KRISHNA EAGLE AND FAMILY
Here's Krishna Eagle and his family's story and how MOTHER had helped them find their "organic" existence in British Columbia.
March/April 1972
By the Mother Earth News editors
This whole last year, MOTHER has helped us find an organic existence and it's now time for me to sit down and relate our story.
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When Marcia and I headed north from Los Angeles in the summer of '70, we had two sleeping bags, a very heavy backpack, about $700 in traveler's checks and a lot of hope. One week later, after hitching all the way, we were in Nova Scotia.
Frankly, at that time, Marcia and I were not very together about what we wanted or how to get it. Though we had no knowledge of farming whatsoever, our idea was to hunt deep in the wilds of Canada for "The Promised Land". The results were that we ended up, a short time later, back on the West Coast—Vancouver, British Columbia—broke, but still determined to get out on the land somehow.
So we crossed back over the "border"—a magical-psychological thing—and settled in Portland, Oregon. There, we both found jobs working in the same restaurant . . . Marcia as a waitress and I as a dishwasher. By May, 1971, we had saved $1,500.
Enter friend Bear, who had come into some cash and with whom I had lived communally in the past. We three pooled our money and know-how and once again set out in early July, a year after our first attempt, to make the coast-to-coast-to-coast journey.
Seventy tired days and 17,000 miles later we were once again in beautiful British Columbia after looking at a lot of land—and even more back roads—across Canada.
We had learned that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have inexpensive acreage, friendly folks . . . and temperatures of -20° to -30° Farenheit in the winter!
If we'd been able to take that weather we'd probably have stayed in eastern Canada, because the land certainly was cheap there. We met one family who had canoed into the interior of southern Nova Scotia and found a farm of 70 acres with a barn, tillable soil and a seven-room house . . . all for $5,000! And in St. John, New Brunswick, we ran into a mechanic who had just sold 100 acres to his brother for $500 (he'd have sold to anyone for $1,000).
Our next real contact with land prices was outside Cold Lake, Alberta near the Saskatchewan border. There, a gas station owner and his wife told us about a friend who had one section (one square mile or 640 acres) for sale at $9, 000. This particular part of the province is not really plains, being tree and lake-covered but, once again, the only catch was winters of a mere 70° F below zero!
We moved on to Edmonton, Alberta, where we went directly to the lands office and got maps, pamphlets and a lot of friendly, sincere help from the good fellows manning the desk . . . but once again to no avail. By the time we reached British Columbia it was September 1st and all three of us were weary and crestfallen.
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