By Barb Brouwer,
Contributor
At the age of 27, Deanna Barnhardt Kawatski had become a seasoned world traveller.
Following five years of planting trees in B.C., Kawatski was ready for new adventures. In 1978, she became the first female attendant stationed at the Bob Quinn Lake fire tower in northwestern B.C.
In awe of the landscapes, Kawatski was petrified to be living by herself in a “flimsy shack” located on a remote mountaintop.
“My expectation was that I would see no one,” she said, pointing out that while stationed in Stewart, 193 kilometres to the south, she heard many stories about a scary, unpredictable, barefoot “barbarian.”
“I was terrified this hermit could suddenly show up, although it was miles and miles for him to come, paddling and hiking.”
Appear he did, the first time with several young men with whom he was sharing his knowledge of living off the grid.
Kawatski went home at the end of three months, but returned to the remote fire tower for a second contract in 1979. Over the course of Jay’s continued visits, friendship, then romance, blossomed.
Kawatski had always dreamt of living in the raw wilderness and found Jay to be a charming, handsome and intelligent companion.
At the end of the 1979 fire season, the pair returned to the Shuswap where Kawatski had grown up. They made their wedding vows on a North Shuswap beach on a chilly October day.
Nuptials completed, they packed up, boarded a train destined for Terrace and got a lift the remaining 120 kilometres to Bob Quinn Lake on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway.
So began a 13-year adventure, a long-held dream that eventually descended into a nightmare.
“I loved the life; we built an amazing home and I loved the valley we lived in,” said Kawatski, noting the first of her two children were born in the bush. “The house was built from local spruce and pine and people were shocked when they saw how grand it was.”
In the north, summer provided long hours of daylight while kerosene lamps quelled the dark during the lengthy winter nights. In 1988, Jay’s brilliant water wheel and hydroelectric system provided electricity.
As well as tending to and homeschooling her children, Kawatski wrote articles about her family’s life in the remote wilderness for magazines such as Country Journal, Canadian Gardening, Mother Earth News and Harrowsmith.
A photo of Jay appeared on the cover of Country Journal and was seen by two U.S. publishing companies who approached Kawatski about sharing her adventures in a book.
“I was so excited; I’d never really wanted to write about my own life,” she said of the amazing opportunity being offered to her. “But the always demanding Jay became more and more volatile and resistant to her writing.”
Increasingly fearful for her life and for her children, Kawatski left Jay in August, 1992 and returned to the North Shuswap.
Both she and her children, Natalia and Kyle, faced many challenges as they adjusted to life in “civilization.”
“For the first time in 13 years, all our food came from the store, insipid and often trucked thousands of miles,” she writes.
“Cooking on an electric stove with its confined circles of heat when I was used to jockeying pots around the vast surface of my wood cookstove was nothing less than weird.”
When she returned to the Shuswap in 1992, Kawatski already had a book contract with Lyons & Burford in New York and had written half of the first draft.
The original Wilderness Mother was released in 1994.
The fascinating and often poignant description of her adventures became a Canadian bestseller and Book of The Month selection for many years, as did another memoir, Clara and Me, a story about an Indigenous friend and neighbour in the North.
Fiddlehead Press published a volume of her poetry and her short stories have appeared in various anthologies. She has served as a regional rep for the Federation of B.C. Writers, and was writer-in-residence at the George Ryga Centre in Summerland.
In 1994, Kawatski met Eric, a man she describes as being gentle, kind and sweet.
“I was not interested in men at that time, but it was instant for both of us; it was amazing,” she said of the mutual attraction. “He was everything that Jay wasn’t.”
Kawatski and her children moved to Eric’s home, which is set on 40 acres in Celista, half of it woods and the other half fields – a happy return to a world of nature.
At the request of Ronsdale Press about a year ago, Kawatski revisited her book and added 51 new pages of stories not included in the original. Completely re-edited and with many new photos, Wilderness Mother, the 30th Anniversary Edition: The Full Story Revealed, includes the harrowing story of the ending to her relationship with Jay and touches upon the joy she experienced in her 30 years with Eric.
“It gave me the opportunity to delve into some dark places,” she said.
Kawatski was surprised when the cover of her new book turned up on the cover of BC BookWorld. Equally impressive is the fact that BC Ferries has chosen the book to be part of its Christmas promotion and she has signed a contract to produce an audio version. The Tyee is running excerpts of the book and BC Living Online Magazine has included it in their list of fall titles.
Readers are invited to meet Kawatski and get their own copy of her engrossing tales of life in the wilderness and beyond at her book-signing, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 29 at Bookingham Palace in the Mall at Piccadilly.
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