THE FOREST AND THE MEADOW AT OTTER POINT IN NOVEMBER OF 1979

I WAS STANDING ON THE BACK UPSTAIRS BALCONY WHEN A BULLET WHIZZED PAST MY HEAD AND A MILLISECOND  LATER I HEARD THE GUN GO OFF.

Looking East around the side of the house the meadow looked much like this. 

It was a brilliant warm sunny day when I took possession of my first piece of land. The grass was long and soft and brown from the sun, stretching out to the top of the hill on the North and up to a thin line of a copse of Fir on the East.

Unbelievably a thin stream of water shot into the air where the well house is now and I thought there was City Water but it was a capped and taped up Artisan well that was squirting into the air. I can feel how thrilled I was.

A few months later I had moved my possessions and the Family's goods into the 1200 square foot basement and I was finishing gyproc and paneling the house which had only fiberglass lining its walls when I started to finish the house. 

Cheap and practical, the house was a Linwood Cedar Home Kit House, a Double Viceroy with 1760 square feet of mostly very high ceilings. In that the walls were not finished, not a lot of money had been spent by the previous owner. The 12 foot high 1200 square foot basement was unusual, the house was below the road grade and the high basement brought it up. 

The house was a cheap kit and unfinished and to further complicate my finishing and the worth of the home, all fixtures, appliances and heaters had been stripped from the house including all accessible copper wire and pipes.

First off I hired licensed electrician Milton Randall to check and remedy all of the wiring in the house while the walls were open and all wiring could be seen.

I had hired a boarding crew but there was just as much wood paneling to install and as well all of the floors. My friend Marco Bacic came out to Otter Point and showed me how to finish gyproc and paint and I went to work, mostly alone but I hired my brother to work on some of the paneling and we built a well house.

 

I am not sure exactly what I was doing, the building was 28' X 40' and it was 40' high with interior staircase and a mezzanine and windows in the wall of the master bedroom that looked down over the 21 foot tall dining room from the high wall side. It was a large building for one man to run around finishing.

I went out on to the North side sundeck and I looked out over my flat land atop the hill and back at the forest behind the meadow and down to the bottom land a hundred feet below me with its ponds and streams and bullrushes. I breathed a sigh of relief, as I did just now, total recall is more total than you might imagine.

Looking East, I could see the grass under the broom. There was substantial broom on parts of the meadow but you see right through it from above. The Eastern border of trees started out narrow on the South at Otter Point Road, and got wider slowly til it reached the top of the hill about 300 feet from the road. Then the forest spread across the entire property and down to the wetland, 470'X1760' I believe, 12.5 Acres of absolutely perfect and natural meadow, forest and wetland. The American Peeper Frogs were deafening at night, a surreal neo-tropical amphibian orchestra punctuated with the hooting of owls and the howling of coyotes.

 

There was a bit of an anomaly, a shallow brown soil and rock ditch ran out from the Palfry property to the East and scratched its way like a wound across the meadow and down behind the house out of view behind the bulge of the hill.

That ditch, so small compared to the ditch carved out later by the same lunatics, replaced the natural creek which ran along my Southern Border just back from the road until a few years back they diverted the creek in defiance of the British Columbia Water Act so it ran in a strangely anomalous scar through my meadow.

I did not know at that time that Larulla Creek was lawfully located out front where it would be a useful demarcation of my meadow as it was intended, the meadow divided so as to suit the placement of the creek. I looked out over the bottom land and back at the mountains to the North and West. I was going to drive my off road Norton P 11 back there on the roads I could see.

I WAS STANDING ON THE BACK UPSTAIRS BALCONY WHEN A BULLET WHIZZED PAST MY HEAD AND A MILLISECOND  LATER I HEARD THE GUN GO OFF.