In a post a while back I made a dirty allusion to some bike trouble I was having on Lasqueti Island.  I was on Lasqueti – an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island in the Strait of Georgia – for five days, doing ethnographic fieldwork with Dr. Phillip Vannini, Canada Research Chair in Innovation Learning and Public Ethnography and professor at Royal Roads University’s School of Communication and Culture.  Our work on Lasqueti was just a small piece of a much larger project, and for the next year and a half Professor Vannini and I are going to be visiting every province and territory in Canada to research and document off-grid living with the support of both the Canada Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councils.  The intent is to describe, in words and pictures, the culture of off-grid dwelling and dwellers, and how and why they do what they do.

Lasqueti is the least developed of the major Gulf Islands.  It has a permanent population of approximately 350, is accessible only by foot passenger ferry or private boat, and remains disconnected from BC Hydro, British Columbia’s provincial provider of electricity.  As such, it is the perfect place to begin a long-term multimedia documentation of off-grid living – and by ‘off-grid’ I am referring to the freedom (or forced isolation) from any or all of the dominant hierarchies of resource (al)location: power, communication, water and transportation.

Lasqueti is a melting pot unlike any other I have visited: here, back-to-the-landers and hippies of all generations exist side-by-side (figuratively, at least, as Lasquetian land parcels are minimum 10 acres to manage density) with the kind of nautical roughnecks you might find in one of Mowat’s maritime epics. Although not natural islandfellows, any tension between the two factions is quite superficial, as the challenges of living on Lasqueti provide a communal undertone of cooperation and support. As one Lasquetian illustrated, “So-and-so didn’t like me, but he still spent two hours under my truck when it wouldn’t start”.

As mentioned, there is no car ferry to Lasqueti, and the cost of bringing a vehicle over by barge is enormous, so Professor Vannini and I travelled by bicycle. Yet another grid Lasquetians are removed from is that of the civic system of addresses, so our island explorations were guided by word of mouth. A typical set of cycling instructions on Lasqueti might sound like this: “So-and-so lives on Boat Cove Road. The driveway is marked with the sculpture made from old hubcaps and eagle feathers – you can’t miss it”. The roads are gravel and on an island where everything seems to be uphill from everything else, our bikes took a beating: broken pedals and snapped shifter cables benefitted from a little innovative bicycle repair – skills honed last summer will on tour with The Malahat Revue.

The video from our trip (and there is lots of it) has yet to be digested, but here are a few photographs of life on Lasqueti.