Disaster in Paradise
The Landslides in Johnson’s Landing
Disaster in Paradise
Amanda Bath
Copyright © Amanda Bath, 2015
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Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219
Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
Edited by Holley Rubinsky and Pam Robertson
Front cover photo by Louis Bockner
Back cover photo by Renata Klassen
Map on page 9 by Roger Handling / Terra Firma Digital Arts
Index by Brianna Cerkiewicz
Text and cover design by Carleton Wilson
Printed and bound in Canada
Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also greatfully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55017-695-7 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-55017-696-4 (ebook)
Page 96 excerpt from The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Valliant. Copyright © 2010 John Valliant. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company.
In memory of those we lost:
Petra Frehse, Valentine Webber,
Diana Webber, Rachel Webber
And a small black cat, Ozzie
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
—Robert Frost
Prologue
Christopher and I fell in love on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, in the summer of 1992, two years after we first met at his family’s summer cabin there. We sat down together on the rocky shore, as the moon scattered a pathway of diamond light towards us across Lake Huron, and made plans for our future. “Could you live in Canada, do you think?” Christopher asked me. I assured him that I most certainly could. One city was much like another, right?
“Right,” he agreed. “How would it be if we moved west to British Columbia?”
I kissed him and concurred, my mind’s eye already envisaging a tidy condominium apartment a bit like my home in London, England, but overlooking Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean.
Christopher went on to tell me about a place called Johnson’s Landing, a remote rural community at the north end of Kootenay Lake in the southern interior of British Columbia. His sister, Renata, had just moved there with her partner, Reid, and their three daughters, and lived in a house rented from the local potter. Christopher described his sister’s delight at its large, sunny gardening space, and the abundant food they grew. In my urban ignorance I wondered why they’d go to so much trouble. Surely they had shops?
As summer waned, I made decisions that shifted my life’s trajectory. I decided to abandon a financially secure, intellectually rewarding research job, a home in London near my parents and the comfort of safe routines, in exchange for a much less predictable existence. We’d be travelling for a while with no fixed abode and our financial outlook was precarious. In order to work I had to apply to become a landed immigrant in Canada. Love gave me courage and I barely paused to consider the implications. I was confident of my future path beside Christopher, wherever we chose to go, and excited by the novelty of it all.
We left Manitoulin for Minnesota, where Christopher’s father, Hanno, and stepmother, Julie, had their home. From there I flew to England, resigned from my job and emptied out the apartment in London. I gave away most of my possessions, stored the remainder with my parents, kissed Mummy and Daddy goodbye and was back in Christopher’s embrace within eight weeks. We packed, prepared for the long road trip and, in early November, left Minnesota in the “White Whale,” Christopher’s Dodge van and home-on-wheels. A luxurious queen-sized mattress filled the back; as a concession to the sensibilities of his English sweetheart, Christopher put up curtains.
We crossed the border into Canada at Creston, BC, and made our way up the east shore of Kootenay Lake. The highway was winding and narrow, the day stormy and overcast. We only just made the ferry to the west side of the lake—ours was the last vehicle waved on board.
Even under heavy clouds and in the face of a biting wind, the mountain scenery was dramatic. A lifelong city girl, I’d never seen anything like this place. The lake, a one-hundred-kilometre trench of deep clean water, lies between two rugged mountain ranges: the Selkirks to the west and the Purcells to the east. Its water drains into the vast Columbia River system.
Johnson’s Landing is one of the most remote communities in the West Kootenay. We drove through the village of Kaslo (population one thousand) and continued north. At the head of the lake we turned right and crossed the Lardeau River. Then another sharp right turn sent us south, once more on the east shore of the lake, beside the Argenta Flats, a wetland area and rich wildlife habitat. The road south was a gruelling twenty-two kilometres of unpaved dirt road: a juddering, corrugated dust bath in summer, and mud porridge in early spring, so Christopher told me. The road was at its best during winter freezes when snow and ice filled the ruts and potholes, and after the grader put a coat of grit overtop.
Johnson’s Landing’s “centre”—a community hall, a bulletin board and a bank of green mailboxes—was too small to be called a village. A broad spread of acreages extended over a bench of land above the lake and along the shoreline, ranging in size from half a hectare to just over twenty hectares, thirty-six properties all told, with some forty full-time residents. The community was named for Algot Johnson, a Swedish miner and trapper, who came to Kaslo from Colorado in around 1895. The story goes that in 1901 a storm drove his rowboat into the bay of what was to become known as Johnson’s Landing, while he was out fishing. He liked what he saw, saved his money and in 1906 bought sixteen hectares of virgin wilderness on the bench of land above the shore.
We found Renata and Reid, that grey November day, in their home adjoining the Johnson’s Landing pottery studio, with their daughters Rachael, Delanie and toddler Margie.
The place didn’t have a single shop or amenity. What was the allure? I pondered this question a day or so later, sitting on the half-rotted dock, gazing out across the lake with not a house in sight. Maybe that was it: an attraction of opposites, a place and way of life I had never experienced or imagined. The views, the peacefulness and