On Strawberry Hill

The Slocan’s back-to-the-land movement was robust enough that the fbi sent an undercover agent to the valley in the spring of 1973 in the (erroneous) belief that there was a Weather Underground safe house somewhere in the valley. The best known of the Slocan communes was probably the New Family in Winlaw, which had a clear guiding philosophy and an austere code of conduct; it prospered for nearly twenty years. There were others: Many Skies, Harmony Gates, the Flying Hearts Family. (This last spawned Brain Damage, a mid-1970s psychedelic—rock band.) There was an ashram on Kootenay Lake. The era has inspired reams of anecdotes but few narratives or conclusions.

As counterpoint, consider the climactic scene in “On the Rainy River,” an autobiographical story from Tim O’Brien’s masterful Vietnam War collage, The Things They Carried. In the story, O’Brien has decided to flee to Canada to avoid the draft. He makes it as far as a fishing lodge on the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from northwestern Ontario. It is off-season, the lodge is all but deserted, and the shrewd old proprietor knows exactly what O’Brien is doing there. One day, O’Brien and the proprietor go fishing, and the proprietor stops the boat twenty metres from the Canadian side and drops his line in the water. O’Brien is paralyzed with fear, then overcome with a profound sadness as he realizes he can’t make the leap. “And what was so sad, I realized, was that Canada had become a pitiful fantasy,” O’Brien writes. “Silly and hopeless. It was no longer a possibility. Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream.”

This is the gut check that faced each of the 50,000 or more who did take that plunge. Before adventure or assimilation or the tending of goats, each of them had to decide that their convictions were worth more than the comforts of home and family and career. If they weren’t quite revolutionaries, they were in some sense pioneers, and if what they did was sometimes naive and foolishly audacious, it nonetheless took real courage.

Bill Irwin — formerly of Strawberry Hill, still turned on, tuned in, and now settled on a homestead in the Yalakom Valley, an even more remote alpine enclave near Lillooet — puts it more forcefully. “In some ways,” he says, “this is the original spirit of the American people — to say ‘fuck the empire’ and move over on the Mayflower.” To reinvent democracy, or at least to try, whether in Massachusetts or on a Slocan hillside.