It was a silent, magnificent forest, glowing in the warm Kootenays, our mountain trail occasionally allowing us to peek across Slocan Lake to what became, after an eight-year battle, the Valhalla Wilderness Park.
I no longer remember the name of my mountain trail companion that day, an actor I met through the New Denver poet Diana Hartog—an intrepid writer who built her own house close to the lake. The actor was taking me back to his roots as a young man and the commune that inspired him. It was a classic Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, gone rotten and dangerously falling apart, a once vibrant site now littered with junk—pulled apart by vandals and time.
We looked upon the ruins of his old commune, aware of how much had been lost, good and bad, since those optimistic days before the rise of religious fundamentalism...
Brian Brett is the author of 13 books of poetry, fiction and memoir and a winner of numerous prizes, including the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction prize for Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life (Greystone, 2009). His newest memoir is the soon-to-be-released “Tuco, a life with birds.” He was there in the 1960s, and he remembers it.
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