Hornby Island

So I list the ones that sound most impressive, but those are usually not the ones that land as really memorable.

I'm just dialing into my backlog of memories and I mean, I think I just finished two shows in August at this little theater called the Painted Door Theater on Hornby Island.

And it's this little black box theater and there's a stage and then there's bleachers, but it's so tiny.

It only fits about 35 people.

We've got some ideas.

Um, my wife has some property in Hornby Island that we're looking at developing and, you know, kind of building a bit of a, a bike culture experience.

Um, I won't say much more than that-

Yeah

[laughs] And, uh, uh, there i- it was a gr- interesting group of folks.

Um, uh, we had, uh, some other people that were my age, and then a couple of o- o- older fellows who came from, uh, a Hornby Island, uh, hippie era, and one of those was, was Tony and the other was Scott.

And so we played a lot of music there.

And then, uh, not long after I joined that band I joined another band called the Jazzmanian Devils, and we played, uh, jump swing, uh, and played all, all over the place.

I enjoy when you speak before and after each show and look forward to hearing from you.

From Basil, who's on Hornby Island, British Columbia in Canada.

Well, thanks so much for the email, Basil, and you ask a very, very tough question.

I'm not going to be able to give a satisfactory or complete answer.

On the ferry, they meet two young women.

Rosemary Allenbach, and Martha Ross, who are hitching to Hornby Island.

They invite Barbara and Terry to come along with them.

They're 19 years old and are about to embark on their own lives.

I think it's Terry who said, I hope we didn't manipulate them for our ends.

And there wasn't that feeling at all, except when they stole the fire axe.

We got onto the ferry and before we knew what was happening, Barbara leapt out of her car and grabbed the Hornby Island Ferry red fire axe and threw it into the trunk of her car.

And then we drove off the ferry.

For many people in the U.S., particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War, Canada represented another kind of ideal, a place to escape the draft.

Hornby Island, on the west coast of British Columbia, was one such ideal.

Nothing felt so broken, and we think it's broken today, but for women in the 70s and 80s, especially after Reagan was elected, but even before things like the founding of the John Birch Society, it just, yeah, I think they all thought the system was broken, that the civil rights movement hadn't accomplish what it was supposed to do and therefore it was the only way to solve it was to break out of the system and go try to create a communal utopia.

Let's get away from, you know, the patriarchy and the boss and the paycheck and let's, you know, celebrate and do something alternative and really live the communal lifestyle.

And I think that, um, and then falling in love too, or having an affair, whatever, with the nature of the relationship.

Um, yeah, it was, um, I think it was a very powerful experience.

The photos that Barbara took on Hornby Island that summer in August 1973 represent a spectrum of emotions intimately associated with that transition from powerlessness to empowerment, disenfranchisement to possibility.

But what did these photos mean for the queer women who arrived to Hornby in the intervening years around Barbara and Terry's visit? And what does it mean for the people who grew up on the island at that time?

Okay.

So, yes, just talking about here, Jadaih, Hornby Island, where the outer island is a loose translation of the, and that's an Iajuthum Comox language word for Hornby.

Chapter 2 Arrival Let's say we go back around 70 million years ago.

The mountains were being pushed up.

Our farming went into a decline then and has never recuperated.

Another thing we used to grow at that time was a lot of tomatoes.

Hornby Island is famous for its high quality tomatoes, but no one is growing them anymore.

So your life really has always been connected with the sea then, has it?