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Thread: Life on Devil’s Island

  1. #1
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Life on Devil’s Island

    This story is probably going to get told pretty out-of-order because there’s the story of how it came to be, and there’s the story of what’s happening now, and I don’t want to miss out on telling you about interesting things that are happening now just so I can obsessively chronicle the last five months of backstory, which probably won’t be interesting to anyone but me anyway.

    As some of you know, I have been living in Vancouver, Canada, for about the last ten years, and not really enjoying much of it. It’s a beautiful setting but the city’s been completely destroyed by frantic growth and offshore investment money, which both obliterated local culture and turned Vancouver into a giant money laundering hub, separating the real estate market from the local economy and increasing the cost of housing to something like 30x the average annual income. As a result, the whole city has developed this grim, desperate vibe – I often say that for a few years now, if I get into an elevator with another local, and there was nobody else in the elevator, they’d often ask, “you from here?” and then follow it up with “what are we going to do? I have to get out of this city.” It was grim.

    For a few years now, consequently, I’ve been trying to get work on Vancouver Island. This was a pretty soul-destroying process in itself. In addition to working on the magazine, which is what people here might know me from, I also have a pretty decent career in the telecom business, building and fixing business systems…my employer is pretty large and I’m relatively well paid (for here, anyway…my equivalent somewhere like Comcast would make a lot more, I think) and it wasn’t a company I was looking to leave. For at least two years, then, I have been working hard to make myself a valuable employee that nobody could say anything bad about. I’ve always been fairly good at the work but I never used to have to put on a mask just to be there, but you know how it is.

    I interviewed for thirteen different jobs trying to relocate to Vancouver Island, all panel interviews, and, obviously, I got rejected a lot. In fact, I got thirteen rejections. The biggest problem was the extreme local desirability of Vancouver Island. It’s a famously relaxed lifestyle and very difficult to get into a good job from the outside. Lots of the jobs I applied for, which are complicated jobs for which not that many people would be qualified, would have forty applicants. Over and over I got “first runner up”. The second to last interview, the whole panel came over from the island just to interview me, spent ninety minutes on the interview, took recommendations for me from everyone from my immediate supervisor to the regional director, who is about three levels up from the hiring guys, and at the end of the interview told it had been fantastic and that I’d done really well and that if they didn’t already have a guy who was getting the job, I’d definitely have been their top pick. It was tough.

    The last interview I did, which I also failed, was kind of a hail mary. It was a little outside my specific area of expertise and it was also in a town I didn’t really know much about. I grew up on Vancouver Island but it’s a big place and I had just never really been to this town but I was willing to take a stab at anything. The interview went pretty well but not great; I’d just had the “gee if only we didn’t already have a guy” interview two days before and I was pretty wrecked on interviews. In fact at that time I think I’d done six interviews in four months. I honestly didn’t even really want the job, just the location. But I gave it everything I could. The head guy called me the next day to say they were giving it to another guy who they’d already worked with a lot.

    The funny thing was that in order to have the minimum panel size for the interview, they’d asked this guy I’d never heard of, from some other department, to sit in, just to make quorum or whatever. He asked no questions but listened intently. Three days after the interview he called me.

    “Look,” he said, “do you know anything about my department? We do planning and design. It’s brain central. I think you’d like it. Do you want to come work for me? The region you just applied in needs someone in charge of the planning and design. It’s expanding fast. You’d have your own little kingdom up there.”

    “That sounds amazing,” I said. “I don’t want to sound mercenary, but how is the pay? I’ve heard the planners and designers are underpaid.”

    “The entry level guys are,” he said. “Do you think you’re an entry level guy?”

    “Well,” I said, “It’s just hard for me to imagine that you would hire me for a fairly different skillset than I typically perform at work, and take me on in a more senior role.”

    “It’s a lot of thinking, a bit of interpersonal, and a lot of written communication,” he said. “A technical guy with a deep telecom background, with a lot of writing experience. Isn’t that you? We can teach you the CAD stuff. That's no big deal.”

    “That certainly is me,” I said. I list nothing on my resume about any work in the arms industry for all kinds of reasons, but it’s not hard to find out, of course. But this was the first time anyone had implied they knew, let alone that it would be an asset.

    And so he swore me to secrecy on my pay scale to avoid internal conflicts with longer term people, sent me a written offer, and I took the job.


    I had a couple of weeks to try to get organized for the move, but the move wasn’t going to be simple: I was moving to…homelessness, starting February first. As a guy with no planning or design experience, they couldn’t put me in the soup on day one, so I agreed to work in Victoria, BC, for a few weeks or months - it was a bit vague - getting things figured out. I have family there but I’m not very close to them, exactly. It would mean a lot of sleeping in the 4runner and going back to Vancouver on the weekends and packing. I thought it would take me maybe two months to get the Vancouver side wound down, although I had no idea what Erin would do. Still, she was also committed to the idea and it was obviously a step up for me work-wise and it meant finally getting out of Vancouver and into the desirable Vancouver Island life, so I packed some stuff into the old Toyota and off I went. I had grown a beard the year before when I got super busy building a little rowboat in my apartment while trying to wrap up an issue of the magazine outside of my regular job and just stopped shaving, and I felt I was ready to put my stuff in a storage locker and embrace the homeless lifestyle.

