I got asked to write a little lovesong to Pemberton – to make the thousand word case why it’s the best community to live in, in the Sea to Sky – and I still don’t really understand why I found it so hard. (I shared the final piece earlier this week.) Ten years ago, even five, I felt pretty authoritative on the topic. I’d probably written hundreds of columns and blog posts making the case. I could tell you why Pemberton is distinctive, and the place to be, and who makes it so, and what draws them here. Then, we all went into lockdown, and emerged into a different version of the Before. And I don’t have a grip on any of the answers I used to think I had.

Alnoor Ladha is a smart guy, part of the Indian diaspora kicked out of Idi Amin’s Uganda, who spent years as a child in a refugee camp in Switzerland before moving to Vancovuer, and now he’s part of a community experiment in Costa Rica. He talks about community as something we need to get better at but something that is hard to even define:

“Like everything that happens in globalised industrialised culture, ‘community’ is a word that has become meaningless and generic and commodified. And I know people selling plots of land for extortionate profit who say they are setting up communities. One way in to the answer is that community is not necessarily the people that you start an intended project with, but it’s the people who you’re left with, it’s the people who you’ll be at their death bed and they’ll be at your death bed. That’s an interesting sense of community. Another way in, community is the physical embodiment of culture, so it’s people who share culture, they’re what’s worthy of the title of community. Another way into this is community, how we define our community, are the people who I reincarnated for, the pull of the love was so strong that I came back to be entangled with them in that way.” 

Alnoor Ladha

I’ve been driven by this word, too – to be part of a community, to be a cheerleader for community, to contribute to community. But what does it mean, if someone just sees that as a selling feature? 

So instead of trying to contend that we have something better here than anywhere else in the Sea to Sky (let’s be honest, we don’t have any of what the other guys have – we don’t have a pool, a bus service of significance/that you can use to commute to work), we don’t have a hospital or a CT machine or an aged care facility, we don’t have enough child care spaces, or any guarantee that the things you order online will get to you, especially if you use DHL, we don’t have a pub (the Pem Ho apparently is just a money laundering set), we don’t have a nightlife… and what we do have is being stretched beyond its capacity to keep up… I keep thinking about two things. Mr Rogers saying, “look for the helpers.” And Maggie Smith’s gorgeous poem, Good Bones.

Because it’s on us to make it, what we need it to be.

Good Bones 

BY MAGGIE SMITH

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.