How do you House a Hippy?

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Image via Wikipedia Islanders called every young person with long hair ‘hippy’. I guess that was common everywhere, thanks to the power of television.

Personally, I wasn’t considered a hippy by my fellows. Since I was a Baha’i pioneer, I didn’t smoke dope or partake of a lot of the pursuits my long hair would normally have entitled me to.

Hippies broke down into two broad groups and affiliation could often be detected by the housing they preferred:

Traditionalists wanted to live in log cabins, tee-pees or yurts. For them, housing had been perfected by people in pre-civilization times.
Modernists believed that new technology and modern practices would finally provide cheap, comfortable and healthy housing for the world’s huddled masses. Modernists liked domes, tire houses etc. The most important thing was that the building techniques were unusual and that there was some kind of underlying philosophy which made at least superficial sense.

Traditionalists had a rough time on the Charlottes. I don’t know anybody that lived in a teepee, although there was one fellow near Cape Ball who had a Yurt. Log cabins were pretty much out of the question as well because the trees were just too big to handle. I did come across a ruined cabin from the old days around the turn of the twentieth century, though. It was up around Tlell. The logs in that puppy were between three and four feet in diameter. Weird thing was that they had all been broad-axed to provide a more or less smooth wall and then covered with shingles. In those days, apparently, living in a cabin didn’t bring you any status.

Anyhoo, I was a modernist. We decided that a geodesic dome was the way to go. While we were still in Vancouver we pre-cut all the struts and hubs and skin pieces and had them all shipped up to the islands. The place we were going to build was a mountainside. The first flat spot on it was a little bench about 800 feet up, so the dome pieces, tools and all the rest had to be packed up there on our backs. This made perfect sense at the time, but now I’d say we may have been modern but we weren’t that bright.

It was good fun building it, and the dome gave us good service the whole time we were there. It may even be in use today for all I know. We wound up adding a two-story, square structure to it when the kids came along and we needed more space. True to our modernist leanings, that was a pole-frame structure instead of a conventional stud framed house. But that’s another story.