I stand in the garden my sister had carved out of the Canadian wilderness, surrounded by dense cedar forest. Eagles wheel overhead. Bees hum in the herbs and garter snakes rustle through the dry grass at my feet. There is no other house in sight. After the vibrant hustle of life in Ubud, the vastness and silence of the Canadian forest is shocking.
Robin found her land on the British Columbia coast and started building about the same time I built my house in Ubud. There the resemblance ends. My house went up in three months, in tropical weather, with plenty of help and no building code. Robin moved into her land alone in late winter, without electricity or running water. Every step of building the house was an obstacle course of bad weather, delays, expensive and unreliable workers and officious inspectors measuring the height of the balcony railings in millimeters. When at last she could sleep under her own roof, the mammoth task of clearing the land was still ahead of her.
My sister has three big axes. She chops a cord of firewood every winter to feed the little wood stove that keeps her warm. Every free moment when it isn’t raining, she’s in the garden growing food and herbs and fighting back the relentless tide of the temperate rainforest that seeks to reclaim the clearings. It rains too much, or not at all. The well water is sparse and undrinkable. She drives her truck several kilometres to fill 20 litre bottles with fresh spring water from a neighbouring property.
Robin’s rambling garden is a small organic jungle of vegetables, berries, fruit trees and the many herbs she grows for the market. Each garden is fenced against deer, which can ruin a crop in a single night. Bunches of fragrant herbs hang drying in every corner of the house, waiting to be weighed, bagged and labeled.
We drive up an abandoned logging road to harvest St Johns wort on a vastly silent summer day. We leave the truck doors open and constantly scan the clearing for bears. Bears and cougars are a constant presence in Robin’s life. She doesn’t have a barbecue or a salmon smoker. When we eat lamb chops, the bones are buried far from the house. “Bear bait,” she explains. The bears here are bold. Local stories abound of bears tearing open the trunks of cars and the lids of outdoor freezers, drawn by the tantalizing aroma of fish and meat. Last fall, her little apple tree was heavy with its first ripening fruit. When Robin spotted a mother bear and two cubs strolling up her drive toward the orchard she erupted furiously from the house, shouting rude things and banging two pot lids together. “Bloody bears,” she mutters.
I am awed by her courage. When I visit Canada people sometimes say, “You’re very brave to live in Indonesia.” They must be kidding.
My other sister lives in a suburb, near our parent’s house where we grew up. This world now is almost as exotic to me as Robin’s. I am amazed by the wide, deserted streets of the suburbs. There are no dogs or children in the empty gardens. I cast back a few decades to when these same streets buzzed with kids on bicycles or playing games in their yards. Traffic is rare, and the drivers are usually elderly. Where is everybody? “At work, at school, in front of the computer,” Beth explains.
She juggles a job, a family, a house and garden and an endless stream of boarders. Somehow, she finds time to throw a party for our 85 year old parents. About 30 elderly folk totter up the front walk on a sunny Sunday afternoon, supported on canes and each other’s shoulders. No one arrives in a taxi; they have all driven themselves, often with the aid of a Google-generated map. They consume an astonishing amount of wine and food before tottering off again.
Even here in the burbs, there is wildlife. Cheeky racoons nose in through the cat doors to raid the pet food bowls. It is not unusual to find my 85 year old mother in the front garden, flapping a tea towel at the deer grazing on her geraniums. Bears wander in from the many forested creeks. Last year, a young bear was found happily foraging through the produce warehouse at the back of a local supermarket in broad daylight. Wildlife officers sedated it with a dart gun, carried the slumbering bear to their van and took it into the forest. It must still dream of imported figs and cherries.
Beth and her family have two foreign language students living with them. I feel empathy with the two boys from Japan and Mexico, as, dazed with jet lag and culture shock, we navigate the intricacies of everyday life. Bali seems like another world.
The supermarkets are overwhelming. I meet up with a friend living in another Asian country who’s also here on holiday, and we spend almost two hours buying groceries. Enchanted, we linger in front of the endless displays, goggling at the obscene variety and excess of food. The produce section is an abundant, vibrant quilt of living vegetables, a far cry from the limp, plastic-encased offerings of Delta Dewata. I pick up a huge, crisp, perfect cauliflower and we admire the magnificent vegetable under the suspicious eyes of blase shoppers. We look like normal Canadians, but we’re not. After so many years away our country has become exotic, full of wonders.
