28.02.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: In his own words Vancouver was a place to flee from, a provincial, uncouth, uptight, frontier town that was stuck on maintaining some form of loyalty to a fading Crown. Above we see Margerie on the deck of the first shack in Dollarton.

"The thing to do," he went on, "is to get out of Vancouver as fast as possible. Go down one of the inlets to some fishing village and buy a shack slap spang on the sea, with only foreshore rights, for, say a hundred dollars. Then live on it this winter for about sixty a month. No phone. No rent. No consulate. Be a squatter. Call on your pioneer ancestors. Water from the well. Chop your own wood. Geoff's as strong as a horse. And perhaps he'll be able really to get down to his book and you can have your stars and the sense of the seasons again, though you can sometimes swim as late as November. And get to know the real people: the Seine fishermen, the old boatbuilders, the trappers, according to McGoff the last truly free people in the world."

- from Under the Volcano

Historian Eve Lazarus writes in her blog that the second shack the Lowrys lived in (above) cost $15/mo in the summer and $7.50/mo during the winter. The cabin burned to the ground in 1944 leaving Malcolm badly burned and many manuscripts destroyed.

The third shack was designed and built by the Lowrys complete with firewood, shelves, a woodstove and simple furnishings. Malcolm, legend has it, would dive into the inlet, swim to Burnaby on the opposite shore and climb up to Hastings St. to drink at the pub, but more about that later.