why we live where

[Guest guest]

How a nice girl from Amsterdam ended up living in

a tipi on a mountain in B.C.

 

As a small child I always wanted to live in the country.

 

But in my late teens and early twenties I loved

being in Amsterdam.

 

Leaving 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 this great adventure. 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 kicking and screaming into the country.

I did NOT want to be a stay-at-home anything.

But, come summer time, there I was, in the country.

With neighbors who gardened.

 

And intriguing people nearby who had settled into

abandoned farm houses in the hills, no running water

or electricity.

 

We just shook our heads at the folly.

But I ended up making 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 crash pad.

 

It seems everyone was looking for a piece of land.

This was a new concept to me.

Not just an itty bitty yard, but, like, LAND!

 

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.

 

Somehow I became obsessed with the notion of

owning a little chunk.

 

So, we ended up finding this little ten acre

plot that didn't have a house or anything and was

only $3500. (fall of 1970)

 

I sincerely believe I had Guidance.

We could never have bought at any other time

in our lives.

 

As for the tipi, we came home from a summer

in the geology field to find our friends had been

joined by this 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, and we ended up on our acreage

without the capital to build a house and get

water and electricity and so on.

 

So, we bought a tipi! The first year was fun.

The second year was a bit much, especially since

the summer was one of those cold wet ones

we get now and then.

 

By the time the first floor of the log home was

ready to move into, after almost 3 years of tipi dwelling,

the 16x32 foot dry space was absolute heaven.

Never mind there was still no plumbing etc.

 

I like to call myself an old hippie, but that is not

really true.

We were kind of on the edge of the whole thing.

Most of our friends were bona fide freaks, but

we never did get into the drugs, and we always looked

presentably straight and had jobs, whatever we could find.

 

As for the drugs, it is definitely true that trying

marihuana will lead to harder stuff.

I never took to pot much.

It makes me want to sleep and eat, two activities at

which I excel without any help.

But it took me twenty years to kick the nicotine

habit that I acquired in order to practice inhaling.

 

There is a picture of the tipi in the photo album on

my site. Click the sig file.

 

Ien in the Kootenays

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Stop. Breathe. Smile!

~Padma ( my TV yoga teacher)

See my smiling face:

http://www.greatestnetworker.com/is/ien

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