The Martlet

Being on the Island takes me places I never thought I’d go.

From singing “Redemption Song” with 10 000 people at my first 4/20 celebration in Vancouver to witnessing police cars set ablaze from metres away during the Stanley Cup Riot to an eight-day desert survival journey at Burning Man, a kaleidoscope of summer experiences threw me across challenging boundaries.

This West Coast environment pushes me to grow and explore. Beyond boundaries of mere knowledge, I seek frontiers that are physical, emotional and relational. Like my peers, I’m educating myself to acquire the confidence needed to transcend those boundaries.

Around this time last year, I was starting at UVic and had a serious case of imposter’s syndrome. People in my classes had intelligent things to say and impressive experiences to relate. I felt I didn’t have as much to contribute and it forced me to reflect on what was standing between me and a more active way of being.

The answer was self-judgment.

On the Importance of Friends

Forging friendships each semester helped me discover the confidence I needed to stop holding myself so apart from experiences that I grew up judging as irresponsible.

It all started with a little gassin’ (a greasy style of drinking that hails from back East) around illegal beach fires. Driftwood was plentiful and fires were easy to start and snuff. New friends from the Maritimes, southern Ontario and Germany wanted to experience British Columbia’s mystique, and I’d been on the Island long enough to know what they had to see.

As classes wound up and reading lists dwindled, we cobbled together ride-shares and bus sequences that would take us to hotel ruins at the Sooke potholes, the trestle bridge in Goldstream and Mount Finlayson, which afforded gorgeous views of the Island’s southern tip. As soon as classes finished for the summer, we were in full-on adventure-seeking mode.

We absorbed the exquisite beauty of Sombrio and Botanical Beaches, hugged massive old growth trees in Avatar Grove and canoed on Lake Cowichan. These sights compelled us to set out through Cathedral Grove to Tofino and Ucluelet, where we strolled vast beaches along the open Pacific. I dove right in for the first time at Long Beach and probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t had company. Same goes for the naked plunges I’d take on a later trip to Mystic Beach.

It’s not peer pressure — it’s peer empowerment.

That’s how I ended up trekking to the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington for the four-day Sasquatch music festival — friends convince you to explore limits. Not only was it an obviously irresponsible use of my budget limits, making my way there via random Internet match-up was also a challenge to foundational limitations on taking rides with strangers (who now happen to be friends). Add my initial exposure to the celebratory festival ethos and more hipsters than I’d ever seen gathered in one place, and it’s safe to say it felt surreal.

But it was a surreal I could handle, which was the reassuring part. The feeling was by no means limited to the festival, either. Back in Victoria and walking to the Beacon Hill flagpole through tall grass with buddies and beer, I heard oddly syncopated drumming in the bushes. Out popped girls in starched dresses and boys with ironic facial hair who claimed to be having a hipster-themed birthday party. They took pictures with old cameras and shared chilled oysters with a variety of sauces. Before long they said they were off to some other secret location to continue the festivities (we’d opted for another beach fire) and slowly drifted off in bunches. Were they actually pretending to be hipsters, or were they just hipsters pretending to be hipsters because they feared judgment? I might never know.

And that’s all right, because it’s irrelevant. They were kind. Those popular sentiments that encourage me to hate on hipsters and their peculiar tastes have always felt suspicious, and befriending these people showed me how terribly boundary-building the term “hipster” alone proves to be. What useful purpose does scene categorization serve but to provide easy reference points for snap judgment?

On the importance of disobedience

Still, a few beach fires, a little public nudity and some unorthodox cultural exposure didn’t push my boundaries as far as I was ready to go. Having grown up on harsh judgments about things like public disorder, recreational drug use and indignant music, I wanted to understand these things instead of thoughtlessly dismissing them and their adherents.

A friend and I took a trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery on April 20 and found no stigma or secrecy surrounding cannabis use. One of the event’s organizers (another old friend from school) compared 4/20 to the community-building function that Pride festivals and farmer’s markets respectively perform for the LGBTQ and environmental movements. Events like these provide us with a chance to feel accepted and among “our” people, if only for a day, out in public view. There was peace and love abundant, and I felt comfortable doing something I’d have negatively judged myself for only months earlier.

Emboldened to explore the unique energies found in varied crowds, I sought thrills by throwing myself out there like I’d never had the courage to do before.

The Stanley Cup was on its way to Vancouver, and having been at Robson and Granville when Canada won gold in Olympic men’s hockey last year, I knew I had to be there should the Canucks see fit to mend my broken childhood dreams from 1994. I was downtown with friends at the jumbo screens by the CBC, Vancouver Public Library and Canada Post buildings for game seven, and it got weird.