    So here is me, having begun to fill a storage locker, and trying to embrace my new life. Note rickety bicycle and a shirt sporting the logo of an optics brand the poors use.

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  2. #2
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    Best wishes on your move. One thing that I have always found is the cream rises to the top.
    With liberty and justice for all...must be 18, void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply, not available in all states.

  3. #3
    Hodor!

    Welcome back.


    Okie John
    “The reliability of the 30-06 on most of the world’s non-dangerous game is so well established as to be beyond intelligent dispute.” Finn Aagaard
    "Don't fuck with it" seems to prevent the vast majority of reported issues." BehindBlueI's

  4. #4
    The adventure continues

    Best of luck

  5. #5
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    I love the homeless method acting, tall boy of Bud Diesel/Heavy is just good research.



    Homeless Wolverine is a little rough though...

  6. #6
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Devil’s Island

    Further backstory: I own a vacation cabin on a really small island. I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but the whole island is about a mile long and maybe a quarter or a third of a mile wide. There are about two hundred lots on the original subdivision plan but many were never built on, and some have rickety old cabins that are falling down or haven’t been occupied in years. The permanent population is about ten, although on summer long weekends it gets up to around a hundred. There’s no ferry, there’s no paved roads, there’s no grid tie for anything. It’s solar electricity and well water or nothing.

    For the last five years I’ve been going most long weekends, in my little pocket tank of a boat. From where I kept her in Vancouver it was about 60-70 km (40something miles) by water one way, which included one big river bar. That could get pretty sketchy; the water in the area is pretty notorious. It’s no Columbia River bar because Vancouver Island blocks the big seas from the open pacific, but you get some pretty big water built up from the endless west and northwest winds that run down the length of Georgia Strait. Plenty of commercial boats have been lost there and it would often be pretty gnarly. I have video I’ll try to embed which is hardly spectacular but you will notice that a 31’ flybridge cruiser is completely disappearing between waves, and we’re laughing because we’re through the actual rough part, during which it would have been impossible to film. My boat, for the record, is a twenty foot sportfishing boat (although to be fair it is a design which is locally famous for performance in heavy weather – it’s not the equivalent of taking a 20’ lake boat out there).

    Anyway, that’s been my system for the last five years. I watch the weather carefully and try to time the tides right and then I gun it out the rivermouth and pilot the little boat as best I can. We have seen some really bad conditions out there – one day heading into 30kt winds I lost track of a big marker buoy and I couldn’t physically see it until I got within twenty feet, there was just so much spray in the air. We had the dinghy ripped off the roof of our boat by a big wave that just swept us, front to back, on one of our first crossings. I pushed my luck probably too often and I was getting sick of the nerves I’d feel, particularly the first crossing of the year. Also, at the cabin, I’d be waiting and watching the marine weather like crazy, because if there’s one thing worse than leaving a big river, it’s entering it. I think the worst we saw at the mouth was a series of stacked up ten foot waves, which were manageable, except that river is also the site of a huge amount of commercial traffic, so in those ten footers we were also dodging a massive freighter and two ocean tugs, every one of which was throwing a massive wake at completely different angles to each other and to the offshore waves, which were hitting the river bar and standing up to start breaking.

    In fact I’m not sure how common this knowledge is but river bars are typically really bad spots because the silt from the river (and the Fraser is about the siltiest river I’ve ever seen) builds up and the water gets shallow. The shifting bars drift around like dunes on the bottom and you never know exactly where it’s going to be deep or shallow, and the bottom rolls up and down, just exactly like sand dunes. The water interacts with the bottom; waves start to “feel” it somehow at around nine times their height, and they get steeper and taller. Then the bottom drops off and the waves turn unpredictably into troughs, and you can get burned by maneuvering for one condition and seeing it melt away right in front of you to present you with a different one. Maybe everyone knows this but anyway it’s a big concern for anyone who has to deal with it.

    The bottom line is that my island place is only about 5km – three miles – off the east side of Vancouver Island. It’s a cake walk compared to crossing the strait and exiting the river, just a breeze. My boat is total overkill for the job. I could probably do it in an actual hurricane. So my thought was that by moving to Vancouver Island, somewhere near my island place, I could go whenever I wanted. I’d get more vacation time, and better. I like off-grid, quiet time. I don’t mind a bit of isolation and I don’t mind vacationing without electricity or running water. Actually, that’s a nice vacation, in my opinion. You get in touch with yourself and you get into the rhythm of actual human-scale existence. I planned to be at the cabin for every day off I could possibly get, once the move was complete, of course.

    What I didn’t really plan on was moving there and becoming one of the ten residents.
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  7. #7
    Umm...what if you can't afford Vortex and you use Primary Arms? Is that like double secret poor? #AskingForAFriend
    #RESIST

  8. #8
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by LittleLebowski View Post
    Umm...what if you can't afford Vortex and you use Primary Arms? Is that like double secret poor? #AskingForAFriend
    Uh...I mean I think "secret" might be a bit optimistic


    (says homeless guy wearing donated clothing)




    Some pictures to break up the text...

