the exile, since I said I would come to it

I left Bowen in 2023, and I called myself an exile in the previous update after that leaving, which is a large word and I have thought about whether I am entitled to it. Sometimes, as I write, I use a word almost as a marker for myself, a thing and an idea and an understanding I am still thinking myself towards, and exile was one of those words.

Nobody drove me off at the point of anything. I left the way most people leave the places that have stopped holding them: for a tangle of reasons, some practical, some to do with family, and one that sits underneath the rest and is harder to say, which is that the island I had lived on since 1980 had become a place I no longer recognised as mine, and the process by which it became that is most of what this record is about.

I will not say exactly where I am now, but I will say what kind of place it is, because it matters to me more than I expected it to. I have come to somewhere quiet and wild and rural, as beautiful in its own way as the place I lost, and I have been surprised by how much peace there is in that, in the plain discovery that the things I was attached to, the quiet and the wildness and the being held by a landscape, were never the property of one island.

I would never have said I wanted to be somewhere else. It turns out there was somewhere else that could hold me, and does. I write from there now, a long way from the creek I keep describing, and I think the distance clarifies rather than disqualifies what I see: I am no longer inside the thing, needing it to be liveable, and I can look at the whole shape of what happened without also having to get along with anyone in it tomorrow morning.

I use the word exile and I mean it, but I want to be exact about it, because it was an exile with choices. I had somewhere to go and the means to go there. Nobody I loved was at risk of their life for any of this. I am acutely aware that resistance, in other places and for other people, carries costs I was never once asked to pay, that people speak up, over water and land and much else, in circumstances where speaking up can cost them everything, and sometimes does.

I have only admiration for that kind of courage, and no illusion that anything I have faced belongs in the same sentence. But I have drawn something from it that I want to set down, because it is part of why I keep doing this. If those of us who are, in the scheme of things, safe, who have choices, and exits, and the luxury of finding it merely wearing or socially awkward rather than dangerous to speak out, decide it is all too much and do not bother, then we leave the whole weight of it on the people who have no safety at all. Being able to speak at relatively little cost is not a reason to stay quiet. It is close to the opposite. It is the reason to speak.

community, from the inside

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to be misread, and because I am not writing from outside throwing stones. My family came to Bowen in 1980, and across those decades we gave to the place in the ordinary, unglamorous ways that people give to somewhere they believe is theirs and believe is real: work, time, help, showing up. When the pandemic came, my mother and I ran what we could as an essential service and gave a great deal of our time away, to anyone who needed it, without much thought about who deserved it, because that is what you do in a community that is what Bowen says it is. I mention this not to be admired but to establish the ground I am speaking from. I did the caring that Bowen likes to describe itself by. I know exactly what it is worth, because I did it.

Which is why I can say the next part with some authority, and I am going to say it. Bowen tells a story about itself, small, caring, connected, a lovely little island where people look out for one another, and I believed that story for most of forty years, albeit with a certain wry recognition of its overstatement, and there is truth in it, and I am not writing to take it from the people for whom it holds. But I want to be exact about the distance between the story and what I met, because the distance is itself the record, and because the gap between the fine words and the actual conduct is the thing this whole project is about, and it does not stop being the subject when it arrives at my own door.

The matter is the one that runs through the whole of this site: an application, in 2021, for a temporary use permit for a commercial cidery on the property above ours, on a well and a septic field, at the top of a creek that ran straight down onto our land. People I had known for decades spoke, acted and made decisions as though the neighbours whose water was in question were invisible and negligible. There were those who passed our homes on their way to be shown the orchard, who knew us, and who then conducted the deciding of things as if none of us were there to be considered at all. There were letters of support written by people who had never once asked what the concern actually was.

And there were people I had taken for friends who could not meet me through the worst of times, and who were in the comments on the first day the doors opened, delighted, hearts attached. I will not name any of them, because naming them would make this smaller than it is. The point is not the particular people; it is the pattern, which anyone who has ever been made invisible by a community busy admiring its own warmth will know on sight. I gave to that community for forty years in the belief that the giving was mutual and the belonging was real. Learning how conditional it actually was is its own kind of education, and I would be lying if I said it did not cost me something to be taught it.

