Collins once joined her on a hunting expedition. He recalled her spotting cougar scat. “Like a connoisseur rolling a favoured Cuban cigar with her fingers,” he wrote, “she fondled the piece of feces, broke it in half, and put it to her nose, inhaling deeply.” She pronounced it fresh, before describing the cougar’s diet. Asked to pose for a photograph, she stood atop a stump and slung her bolt-action carbine over her shoulder, grasping the barrel with her left hand.
Her rifle once got her into trouble with a local conservation officer, who served her papers explaining hunting regulations, and once reportedly tried to seize her firearm. Solberg did not know how to read, the reporter said, and had a difficult time understanding the concept of seasons for hunting. If she saw game, he said, it was in season.
Her home was jerry-built from pieces of wood scavenged over the years. Her many possessions were piled high against the walls “in case,” she said, “there’s ever shortages again—like during the war.”
Solberg stayed in contact with the outside world through a citizen’s band radio. (Her handle was Cougar Lady.) When a friend was unable to reach her over two days, another friend was dispatched to the shack, where her body was found. Sechelt RCMP said she died of natural causes. Her friends suspect she suffered a stroke, as there was evidence that she collapsed midway through preparing a meal.
December 14, 2002
Bergliot Solberg, known as “The Cougar Lady,” takes aim behind her cabin just outside of Sechelt, circa 1995. She and sister Minnie (rear) lived trappers’ lives in the back country of the Sunshine Coast. PHOTO PROVIDED BY KEITH THIRKELL
Ian Hunter
“High Priest of Pot”
(March 20, 1961—August 14, 2002)
Ian Hunter called himself a reverend for the Church of the Universe. He claimed to be on a “Mission of Ecstasy” and described cannabis as a sacrament. The evangelist for marijuana, who brought to his advocacy a wit and flair unappreciated by those who upheld the laws he challenged, died in an accidental drowning on Kootenay Lake, aged forty-one.
Acting as his own lawyer on three drug-related offences in 1998, he told a BC Supreme Court justice that since the constitution recognizes the supremacy of God, and since God created marijuana plants, therefore all anti-marijuana laws were unconstitutional. The judge dismissed the challenge and ordered him to stand trial.
After conviction and the imposition of a $500 fine, Hunter remained unrepentant about promoting marijuana. “I carry some with me all the time,” he said. “I consider it my sacred duty as a minister, like a medicine man.”
Hunter was a rebel with a cause and the newspapers called him a “hemp honcho” and a “high priest of pot.”
With nineteenth-century mutton chop sideburns and pristine white suit, Hunter cast a dandy Beau Brummell figure when campaigning for mayor of Victoria in 1996. The suit was made of hemp fibre. He finished a distant third, though he proved more popular than five other candidates.
Ian Fergus Hunter was born in New Westminster to an insurance agent and a mother who had polio. He learned journalism at the Other Press, the student newspaper at Douglas College. At twenty-three, he became editor of the Squamish Times and later contributed to Vancouver radio station CFRO, known as Co-op Radio.
In 1988, he produced a provocative report for CBC Radio’s Ideas program advocating the vote for children. Hunter noted that arguments once used to deny the franchise to women and people of colour were also cited to keep children from the ballot box. He contributed a seven-page statement outlining his position on children’s suffrage to the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing in 1991.
He had first become publicly identified as a marijuana advocate in the early 1990s when he opened the Hemp BC store near Victory Square in Vancouver with Marc Emery. They called their budding business “capitalist activism.”
In 1993, when Prime Minister Kim Campbell admitted to having smoked marijuana, Hunter tried to present her with a certificate declaring her “a research associate in our hemp-cultivation program.” Tongue firmly in cheek, Hunter said his group was called the Institute for Adversarial Irony.
After moving to Victoria, Hunter opened his own hemp store called the Sacred Herb near city hall. He also initiated weekly marijuana smoke-ins at Beacon Hill Park, which attracted from fifty to a hundred and fifty aficionados. Victoria police broke up one of the protests in May 1996, charging three people with possession. Hunter wanted eleven police officers to be charged with obstructing a religious service, but the Crown said there was no reasonable chance of conviction.
Two months later, police raided his store and Hunter was charged with trafficking marijuana seeds, growing a marijuana plant, and possession of a small amount of psilocybin, so-called magic mushrooms.
When Justice Montague Drake dismissed Hunter’s constitutional challenge, he noted that marijuana seemed to be his church’s only dogma. Hunter was later convicted by a jury and fined by the judge. An appeal was rejected by a 3–0 vote by the BC Court of Appeal. Hunter vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court of Canada, but lacked funds to pay for a transcript of his trial.
Meanwhile, police asked council to review the store’s business licence. Council voted 6–3 to revoke the licence, the deciding vote for the two-thirds majority necessary cast by the mayor, Bob Cross, against whom Hunter had campaigned two years earlier.
He sold his store and eventually moved to Nelson, where he co-hosted a weekly, two-hour radio program called Fane of the Cosmos Infinite Moment. (Fane is an archaic word for temple.) The other host was Dustin Cantwell, proprietor of the Holy Smoke Culture Shop.
“He always pushed ideas,” Cantwell told Pot-TV, an Internet broadcaster. “You’d have an idea and he’d bat it into the outfield.”
Hunter also explored a variety of New Age practices, including yoga and tai chi. When he was first reported missing, six friends cast the I Ching before launching a search. His body was found floating in Kootenay Lake near a small powerboat. The RCMP said he had accidentally drowned, although no witnesses were available to describe the circumstances.
September 30, 2002
Entertainers
Harvey Lowe
World Yo-Yo Champion
(October 30, 1918—March 11, 2009)
Little Harvey Lowe’s mastery of a simple, ordinary toy—the yo-yo—became his passport to a boyhood adventure that would make him a world champion. He wore proudly for the rest of his days a title won at age thirteen.
In his nimble hands, the yo-yo became more than a child’s plaything.
He handled the string like a puppet master, causing his yo-yo to spin, dance, and, in the nomenclature of the pastime, sleep. He claimed a repertoire of a thousand tricks. On rare occasion, he performed a feat in which a pair of wooden yo-yos whipped within a blink of his face. He called this the death-defying Mandarin puzzle, a reminder of the toy’s origins as a hunting weapon in the Philippines.
As an adult, Lowe appeared on stage at clubs as one of the entertainments in an era when a venue’s nightly attractions might include a half-dozen acts. He later appeared on television, most notably on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which he wore an elaborate robe in his role as a Confucius Yomaster. It was his job to teach the venerable art to a character portrayed by Tommy Smothers called Yo-Yo Man.
Away from the stage and screen, Lowe acted as an unofficial ambassador to Vancouver’s Chinatown, with all its attendant mysteries. It once fell to him,