Living on the (North) Western Shore

“These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend.” (John Banville, from ‘The Sea,” p. 143 of 195 pages, Vintage Paperback edition, 2005.)

That describes, pretty well, what we have done over the past fifteen years, but surely we did not know that was what we were doing as we made a series of decisions that placed us in that position. Nevertheless, had we known, we would have made the same decisions, I think. Sixteen years ago, we began to separate ourselves from urban life. We cut back our work from full time to half time, to quarter time, to no time. We moved to a rural area of Canada and then we moved additionally to a rural area of Washington state. The rural area of Washington state is not only rural, but also a small, 4.5 square mile peninsula that belongs to the U.S., but is attached to Canada. We live closer to the Vancouver airport than we do to anywhere in the U.S., but we are separated from Canada by an increasingly oppressive border, a 24-hour a day controlled border. Not enough to be isolated in a rural area, we have isolated ourselves further, effectively inside another country. And even then, not enough, the residents of this area are largely Canadian. Perhaps 800-1,000 full-time American residents, and another 4,000 or so part-time Canadian residents.

In this way, the U.S. comes to us only in those “small and carefully measured doses” of which Banville speaks. There is no cell phone coverage here to speak of; there is nothing to buy but groceries, gasoline, and tourist trinkets; there is no U.S. television that comes through the air and no public radio that comes that way either; there are no billboards or stop lights or sidewalks or public lighting. At night, it is dark. When the snow falls, it stays on the roads until (last on the list) the county manages to send someone up to clear it. When the power goes out, as it often does because there are many trees and much wind and frequent storms, we can be hours or days without electricity. What we have that brings the U.S. to us is the internet and the U.S. Postal Service.

It makes for a very different kind of life. And it makes for a strange sense of community. No adult is here except that he or she chooses for there are practically no jobs and hardly any economic activity. All have chosen this strange isolation. And half the time, yet, we drive up to the Canadian house, where we live a different but equally isolated life among Canadians who live just north of the great city of Vancouver, separated this time not by country but by water.

Add to this the fact that we have entered the world of the old, yet another kind of isolation. It is from those perspectives that I now see American politics and American life. The small doses may be not so much a cure as a preventive measure: a way of staving off what increasingly looks like life out of order. I think to contemplate this isolation and measuredness and to try to capture what it is like.