It Takes All Kinds
You can come for a visit or pass on through
Spend all your money like the tourists do
But if you're thinkin' about settling down
Do it off, not on, the island.
— From "Please Don't Come" by Mike Hayes and Arvid Chalmers, Salt Spring Hysterical Society
PHYSICS TEACHES that you can't observe a subatomic particle without changing it by the very act of observation. British Columbia's Salt Spring Island teaches that you can't move to heaven without bringing a little bit of hell.
Don't get us wrong. This Gulf Island nexus is still nirvana, despite periodic productions of a local play called "Paradise Lots." Its mix of mountains, beaches, artist studios, wineries, galleries, marinas, organic bakeries, farms and pasture is reminiscent of the culture of France or Italy, where people emphasize the pleasures of "being" instead of "doing."
There still isn't a single traffic light on an isle of 12,000 people. There are no franchise businesses, not even a Starbucks: The lone Dairy Queen died from lack of patronage. Salt Spring folk have the easy grace and charm of the herons and eagles that glide along the shorelines. And the place is drop-dead gorgeous.
If you're a visitor, welcome aboard. You can reach Salt Spring by boat, seaplane or ferry. There is direct service from B.C.'s Tsawwassen, Vancouver Island's Crofton or the ferry hub at Schwartz Bay just north of Sidney.
But rising population, soaring real-estate prices, water shortages, tight parking and redevelopment schemes have islanders at odds with each other in ways reminiscent of, well, every decade of the island's history since the first pioneers, half of them free American blacks, splashed ashore in 1859.
"Salt Spring," says Peter Lamb, president of the Salt Spring Conservancy, "is an argument enclosed by water."
Even the spelling is under dispute. Officials set it as one word a hundred years ago, but locals prefer two. It comes from brackish springs at the island's north end.
The 250,000 tourists who come and go each year can remain in blissful ignorance of the turbulent passion with which the 74-square-mile island (about 20 square miles bigger than either San Juan or Orcas) is defended. Most visitors barely have time to sample the 40 or so art and food studios open for tour, take the day-long Island Gourmet Safari, dip in one of the eight lakes, explore the 22 saltwater beaches, stroll the galleries that feature 200 local artists or slip into Hastings House and splurge for a dinner that, with wine and tip, can hit $300 (Canadian) for two.
You can get a cloud-top view from 1,985-foot Mount Maxwell, buy produce from unstaffed roadside stands in which you're trusted to leave correct payment, try some yoga or massage with Eastern-and-New Age ambience, kayak the harbors, browse five bookstores and drive by farms with names like Rocking Goat, Foxglove and Daisy Hill People.
But stay? You'll likely pay $1 million and up for a waterfront lot. You may be pressed into preservation vs. development fights, and find yourself in a nude calendar like the one island women produced in 2001. Certainly you'll need a pair of rubber "gumboots," in case you want to join the Gumboot Dancers. And you'll inadvertently define yourself by settling in the 537 telephone prefix north (richer, more yuppie) or 653 prefix south (rural, more hippie).
As Shilo Zylbergold of the Salt Spring Hysterical Society penned of a 653 woman trying to pass for a 537:
With a house built on skids
Three dogs and four kids
A staircase that creaked
And a skylight that leaked
And a truck in the ditch
And head lice that itched
Her gumboots said 653
THERE ARE 11,999 interesting, articulate and passionate people on Salt Spring Island and one dullard, whom we were unable to find. "British Columbia is Canada's California," says historian Charles Kahn, who has written an excellent history of the island. "Salt Spring is its small town."
A foremost authority on how the island (and, by implication, the Pacific Northwest) is changing is 94-year-old Lotus Ruckle.
Lotus? "I was the youngest of 10 children," she explains with a sly grin. "I think my family ran out of names."
In 1972, her husband, Henry, and his family sold to British Columbia some 1,200 acres of farm and forest with 4.5 miles of waterfront for a mere $750,000, taking off the market a property that would make developers drool. By doing so they created Salt Spring's crown jewel, Ruckle Park.
Why? "My husband always had the strange idea that you didn't own the land, you were just a steward of the land."
Lotus Ruckle now lives in Ganges (named for a British warship), which is Salt Spring's largest town. Life has changed in her near-century of existence. She grew up with no car on an island where bumper stickers now read, "Think Globally — Park Somewhere Else!" The fledgling high school that started in the 1920s was initially in a house that doubled as a jail, then in a revamped chicken barn where a bug explosion caused temporary closure. The island's population was less than a tenth of today's, and ferry service didn't start until 1930.
"I swore I wouldn't marry a farmer," Lotus recalls. "I'd had all the poverty I wanted. So of course I did." Yet the result, she says, "was a wonderful life. We had sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens, potatoes and vegetables. The kids swam in the ocean daily. We lived for the land and the farm. Everyone knew everyone then, and we had to make our own entertainment." There were summer dances to the gramophone in the little red schoolhouse.
