In this day and age, there’s more to homesteading than simply knocking up a cabin and kicking back with a moonshine martini. There’s connectivity to consider. Yes, an Internet connection is as important, if not more so, to those who might want to be off-grid but still of-this-world. The key, unless you want to spend a thousand dollars on a satellite Internet setup like Rich and Lisa had, is cellular telephony. A good cell signal will provide both your telephone and Internet needs. But out here, a good signal is hard to find.
Enter Meredith. Meredith, who lives just a little further up the road, is the resident renewable energy and telecommunications guru. Having gone through the process of setting herself up, she has the knowledge to provide knowledge best suited for local conditions. One morning, upon request, she dropped by with a dual band cell booster which meant that I could, for a few hundred dollars, go from one slippery, intermittent bar of cell coverage to three, if I had the booster powered. Which meant stepping out onto the porch and yanking the cord on my generator every time I wanted to make a call or check email.
But that was a small price to pay. Considering that Rich and Lisa had for a long time had to wait until low tide to walk out and make cell calls or drive out onto the sand flats in their truck, using it as a mobile office. Cell reception improves with line-of-sight with the cell tower in town.
Then there’s the iPhone, which as it turns out is more than just a slick gadget. With its somehow superior reception, it has revolutionized communications out here. Lisa, will on an almost daily basis announce, “I love my iPhone” and cuddle it to her chest. With it, they can now make calls from their front room and get Internet wirelessly through their iPhone personal hotspot, even without the booster.
Since, in the Queenpin, I’m down the hill, a little farther back from the beach, I still need to use the booster even with my brand-new iPhone (among the relentless torrent of purchases I’d made before leaving the city). And even then, we’re sometimes subject to ebbs and flows in signal strength that seem to have no relation to tides, weather, or what Lindsay Lohan is wearing.
And good, old snail mail is still of importance. Even if the snail here has to ooze all the way down-island and onto one of the periodic ferry sailings before it even gets to the mainland and becomes mail that’s legitimately in-play. This was explained to me by Jedah, a girl working at the Post Office, with hazel eyes, a spider tattooed on her forearm, and named after a Martian princess from a sci-fi novel her dad had liked.
She also counseled me that to make a 2-day ExpressPost package, actually something that would take 2 days, I had to drive to the airport and pay another $30 so that someone would step off the plane in Vancouver and stick it in a mailbox.
I opened a Post Box ($16.80) in town since there’s no mail service out on Tow Hill Road. Before coming, I was getting packages shipped to be held for me at the Gas Plus in Port Clement (the fringe benefit of which, is that the Gas Plus apparently serves really good burgers on Fridays).
Switching my car registration to Haida Gwaii saved me almost $400 in premiums due to their lower claims rates. I signed on as a member at the local food Coop for $10 (for which I got a $10 gift certificate).
I’d realized the day before I left that I needed to change my phone number to a local one if I didn’t want to be charged long-distance for my calls, so I now had a new number. Since all the numbers on-island had the same area code and first three digits, all I needed to remember was four new ones.
So, having actually “made” a few hundred dollars and with several new numbers: a PO Box, a phone number, and a Coop membership (all four digits or less) I was now officially a resident. But not ‘a local,’ a designation that would take years (well into the double-digits), if ever, to achieve.
I also did more work on the cabin. Cleared more brush, hauled out a dead log buried next to one of the posts (don’t want carpenter ants), and erected four more poles.
6 poles up, 3 more to go.