In the summer of 1984, Joseph McLean was a backwoods wild-child who climbed trees and ran through the woods. That year, while driving through BC in a Ford Supervan looking for a back-to-nature homestead where a mom could raise her young son away from the city, mother and son found Lund. McLean was six years old.
“My mom got this little chainsaw, cut down the trees and we built our cabin,” said McLean.
When he came into town in those days, McLean said he would max out his library card, grab all the books he could find and read one per day in that little cabin in the woods.
At first, he read by kerosene lamp, then propane, followed by electric light powered by a generator and then right into the future with solar power.
In 1988, everything changed when his father bought him a computer, “a 16-pound” laptop, according to McLean.
“I became the second person in Lund to have a computer,” he said. “I was this ‘proto-nerd’ who had this computer. I was very high-tech, but only when it was a sunny day, because of the solar power.”
Five years later, McLean said he was attending a private, alternative, high-tech and groundbreaking school in Vancouver called Virtual High, which is now defunct.
“I grew up, cut my teeth, as it were, on the internet,” he said. “I was into the internet in sort of a cyberpunk time when people really thought, perhaps too much, about what the internet was going to do to change the human condition.”
After two years in Vancouver, McLean said he returned to the Lund cabin, but without internet access. In his self-described, logical, problem-solving way, McLean said he connected to the internet by jerry-rigging a phone line, spliced together with duct tape strung through beer bottles for two kilometres, all the way to the nearest telephone pole.
“Solving problems is really awesome, and my analytical mind really enjoys solving logic problems with computers and nailing down issues,” he added.
McLean moved into Powell River from Lund in 1999 and bought a building on Marine Avenue in 2000, where he opened his business, Full Solution Computers. He’s still there, living upstairs with his wife Katie, whom he met at Virtual High, and their two young sons, six-year-old Ryan and three-year-old Kevin. The business operates on the lower floor.
Former Powell River Peak publisher Joyce Carlson watched McLean become a businessperson, husband and father over the years. The Peak was the first to pay McLean for his computer skills and Carlson said she remembers his command of technological change happening very rapidly.
“At that time he had really long hair and would wear this really long trench coat,” said Carlson. “I thought, ‘Wow, is he really from earth? Maybe he’s from outer space.’ He was so absolutely brilliant at what he did. He is the most amazing human being. I figured out after a while that he was not an alien.”
Today, McLean could be the prototypical poster boy for the Generation X-ers City of Powell River is hoping to attract through its resident-attraction program as a new economic driver for the region.
McLean checks off all of the boxes: he owns a computer business and property, has a young family and a passion for the outdoors, which, in his case, involves trail running through the woods.
“A lot of the ideas I have about stuff come to me, not too surprisingly, when I’m out there running around and not on Facebook or fixing someone else’s computer problem,” he said. “I see Powell River as diversifying. It’s halfway to becoming a butterfly, but you don’t know what sort of butterfly it’s going to be yet.”
Powell River in the 1980s was still very much a mill town, and if the mill closed at that time, it would have been the end of the town, said McLean.
“That has changed a lot and the changes are healthy for the town,” he said. “Powell River perhaps has a little bit of an identity crisis, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing, because it gives you the opportunity to define yourself. What that is, I’m not sure.”