What I felt most, in 2021, was not even hurt initially. It was incredulity. I could not comprehend that no one appeared to think this mattered, that a threat to the water people drank could be handled as though it were a minor administrative matter. And if the belief was truly that we were mistaken, that we had it wrong, that we were worrying over nothing, then the plain human thing, the thing any of the people who knew us might have done, was to tell us what was actually happening, to show us what we had missed, to express even a flicker of concern. Nobody did. The response was not “here is why you needn’t worry.” It was silence, and around the silence a comfortable story assembled itself, which I have watched harden ever since: that the problem was the neighbours. That we did not understand. That we were overreacting. That it was, at bottom, a misunderstanding, and that whatever had fuelled it was in us, and was not to our credit.

It was not a misunderstanding, and I want to say so, because letting it stand would be to collaborate in a falsehood. I do not claim to be right about everything; I get things wrong, I do not always know what I do not know, and I have tried throughout this record to say clearly where my understanding runs out. But on this, on what was actually happening, and what it meant, and what was at stake, my understanding was not at fault, and nothing in the five years since has given me the smallest reason to think otherwise. The questions we asked in 2021 are, to the letter, the questions still unanswered now.

The people most soothed by the story that we had simply misunderstood were, almost without exception, the ones who had done none of the work, faced none of the consequences, and would carry none of the cost, the friend who assured me, comfortably and at no expense to himself, that it was all just a misunderstanding, having spent not one hour on any of it. A version of events was wanted, by a good many people, that would let them stay comfortable, and going along with it was the price of remaining among them. That I could not pay it is one of the truer reasons I no longer live there.

It did not fall on me alone, but I will speak only to my own part in it, because my own experience is the only one I can honestly account for, and the only one it is mine to tell. What others carried is theirs. For myself: there has been grief in it, and I have had to grieve.

why the water, specifically

There is one part of this I will not be measured about, because being measured would misrepresent it. To be made unable to trust your own water is a violation of a different order from most of what a person can do to you.

Water is the most basic thing there is, before shelter, before almost anything, ahead of nearly every other need we argue about. It is not negotiable and it is not substitutable, and there is a particular, bodily kind of fear that comes from not knowing, from not being able to be sure, that the water you and the people you love depend on is safe. It gets underneath the rational mind. You can know a worry may be disproportionate and still not be able to put it down, because the thing it attaches to is that fundamental. I understand, from the inside, how destabilising that not-knowing is, in a way I did not before and would not wish on anyone.

That is why I find the casualness of what happened so hard to forgive. Not the disagreement, disagreement is ordinary, and legitimate, and I have no complaint about being on the losing side of an honest one. What I cannot get past is the ease with which the most basic need a person has was treated as a secondary consideration if noticed at all, a thing to be managed around, by people and bodies whose entire purpose was supposed to include exactly that care. You can take a great deal from people and have it be, in the end, survivable. Their water is not on that list. It should never have been treated as though it were.

what I will not do, and why there are no comments here

That last sentence is also the reason for something on this site that I know reads badly, and that I am not going to soften. There are no comments here, and I do not answer.

I want to be exact about what that is and what it is not, because the obvious reading is wrong. It is not a retreat from the argument. I made the case in the places you are supposed to make it: letters to the Municipality, to the Islands Trust, to the health authority, to provincial bodies, submissions to committees, requests for records, and where records were refused, a request for review with the information commissioner. I am still doing it. All of it is on the public record and anyone can go and read it. What I have declined is not the argument. It is the running commentary. On Bowen that mostly happens on a Facebook page, and plenty of people use it and get something from it. I do not think it is the right place for this kind of work, and it is not for me.

Underneath that there is something I hold and am not going to argue about. You can lose an argument about a road, or a building, or a line on a zoning map, and still be in community with the people who won, because those are the kinds of things a community decides. Water is not that kind of thing. I have just said that you can take a great deal from people and have it be survivable, and that their water is not on that list. If that is true, then it follows that I do not have to sit down with the people who put it on the list, and work through their reasons with them, and be reasonable about it. Their reasons are the thing I am describing. I have heard them already.

I know how that reads, and I am told, in various ways, that it is uncompromising. I would say only that the people most inclined to say so are, in a good many cases, the ones who said nothing at the time, and that whatever their approach was, it has not produced a record of any of this. Mine has. It is a great deal of work, and I am not obliged to do more of it than I am doing.

So there will be nothing here in reply to why didn’t you, or if only you had, or have you thought about. I have thought about it. This is what I decided.

on credentials, since I am revisiting my own words

There is a paragraph in the 2024 layer about Oxford. I have left it exactly as it was written, but I want to say what it was for, because I do not think it explains itself.

