly just friend you on Facebook (Yes, it also happens up here). But also, if they know that you’re having a hard time, they’ll come to help you out.
I’ve had friends come up to visit, who were awestruck by the amount of interaction that can occur during the course of going about one’s daily business. That, more than the primordial forest or clean ocean waves, made them want to leave their basement suite in Vancouver to move up and buy into some sort of commune/compound off the beach here.
I haven’t been here long but I have observed a wave of young – for lack of a better way of putting it – hipsters (and I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense), who have moved up to live. They then tend to pull up mates, siblings, friends and ex-roommates to join them. I could see a movement of young folk, disillusioned by the lack of good jobs and affordable real estate in the city, coming up here to try a new lifestyle, form their own community, while also getting closer to nature. Kind of Back to the Land 2.0 (with skinnier jeans and better taste in music).
What started this stream of thought is that today, I got copied on an email exchange that Chris the Mapper was having with a relative down south, who apparently has been pimping my vlogs among her fellow teachers at school. Some even use them in their classrooms (I don’t have the full story but I imagine that it’s some sort of ‘scared straight’ program to keep freewheeling students from straying too far off the path.)
As anyone who has seen the vlogs will know, the Mapper has played a big role in my positive experience up here to date. And he’s not just a funny guy, who brings a lot of humour into the world (which I believe to be a highly underrated thing), in many ways, he’s the unofficial mayor of Tow Town. When he himself showed up on North Beach years ago, it spawned the birth of the surf community (because there were now two of them, him and Surfer Jeff.) And well, the dude really does just care about what’s going on with the community around him. He not only cares, he actually does things to make it better.
Anyway, with his permission, I’ve extracted a portion of this private email to his sister-in-law. Enter the Mapper, in an inadvertent testimonial/full-on rant:
“I’m a big supporter of Masa’s vlogs, and not just because it gives us a way to send videos down south to family. I think that our small community needs new blood… new families, new volunteers, new faces. There’s not much work up here, so the types of people I’d like to see bring work with them are young and interesting, have big bushy hair (optional), already like the lifestyle or are interested in it, and generally are here FOR the place and not despite it, like you might see if people were doing this for the money or for some here-today-gone-tomorrow industry.
As a community, we were getting very concerned when NXXX, the local land whores, were the only ones trying to bring in new people… and the people they decided they wanted to bring in were the real-estate speculators, Albertan vacation home buyers, and kill-the-fish types. Nothing wrong with killing fish, but the last thing we need is more fair-weather charter guys making it tough for the locals. Real locals who tough it out year-round are the ones that contribute to the community by shopping local, volunteering, waving & smiling, watching out for their neighbours, and making the place better all around.
The speculators and vacation home types are blood-sucking leeches that want to take cheap land, drive around with the windows up gawking at the weird locals, put up no trespassing signs, and board their places up for the 50 weeks of the year they aren’t here, thereby leaving a sucking vacuum in the community where families can’t live. All the while, property taxes go up, locals can’t afford land, and eventually some a**hole bylaw inspector is swinging the billy club and writing tickets for non-conforming buildings… just like they have in Tofino and Whistler. And this, D., is my Tow Town Rant affectionately known as “The Curse of Tofistler”.
So, in short, I’m glad you’re sharing Masa’s vlogs. It’s more than nice imagery…”
There it is. The Mapper, pulling no punches. Some strong but heartfelt words. You can’t be gentle with gentrification. A call to arms, or rather, a call for likeminded others to move up here. Life’s short, live well.