Later gatherings, native Bruce Peterson remembers, included the Hard Times Dance, the Rod and Gun Club Dance or the Bean Supper, a potluck eventually shut down by Health Department bureaucrats.
Today, of course, there's cable, the Internet and a whole lot more people. "I do take a certain amount of pride that there's one piece of Salt Spring that will remain as it is," Lotus says. Her former farm is still in production so visitors can see what life was like when Salt Spring was truly a rural retreat.
"I think they should have limited development a long time ago," she says. "We don't have enough water. You can smell the greed from one end of the island to the other."
IN SOME WAYS British Columbia's Gulf Islands are remarkably preserved. The province created the Islands Trust in 1974 with a mandate to sustain the rural character of the archipelago, and it has partly succeeded. Portions of the islands became Canada's newest national park this year. However, government is splintered between the trust's land-use authority and provincial road, ferry and government services. Land-use regulations are less stringent than in the San Juan Islands. And Salt Spring alone has nearly as many people as all of San Juan County.
A proposal to incorporate the island failed at the polls two years ago because people feared a municipality would be pro-development, but environmentalist Lamb thinks the existing structure no longer copes. A growing problem is millionaire vacation-home owners who have driven up land prices but spend little time on the island.
"The worst thing about a second home is that the owners have no allegiance to the community," he says. "They don't volunteer. They don't contribute." One Canadian economist, Claire Mitchell of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, coined the term "creative destruction" to explain how working villages are converted by money into "theme parks" like Whistler, Aspen or Martha's Vineyard.
"They are destroying the goose that laid the golden egg," says Briony Penn. She's a Salt Spring geographer who put her body where her mouth is, riding bare-breasted as Lady Godiva in downtown Vancouver to protest logging on the island. "I've got a Ph.D and no one listens," she told the swarming press. "I take my clothes off and here you all are."
Yet realtor Eric Booth, one of two elected Salt Spring trustees — an office roughly equivalent to a county commissioner — says opponents of growth can be so blind to the consequences of preservation that they create a kind of "green racism." Affordable housing is disappearing on Salt Spring, driving working-class people away, but Booth's idea for community-owned land for subsidized housing has yet to generate enthusiasm. Salt Spring needs 3,000 such units, he estimates.
Each morning, higher-income residents flood off the island via the Fulford ferry to professional jobs in Victoria. Meanwhile, a wave of construction and service workers who can't afford to live on Salt Spring come ashore via the Crofton ferry. Once almost self-sufficient and an abundant mix of aboriginal, black, Hawaiian, Japanese and European ancestries, Salt Spring is increasingly white, retired and dependent on outside services. "We've gone from 85 percent food self-sufficiency to 5 percent," Penn says.
Gil Mouat, 67, is a real-estate agent who grew up on the island and is comfortable with what he sees as "measured" growth. His family owns the famed Mouat's general store in Ganges. "Salt Spring is no different than Victoria or Vancouver in terms of affordable housing," he says. Rumors that American money is driving the price hike are not true, he adds: Of last year's dozen homes that sold for $1 million or more, none went to Americans.
His equanimity toward change is not shared by everyone, however. While his mother likes the tourist bustle of Ganges Village shopping center that has grown up on landfill around Mouat's store — made possible after a bitter fight allowing a sewer system in the town — her sister won't shop there.
And ire toward outside money boiled over recently when Seattle's Jerry Parks and Bonny O'Connor, in partnership with the Seattle Yacht Club, abruptly closed a popular pub called Moby's to make way for redeveloping Salt Spring Marina. It didn't help that two other island pubs have closed as businesses started going upscale.
While the couple also have a home on Salt Spring and argue they are locals, the American plans (coupled with another proposal to fill a small part of Ganges Harbor to revamp neighboring Ganges Marina) made environmentalists fear they were losing control of their waterfront to the Yanks.
"You're destroying the very reason people come here in the first place," complains Andrea Collins, a former wife of musician Phil Collins who lives on a Salt Spring mountaintop. In 2001, she put up $37,000 to produce a semi-nude art calendar of 35 local women — including herself — that raised $100,000 to purchase endangered timberland.
Beautifully photographed by islander Howard Fry so the women became part of Mother Nature, the calendar was elegiac, not prurient, and so popular that a line to buy it stretched around the block. It sold out.
But Parks counters that Salt Spring has been changing for a century and a half — Collins herself, with a grand house on 72 acres, is an example of such change, of course — and that redevelopment will improve the waterfront, not harm it.
A contrast to bustling Ganges is funky Fulford, the island's hippie burg that is like a cameo from the 1960s. This is where the draft dodgers and survivalists washed up, and the weathered wood, rainbow colors and flapping flag of reggae king Bob Marley remind that most of Salt Spring remains far from corporate. At the Morningside Organic Bakery you can have your latte with cow, soy or rice milk. The island's Chamber of Commerce president, Peter Allan, operates a dockside kayak business in a 100-year-old former feed store.
