Village Squire, 1980-09, Page 42P.S.
All's not well in the new society
"Frank," he said, "I've had it. I've
got to get out."
I'll never forget the day Sam told me
that. We had just lost this case in court.
Sam had taken to championing the
cause of people caught in the red tape of
modern society. His client had just got
30 days for stubbing his cigar butt on
the city hall steps thereby violating
Bylaw 1033 section B. Sure enough Sam
did get out. He sold his house in the
suburbs and put an ad in the personal
section of the daily newspaper and soon
he his wife and kids and 30 other
couples had moved off to this island in
Georgian Bay to set up an all new
society. The one rule, he told me as he
finished putting the last of his be-
longings on a U -Haul trailer before
heading north, was that there would be
no rules in this new island paradise.
Red tape would be banished.
INVITED ME UP
Sam invited me up to see how things
were working out that first September.
They'd been busy all summer getting
the new society set up and it was quite
impressive. These weren't your normal
hippie, back-to-the-landers with
woodstoves and herds of goats. These
were refugees from the affluent,
bureaucratized middle class who might
want to do without red tape but not
without electricity. They had some
pretty delicious digs for people escaping
from the horrors of modern world. For a
minute there I thought 1 might escape
myself but I had this thing going with a
secretary back at the office and she
wasn't the kind to hide out on an island.
For that matter. neither was my wife.
I didn't get a Christmas card trom
Sam that year. They had decided to do
without all that commercial fuss I think
and besides, their little island nation
didn't have a post office. The next time I
heard about the new pioneers was about
May 24th weekend the next spring
when I went for a cruise on a friend's
sail boat and decided to stop in.
They looked like they'd survived the
winter pretty well. Nobody seemed to
have died of scurvy or frozen to death or
murdered each other. One look at a lot
of the women told me what they had
done for winter recreation.
NOT SO ROSY
Still, things weren't quite as rosy as
they had been when I left in September.
It had started in October when one of
the residents had decided to burn some
leaves. His neighbour just down wind
was a middle-aged lady who suffered
from a respiratory problem. She asked
him to stop. He said he wouldn't. She
said there were laws against things like
that. He said not anymore. One of the
reasons he'd moved here was to get
away from stupid laws. He liked the
smell of burning leaves.
If he liked them so much, the lady
figured he might as well get a better
smell than outside so she put a couple of
bushels of leaves outside his patio
doors and hooked up a fan to blow the
smoke through his whole house.
Problem is she also set fire to his patio
deck. To stop the war Sam, as unofficial
leader of the colony, had to step in. He
called a meeting of all the adults. They
decided that there had to be a rule set
down that no one could burn leaves if it
was going to blow smoke on the
neighbour's yard and if there was a
grievance like this in the future people
weren't to try to settle it themselves but
were to bring it before a council of all
the adults in the community.
FEWER SHOWED UP
Well that worked pretty well for most
of the winter but before long there
ended up being fewer and fewer people
showing up at the council meetings.
Sam of course, duty bound as he was,
always showed up but when he asked
some of the others why they didn't come
they told him they couldn't afford so
much time away from home for nothing
when they could be home doing . . .
. well they left that to his imagination.
but it was obvious that the little nation's
population was about to spurt upwards.
To solve the problem, by spring they
had come up with an elected system for
the council but some people didn't want
to sit on the council while the others
were home doing more creative things
PG. 40 VILLAGE SQUIRE/SEPTEMBER 1980
so they demanded the councillors get
paid. But to do that they had to take
donations from everybody and every-
body wasn't too sure they wanted to
give so some people were paying a lot
more to keep the council going than
others. The councillors finally decided
that something had to be done in the
interests of equality so they decided
that everybody had to give an equal
amount to support the island council.
A NEW CRISIS
Early that summer a new crisis hit the
community. Sadie Miller who had set up
a store on the island usually bought all
her produce from the islanders who had
gardens and resold it to the islanders
who didn't have gardens. A couple of
the islanders didn't like the price she
was paying them for zucchini so they
decided to hold back. Since zucchini
was a staple of the island economy (and
diet zucchini soup, zucchini bread,
zucchini pop tarts) something had to be
done. Sadie brought in a boatland of
zucchini from the mainland at less cost
than she'd been paying before to the
islanders. They protested to the council
because, they said, if this offshore
zucchini kept coming in at these bargain
prices they'd go broke and have to leave
the island. Well the council agreed so
told Sadie she couldn't import zucchini
any more unless she paid a tariff to the
local council which would make it more
expensive than the local zucchini.
ZUCCHINI SMUGGLERS
Well 1'd like to tell you more about
what happened on the island where red
tape was banished but 1 never made it
back the next time I went to visit. You
see they'd been having trouble with
zucchini smugglers so the council fixed
up this patrol boat to intercept.
Unfortunately as I approached the
island late one September night they
thought I was a zucchini runner and
opened fire. They fired a shot right
through my mainsail but we escaped.
There was more serious damage than
that though. The secretary got scared
and said I could either stop coming or I
could do it with my wife. It was my
choice.
I wonder how Sam's getting along
these days.
p
J