With minutes still on the clock and the fate of the game all but sealed, I began to hear metallic thuds and crystalline tinkling coming from the first smashed and torched car. The screens were shorting out from crowd-sourced projectiles before the closing seconds were through. Chants of “Fuck Boston” rang out around me and I walked up the street only to find angry, alienated people surging toward situations that allowed them to vent. Watching later from atop the bus shelter at the Queen Elizabeth Theater, I saw rioters lingering, resisting and burning things as police moved slowly to disperse them.

The result was well-publicized but not well-explained. At first, authorities blamed committed anarchists, but were then forced to admit that suburban kids with serious aggression and trust issues were mostly responsible. Left without a Stanley Cup to admire, they had nothing to celebrate and so let slip some revealing frustrations about unrealized expectations. Bearing witness to the riots felt heavy and dangerous, but they allowed me to see fragility of the behavioural boundaries supported by authorities.

Imagine what would happen if we had a real common cause.

On the importance of commonality

Sometimes when I’m at my desk trying to stop frittering time away on the Internet for long enough to get real things done, I think about how much of a shame it is that so many of us are cooped up in this way. School, work and procrastination take up so much time that I’ve avoided new experiences because I’m protective of what little personal time remains.

But summer allows us to reclaim our lives. Picnics, barbecues and parties provide space for interactions with random people and situations that help us gain greater insight into who we are and who we really want to be.

Take, for example, the experience of watching seals on a Gulf Island picnic. I grabbed a morning bus out to Swartz Bay with some friends and walked onto a ferry that brought us to Otter Point on North Pender Island. We found a spot where several seals were hanging out and watched nature at play, spellbound, while a baby seal explored the shoreline a couple meters away from us, its parents observing nearby.

Later that day, however, we came upon another beach and were startled to find a different baby seal, obviously lost and tired, that was struggling to hoist itself onto the banked shore. It kept swimming nearer to us and at one point was within arm’s reach. My friend was adamant that if any of us touched the seal, it was doomed to die. I listened, but sat sullenly for a half hour, watching nature in peril as the seal swam in lazy circles with its eyes closed and nose barely breaching the surface of the frigid Pacific. We left before we knew its fate.

I felt helpless to save this suffering creature and very guilty, given that the situation represented a microcosm of our global ecology. The boundaries our civilization has erected between humans and meaningful relationships with our ecology isolate us from our humanity. You’d think that since the situation affects us commonly, we’d collectively be more responsive to it than we have been. I felt it was time to fall upon nature’s mercy and learn from it, so I journeyed to Black Rock City for Burning Man.

This city, located on an ancient alkaline lakebed in the Nevada desert, exists for barely more than a week per year and is a pilgrimage for lovers of art, community and (mostly) uninhibited self-expression. It’s a place to survive, yet I, along with more than 50 000 other transitional beings, thrived. How does one live through some of the harsher conditions on the continent for eight days in high summer? Radical self-reliance and inclusivity — that’s how.

Burning Man is like nothing else, and most say it defies description. I can say it is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Imagine a society where gifting replaces money, where everyone wants to connect with you and where hugs outnumber handshakes for the sober and wasted alike. Think of a cyclist and pedestrian paradise that vanishes without a trace when everyone returns to the default world. The dust on the surface is powdery like the moon and the nightly lights from never-ending parties make you feel like you’re on another planet.

But I wasn’t — I was again with my people. They’re the ones who recognize the alienating pathologies of modern life and choose to grow and sustain a better way of being. Burning Man is a healthy place for rock ’n’ roll refugees of all sorts. In an environment that can and will kill you, we brought enough provisions, art and love to create an oasis where boundaries between self, community and ecology ceased to exist. If it can exist there, it can exist anywhere.

And it does. Burners bring this existence home with them. They seek to erode boundaries between life’s participants and observers. Their enthusiasm for pushing their own limits and blending categorizations inspires others to question the judgments of straight society. Some might call us a bunch of “dirty hippies,” and that’s endearing, for we know places where money doesn’t exist and communities are inclusive. In pushing past commodification, the gift economy transcends boundaries built by capitalism. We are free to build something we could call “capitalisnt.”

The Beatles once questioned how such a revolution might unfold, suggesting that before we can change our institutions, we’d better free our minds instead. I tried to do just that this summer, but I couldn’t have started without the understanding that came from reaching out for the deeper knowledge, relationships and experiences that this community and time of year offers.

Boundaries are falling apart all around you. You’re part of it as soon as you decide to be.