    The place, our bay, the boat, and a spot at the north end of the island known as "miami beach" because it's all white sand around the rocks from thousands of years of crushed oyster shells. A great place to swim.
    Attached Images Attached Images     
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

  9. #9
    Site Supporter Hambo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by misanthropist View Post
    This story is probably way too loooong...


    I felt I was ready to put my stuff in a storage locker and embrace the homeless lifestyle.

    So here is me, having begun to fill a storage locker, and trying to embrace my new life. Note rickety bicycle and a shirt sporting the logo of an optics brand the poors use.

    Name:  homeless.jpg
Views: 1015
Size:  99.5 KB
    Dude, congrats on the job, but your homeless look is lame. At best you look like a hipster who couldn't find PBR, and at worst like an out of work YouTube firearms personality.
    "Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA

  10. #10
    Site Supporter Maple Syrup Actual's Avatar
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    Right, Devil’s Island

    I forgot, I was going to explain the island. Okay, this goes back to the 1920s when the neighbouring island was the home of a cult. You can read up on it if you like; the cult leader called himself “Brother XII” and had a whole bunch of followers living on DeCourcy Island, which you could practically swim to on some days, although the current between here and there is no joke. He ended up pretty rich as the result of wealthy suckers and allegedly stashed a ton of gold somewhere on DeCourcy and people have semi-seriously looked for it ever since. Macleans has a good article online that covers most of the history on that
    https://archive.macleans.ca/article/...-of-brother-12

    So DeCourcy was the headquarters. And as mentioned in the article, he also bought a bunch of Valdes Island, which is also really close by. But the island I’m on was used as the prison or exile territory, and it was called “Devil’s Island” by the cultists. Which is ironic, considering that Brother 12 himself ended up being nicknamed “The Devil of DeCourcy” around here. Anyway, their misbehaving castaways were marooned here.

    A few decades after all that had died down, the mayor of the closest city had this idea about developing it into a sort of vacation colony for Vancouver’s private-yacht-owning elite, and it was subdivided with that in mind, but it just never really took off. Maybe there weren’t enough yacht-owning summer home buyers? At any rate, many of the lots just sat vacant and today only about half of them have been built on at all.

    One of the families who bought in and never did anything with the property bought two adjacent lots on the west side of the island. At just under five acres, it’s the largest single contiguous section of the island allotted to a single owner and faces the island’s pond (some years a small lake, others almost a muddy field). In fact they bought the entire west shore of the pond, as well as, I believe, the highest point on the island. But packing stuff up there is exhausting and a lot more like labourer tasks than tony resort attendee tasks so it just sat there until their daughter became an adult and inherited it. She married a wealthy industrial psychologist from North Vancouver, which is the rich part. He didn’t own a boat at all but he’d get dropped off by plane in the bay pretty regularly. I think sometime around 1990 he hired a carpenter to build him a cabin up at the peak of the property’s cliffs, and paid a couple of vacationing teenagers a summer’s wages to pack everything up there from down at the bay.

    And for a while I guess he liked it because he kept going there long after she stopped. But I guess he got tired of it, or maybe with the pending legalization of marijuana he didn’t need it anymore (some form of non-sanctioned horticulture appears to have been taking place, anyway) and put it up for sale.

    There were a number of factors which held the price down: the whole island is an unusual location, for one. There are no docks. There are no roads. You set a mooring in one of the bays and you row in and out by dinghy. That keeps a lot of people away. But it was also bad timing: Gulf Islands real estate is cyclical. When the dollar is high against the US dollar, no Americans buy in, and at that moment the dollar was at par. There were rumours about legislation (which would eventually be enacted but which would not apply to the islands) which would penalize owners of multiple homes – this was part of the effort to deal with the foreign buyer problem in Vancouver. And Canadian banks had all jointly decided that no mortgages or loans would be made on non-serviced islands. And so the five acres were worth much, much less than they would have been a few years earlier, or than they would be a few years later. In fact, they were just about exactly the amount I had from a bunch of sideline work I had done before the magazine existed, plus a few thousand out of my RRSPs.

    The deal with the cabin was simple: you had to have cash and you had to take it as-is. You could come and look at it but you had to have your own boat. I didn’t have a boat, but I did have a friend who worked at a Mercury dealership who was able to borrow the shop’s beater Boston Whaler. It was March and for two weeks in a row it was too stormy to cross the strait, but on the third weekend we got a break in the weather. I went and looked at it with Erin and the realtor, who showed up on his own little boat wearing gumboots and a battered old Mustang floater coat, and agreed to take it on the spot.



    Pictured are:

    Erin and my friend with the beater whaler, who was freezing and borrowed Erin's scarf and gloves which are leopard print

    I think our first glimpse of the cabin

    The wood stove which we were pretty excited about

    Some fish which were caught later in an unrelated incident, but I felt like including the picture anyway
    Attached Images Attached Images     
    This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
    https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff

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