In her recent book about the lifestyles of people who live on remote islands, author Joy Davis weaves interviews with island-dwellers and findings from the emerging field of island studies with her own family鈥檚 story of homesteading on tiny Bath Island in the 1960s and 鈥�70s.
Once Mom and Dad decided to move to Bath Island late in the fall of 1962, they had several months to think through next steps. Leaving the comforts of West Vancouver to create a home on a small, unoccupied island must have had them weighing options and making lists through the long winter months. By Easter, they had severed work, school and housing ties, built a barge for moving materials and were fully focused on the complex task of house building.
Their initial building site was a treed bluff facing north toward Lasqueti and Texada, next to a pocket bay where the barge could come aground. The site was convenient, practical and pretty. We hauled a great variety of building materials from the shore up to this spot. But even as we were getting organized, Mom and Dad were having second thoughts on the siting. The house would have its back to the sun and focus only on a part of the spectacular views available from all around the island. The site needed clearing, and it wasn鈥檛 adjacent to a water source. A new grassy location, looking southeast toward Vancouver, became even more attractive. And Clair and I聽spent hours once again lugging materials across the island.
A-frame houses were at the height of their popularity in the early 1960s, a period when postwar affluence allowed the construction of many vacation homes across the continent. This simple design offered an appealing way to quickly construct a livable house with a modern esthetic. Mom and Dad purchased plans and compiled meticulous lists of all the tools, materials and supplies needed to build a house. Getting building materials to the island was a major undertaking. Lumber yards in Vancouver and Nanaimo delivered to government wharves pallets of dimensional lumber and plywood, along with boxes of nails, cement, bricks, chimney flues, shingles, plumbing supplies and tools. These awkward piles were loaded onto the barge. What didn鈥檛 fit was laid along Whereaway鈥檚 decks or placed in the cockpit. I鈥檓 sure the odd sight of a heavily laden sailboat hauling a barge attracted attention as Whereaway headed out into the strait.
The first step in house construction was laying foundations. Creosoted beach logs were cut into posts and cemented to sandstone slabs. These supported a framework of joists, which were sheathed with plywood to form the main floor. This served as the platform for constructing the two-storey trusses that gave the house its distinctive shape. It had no sidewalls, just a steeply pitched roof on both long sides. You need only look at the shape of a capital A to see the basic framework.
Occasionally friends and relatives came by to lend a hand, but Dad, my petite mother and two girls under the age of twelve did the bulk of the construction. Mom and Dad positioned lumber, measured, measured again, cut (often with a chainsaw in the absence of other power tools) and then braced and bolted, and took care of countless other details. Clair and I must have played important roles hauling and holding things and tidying up the detritus of a building site.
Once the frame was complete, the next step was closing it in. Endless lengths of shiplap created the roofing surface. Tarpaper and hundreds of asphalt shingles went on top, installed from a precarious scaffold system that stretched across the long roof and up to its ridgeline. At almost nine metres off the ground, hanging those final shingles must have been dizzying and strenuous work. I wish I could ask Dad now how he planned the process, and what stressed, scared and pleased him. Those shingles kept the house dry for five decades and have only recently been replaced.
End walls were framed to close in the house. Windows and wide French doors on the south side captured views from the living room and upstairs bedroom. Because internal stairs would take valuable space, an exterior ladder-style staircase provided access to upstairs bedrooms. Going to bed involved a cold dash in the winter. But a convenient hatch in the ceiling of a closet off the kitchen allowed all manner of things to be passed up and down.
At the heart of the house, a double-flue chimney vented both the living-room fireplace and the wood stove in the kitchen. Because it extended several feet beyond the ridgeline, that chimney was a major project. I still remember how raw our hands were from handling those bricks, mixing concrete and lifting it all up with a pulley. In the fireplace, a Heatilator venting system warmed and circulated air in the living room. And eventually Mom found time to craft a raised hearth and face from carefully chosen pieces of tafoni, the sculpted sandstone that makes Bath Island so distinctive.
As that first summer turned to fall, two bargeloads of household goods were towed from Vancouver. Familiar carpets, beds, sofas, armchairs, paintings, a sideboard, a desk and the dining room set transformed the house into home. Electric lamps were positioned throughout, although it took a year or more for a generator system to power them, and then only sporadically. Precious electricity was normally reserved for the radio-telephone and for the tiny television that allowed us to be among the millions who watched the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show and American astronauts take the first steps on the moon. We became accustomed to groping for matches and carefully lighting the mantles of propane lights. But we used them only when truly necessary, since propane bottles were heavy to carry from Silva Bay.
Over the years, additions and renovations extended the A-frame and made it more comfortable. But it was always a simple house, with functional areas centred on the warmth of the wood stove and fireplace. Indoor spaces embraced sweeping views, as did a wide front deck that ended just a few feet above the high-tide line. The house was more gracious and comfortable than the plain accommodations that Mom and Dad had lived in at logging camps along the coast and was much better suited to them than the large West聽Vancouver house they had so聽happily left behind.
Complicated Simplicity: Island Life in the Pacific Northwest, 漏聽Joy Davis, Heritage House Publishing, 2019