Bruce Peterson, who runs the nearby Fulford Grocery, is a third-generation Salt Springer fatalistic about the steady change. He points to the ferry dock, where a log truck is passing a lumber truck. "There it is, logs going out and two-by-fours coming in," he says. "This is where I grew up and NOT where I grew up, in a sense."
SOME PLACES are so overwhelming — Manhattan, or Mount Everest — that you adapt to them. Other landscapes, like Salt Spring, are gentle places you can make into your own. That is what's driving the change, and while a few newcomers build waterfront mansions they visit infrequently, most try to create lives that fit the island's character.
Husband and wife Marcel Mercier and Elaine Kozak left corporate life in 1999 to create a winery on a 10-acre sheep pasture, and built a little utopia.
Garry Oaks Winery looks down the bucolic Fulford Valley to puffy islands that rise from the sea like drop cookies on a baking sheet. Their home is built of maple, cedar and fir harvested from their own property. A gnarled Douglas fir dubbed "the Halloween Tree" stands sentinel over the vines, and below are the winemaking sheds with barrels made, in part, from Garry oak. Salt Spring has the largest of these dry-terrain oak groves in British Columbia.
"I don't remember what I did before, but it involved pantyhose and suits," says Elaine, who finds working a winery to be all-consuming, laborious fun. The acreage is small enough that the vines get intensive hand treatment, and so beautiful that some people help harvest for free. Evelyn Lee, the 84-year-old who sold the property and is grateful it was developed as a farm, picked 500 pounds last year.
This reinvention is encountered over and over on Salt Spring. Potter Mark Meredith, 62, dropped out of advertising and promotion and bought five acres in 1979 for $25,000; it's now assessed at 10 times that. The doors to his gallery are wide open even when he's gone; you pick what you want and leave the cash, or even run your own credit card.
"If we can't trust each other we're in big trouble," he says. "I don't want my life ruined by fear."
The Salt Spring Yoga Centre was started by Vancouver entrepreneurs who had run an Indian fabric store during the counterculture '70s, then purchased 70 acres on the island in 1981. It's now a well-established retreat that just paid off its mortgage, includes a garden that has a seed bank, and follows the teachings of an Indian mystic named Baba Hari Dass — who hasn't spoken since 1952 and communicates by writing on a chalkboard.
In the process, the center has converted a 1911 house and surrounding buildings and acreage into a little Eden. "People come to the island and within half an hour they want to move here," notes its director, who goes by the name Anuradha. "The growth is a two-headed coin. The wealthier people contribute money for conservation, but the children of the people who come here can't afford to stay here."
Dotting the island are small organic farms that provide the chemical-free produce sold at both the Ganges Saturday Market and in local groceries. John Wilcox, 63, has 13 acres called Duck Creek Farm, eight of them in forest or wetlands. On the remainder he grows enough basil, squash, cucumbers, garlic, green beans, corn, pumpkins, carrots, beets and fruit to supplement his government pension.
He built his timber-and-stucco home with the help of a boatwright friend, and provides room and board to young "woofers," or Willing Workers on Organic Farms. "This island used to be a major agricultural producer," he says, once boasting 14,000 fruit trees. He thinks it could be again, with gentleman-farmers potentially able to get as much as $20,000 of produce per acre.
At an organic-farmer potluck at the small farm of Harold Repen, friend Anne Macey says she helped organize a world conference of organic farmers two years ago that drew 1,300 people from 92 countries to Victoria. Salt Spring has the collective brain power to generate ideas, not just food.
But brains come with people attached, and there's the rub, isn't it?
Brenda Ringwald of Arizona volunteered to pick blackberries on a Salt Spring organic farm one summer, bought seven acres, and now spends the maximum six months before becoming liable for Canada's income tax. "Americans can buy this place up," she says. The Iraq war and previous election have drawn more interest in immigration, "and one way to get citizenship quick is to buy a business in Canada."
Yet is this really different from the past? Some of the earliest settlers were Americans — about 15 families of free blacks in California worried it might become a slave state — recruited by the Hudson's Bay Co. to help bolster the tiny population. Hawaiian sailors, Scandinavian loggers, Japanese farmers, Portuguese, Greeks and even an Egyptian came in the early days when no one wanted the place.
And it's all relative, of course. By urban standards, Salt Spring crowding is hard to detect. The island is lush, its lanes elusive, its vales quiet, and many of its homes still modest. When does a little change become too much?
"When I came in 1978 it was all fisheries, farmers and ferry workers," Meredith recalls. "We were told we artists and hippies were going to ruin the lifestyle." He laughs. "Unfortunately, we did. Everyone started coming here!"
As the Salt Spring Hysterical Society sings:
You've got a yellow kayak and a mountain bike
A job in the city that you just don't like
You come here searching for the meaning of life
Find it off, not on, the island.
William Dietrich is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.
