Late last June, my husband Neil, a sociologist, and I sat down to dinner at a farmhouse-turned-culinary-retreat on Vancouver Island, dipping locally milled bread into our olive oil at the beginning of a long awaited field-to-table meal. The setting was idyllic, the evening already magical, but a part of me felt very far from home.
Our dining companions were Neil’s colleague and friend Mitchell, and his partner Arik, who were visiting from San Francisco and had joined us at the cottage we were renting for a week. As the first course arrived – B.C. salmon prepared three ways – we took up the perennial conversation among mobile academics: Where is the best place to live? Is it worth sacrificing a well-established department for a beloved city?
Neil and I – we’ve lived everywhere from Los Angeles to Wisconsin since meeting 10 years ago – were two years into a move to Vancouver from Cambridge, Mass. While we found our new city homey and beautiful, I couldn’t stop comparing it to New York, where I grew up.
Over the second course, homemade tagliatelle pasta with wild oyster mushrooms, foraged on the property, and served in a delicate sage cream sauce, I fantasized about the life I might be leading as a thirtysomething mom and freelance writer in brownstone Brooklyn – had an academic job for Neil materialized in the city.
Mitchell pointed his glass of locally produced Cowichan Valley wine in my direction.
“Just look at your life,” he said, noting my farmhouse chic flowered dress, my silver Swedish clogs, and my newfound love for backyard vegetable growing. (I was even thinking of learning how to can and preserve the overflow from my garden.) “It’s the life everyone in Brooklyn is fantasizing about.”
His point didn’t really register until I returned to New York for my high-school reunion on Long Island several months later. “You’ve flown in from Vancouver?” the clerk at Manhattan’s achingly trendy Ace Hotel asked as I was checking in. “It’s so beautiful there! How could you stand to leave?”
Later that morning, I went downstairs and joined the long line of coffee connoisseurs snaking out of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, based in Portland, Ore., into the lobby of the Ace. As I inched my way closer to a much-needed latte, I noticed the decorating motif from lobby to coffee counter: owls and mountain lions, dark wood, plaid chairs, dim lighting. It looked a lot like the living room of my unrenovated 1917 “character” house in the middle of Vancouver.
Over the next few days of shopping (heritage brands, handcrafted, plaids), eating (seared fish, farm-to-table menus), people-watching (beards and fisherman sweaters) and eavesdropping (canning and pickling techniques), I saw my life back home in British Columbia reflected and depicted and, thoroughly, gorgeously, fetishized.
Why do New York hipsters seem to be obsessed with all things woodsy? Might the new aesthetic be the reflection of an authentic groundswell of interest in sustainability and environmental stewardship – concerns that have been more vigorously pursued in Western Canada and the Northwest U.S. than just about anywhere else in North America?
Vancouver, after all, is the city that produced The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, the bible of the local-foods movement. It’s a city where residents are welcome to raise four backyard hens apiece, where food scraps are collected for composting, and where higher taxes fund sustainability initiatives.
Cultural analysis aside, in the middle of my old Brooklyn neighbourhood, I suddenly found myself missing my new home and the real thing. In Vancouver, I didn’t need an owl figurine at my local coffee shop – there are coyotes in the cemetery across the street from my house, a skunk that’s taken up semi-permanent residence in my backyard, plus crows and dog beaches and old-growth forests and mountains and ferries and fish taco stands.
Trendy or not, growing kale and carrots and zucchini and peas in my kitchen garden has become one of the most satisfying creative endeavours of my life, right after mothering my child, and publishing my first book. There’s nothing like feeling dirt in your hands, and seeing your toddler eat ripe raspberries and tomatoes right off the vine.
The truth is, while I feel at home in Brooklyn, I feel at peace in British Columbia. I love living close to nature and a city bus route, with easy access to inexpensive Indian thalis and fresh-caught fish for Japanese izakaya. In less than three years, I’ve learned how to grow food, take care of a house, be a good neighbour. What would 10 years teach me? Checking out of the Ace, I hailed a cab and left an hour early for the airport, eager to head home to my husband and son and our house in the city in the woods.
Jessica Berger Gross is the author of enLIGHTened: How I Lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle Pointer. She writes the Enlightened Motherhood blog for yogajournal.com.
Special to The Globe and Mail