It was an answer. Not to anyone in particular, and I am not going to name anybody, but there is a kind of person on Bowen now, and a small establishment of them, who conduct these questions through credentials. Where they studied, where they taught, what they are called. Some of them carry it in the signature block of personal emails, which is worth thinking about, because a credential in a personal email is doing no work at all except establishing standing before anything has been said. It settles things in advance, so your actual words do not have to stand up on their own. I was written off by people doing that, and condescended to, more than once, in the discussion of water, by people positioned as this island’s environmental authorities.

I have never once answered it in kind. Not in five years, not in a single letter, though I have been provoked into wanting to, and the letters are all there to check. It is not a game I want to play. I hold the things these people use as currency, and in rather older coin, minted a very long time ago by an institution extremely pleased with its ancient pedigree. I do not think that currency is worth what they think it is worth. What I think is worth something is having done the work, and being able to show where every piece of it came from.

So the paragraph above is not there to say that I see further than other people do. It is there because I spent years inside an institution that was, and is, busy defending its own story in public. I still get the invitations. And that is an education in exactly the thing I am describing here.

who I am in this now

So this is who is keeping the record, in 2026. Someone who believed in the place, and in the institutions, and in the ordinary decency of neighbours, and who was disappointed in all three, and who has learned to tell the difference between disappointment and contempt, because the contempt would be easy and it would be a lie. I am not writing from the position that it was all always rotten and I always knew. I am writing from the position of someone who took the promises seriously, held them to be real, and went looking, carefully, for the evidence that they were being kept. That the evidence mostly went the other way is the finding, not the premise. I would have been glad to be wrong. I checked whether I was.

Some of what is on this site, in the older parts of it, does not read like the rest. There is heat in it, and argument, and a good deal of explaining myself. I have left all of it where it is. I was trying to persuade people then, partly because that was what I was being told to do, and partly because it seemed obvious: set it out clearly enough and surely somebody will see it. It turned out not to be my register, and it turned out not to work. What I do now is keep the record, which does suit me, and which I think is the more useful of the two in any case.

I am still a historian, and this is still, in the end, history: an account of how a small place at a particular moment made its decisions about the most basic thing it has, and of what that reveals about how such decisions get made more widely, upward through every level that was supposed to catch any of it. I am still the person described above, with the training and the stubbornness that lets me read four hundred pages of redacted disclosure and stay awake.

What has changed is that I am no longer trying to hand it to anyone. In 2024 I was still, in effect, asking someone else to take it up and carry it. Nobody did. So I have stopped asking, and I keep the record instead, from a distance, in the open, as it accumulates, not because I expect it to be acted on, though it might be, but because it ought to exist, and because at present no one else is making it, and because the making of it is the one part of all this that has stayed mine.

I should say, since it would be odd to write all this and let the opposite be inferred, that I am not finished and I am not fixed. I am not uncritical of myself. I find myself irritating on a fairly regular basis. Often tedious, and more often ridiculous. Part of what these five years have been is working out and holding to what is actually non-negotiable for me. I do not think I have to spread that across everything I write, but it should be said once.

There are two things I watch for, and I will name them, because watching for them is part of the method rather than separate from it. The first is that a woman who writes this sort of account is expected to account for her feelings in a way that a man doing the same work is not, and that if she does, the feelings become the story and the work stops being read. I cannot write my way out of that and I am not going to try. I have put the personal here, on this page, in my own words, and only elsewhere where to avoid it would be dishonest.

The second is the one I watch for in myself. There is a kind of book, usually written by clever people, in which a private injury is explained by a large system: the class structure, the politics of the period, the age. I read part of one like that years ago, and the reviews of it, and I did not believe it then and I do not now. The system is always available, it always fits, it never has to be tested against anything, and it never quite finishes, which is also how conspiracy theories work. The way not to do that is the way I was trained. Start with the particular thing. Stay with it longer than is comfortable. Find out what it turns out to be an instance of, rather than deciding first and collecting instances afterwards. And always register that history does not work in single instances. A particular belongs to several stories at once, and deciding which one it is an instance of is itself a choice that has to be defended.

There is a test in that, and I apply it to my own work. Take me out of it. Not one of the staff reports written about that property cites a policy about water. The provincial register records four hundred and eighty-six wells on this island, which is a floor and not a count, and nobody knows how many households depend on one. The province has a law requiring an annual report on drinking water every year, and across the ten years to 2022 it produced two. The asset register holds three hundred and twenty-three culverts, each of them costed to the dollar, and no aquifer. None of that needs me. None of it changes depending on whether I was hurt.