Jess in the kootenays

Somewhere deep within the Kootenay mountains, there is a haze of marijuana smoke. And somewhere, deep within that haze, lies the town of Nelson.

Twee, charming and kooky, Nelson’s gritty industrial history has been firmly covered in a layer of tofu.  Dragged out of the silver mines by Vietnam draft dodgers and coloured in with West coast artists, musicians and hippies, Nelson is exactly what you’d expect after 50 years of fermenting in mountain air, pot and idealisms. It’s a place where clothes are more likely to be made out of soybeans than cotton. A place where ‘organic’ is a state of mind, and where the corner shops sell sushi.  A place where, joyfully, the second-hand bookshop is the heart and soul of downtown, where the air tingles with creativity, and where community is so ingrained that if you turn up without the address of the house you’re staying in, you can wander sheepishly into a pottery store and ask for ‘er…someone called Fiona’, and instantly be directed to the right house. A place where ‘grit’ will now only ever be something to stop cars sliding off roads, and where although it is too easy to take the piss, you can’t help falling in love with it.

An old mining town, Nelson’s downtown is adorned with that wonderful 1920′s red-brick architecture that instantly throws you into Hollywood gangster films. Craft shops and diners and bars oozing live music squat next to cute cafes and the best thrift stores in BC. It spreads out, sweet, colourful houses, pink yellow blue, all balconies and veg patches, sloping gently up forested mountain sides, and scattered around a huge, blue green lake. Summer’s are bathed in sunshine, and winters bury the town deep in snow.

We are in Canada’s wild lands, miles and miles from anywhere  – only bears and coyotes and cougars for neighbours – but Nelson is never short of visitors. It seems to be the hub of some kind of transcendental network of ley-lines, invisible rivers of energy running across the country sucking in quirky, grubby souls, who go missing from normality only to appear, often weeks later, on the towns immaculate streets. You see them often, laden only with a guitar and a backpack, eyes full of stars, bewildered to have arrived, and discarded hitchhiking signs at their feet.

And somehow, I seem to have been tugged in too,  digging and painting and plastering and cooking and carpenting for the wonderfully chaotic artists that are my wwoof hosts here. I spend my days in the sunshine, looking out over forested mountains and catching reflections of the lake sparkling lazily in the summer day, and wonder if I’m ever going to make it back home.