From the first chapter of Wild Pick: In the 1980s, my family attended a mostly nude potluck in the wilds of Desolation Sound, during which we refused to grin and bear it. The potluck was co-hosted by a woman and her boyfriend, a modern-day homesteading couple living in a cabin just beyond the beach. It would take me many years to learn of this woman’s fascinating story, which I’ll share with you now.
Linda Syms was born in 1953 into a large prairie family. She was the sixth of seven kids – two boys and five girls – with an age spread of 21 years between the youngest and oldest. The Syms family moved a lot throughout Linda’s childhood, sometimes every six months. By the time she was 17, Linda figured she must have lived in at least 20 different places.
Her dad was a drinker, and did a little bit of this, and a little bit of that: farming, mechanics and odd jobs. When his luck would run out, he’d have the huge family on the move again, forever searching for greener pastures, like a Canadian version of The Glass Castle.
Linda recalls spending time on a farm in the tiny prairie town of Eckville, Alberta, before the family made the move to the west coast when she was nine years old. Shortly after winding up in North Vancouver, Linda’s parents split up and the transient lifestyle continued with her mother, as she moved the kids from place to place.
Linda was in four schools in the next three years around North Vancouver in the mid-1960s. By the time she was ten, she was working as a babysitter.
Tragedy struck when Linda was 13; her father died of cirrhosis of the liver and heart failure. A year later, Linda was hired to look after six children under 10, while the parents of those children travelled with a low-budget circus.
Linda didn’t handle the responsibility well, and at age 14, was caught attempting to drive those six kids to the pool. After that, she and the kids all went on the road with the circus sideshow in the late 1960s.
Linda looked after the kids and worked the ticket booth for the family’s wild animal show, which boasted reptiles, monkeys, and other “man-eating horrors.” The shows ran continuously throughout the day for a 15-cent admission.
Life-changing event
A year later, when Linda was 15 years old, a singular event would change her life forever. It was the summer of 1969. The world was a tumultuous, exciting place, changing every day at a rapid pace.
As an impressionable North Vancouver teenager, Linda was swept up in the counterculture of the era. One day that summer, she attended a laid-back party, held by a world-travelling hippie who had recently rented the basement of her aunt’s North Vancouver house.
When Linda entered the smoky, dim, candlelit dwelling, her eyes found the host of the party: he was a tall, dark and handsome man with long, flowing, curly hair over his shoulders, and a black handlebar moustache, softly playing the 12-string guitar, like a cross between Jimmy Page and Frank Zappa.
This was how she met Wayne Lewis. He was 24, nine years older than Linda, and by that time he had already been in and out of the Canadian navy and had hitchhiked around the world as a vagabond musician.
In that basement apartment, Wayne also had a wild pet alligator measuring two feet long. As a kind of party trick, he’d charge people $1 to pick it up and attempt to not get bitten. If the alligator did bite them, which it almost always did, Wayne got to keep their dollar.
Young Linda was completely enamoured with this lean, six-foot bad boy hippie with the pet gator, and considered that moment in that dark basement to be love at first sight. At five-foot, ten inches with long brown hair, Linda appeared much older than she was, but she was still 15. Wayne and Linda chatted, and a connection was made.
When Linda’s aunt noticed she was hanging around and showing great interest in the older hippie tenant in the basement, she told Linda’s mother, who was furious, but Linda was determined.
On their very first date, the police busted into Wayne’s apartment, finding Linda’s clothes strewn about the floor and her hiding in the closet in her underwear. Wayne was arrested for being with a minor, and was eventually released without charges.
But in an effort to quell a further relationship from forming, Wayne and his alligator were kicked out of the basement and Linda was shipped off to live with relatives in Ontario. Within a few months, she had snuck back to Vancouver and was living with girlfriends in various downtown apartments, sometimes having their house warming party turn into an eviction party on the very same night.
Rekindled connection
Despite attempts at communicating, Linda had completely lost track of wild Wayne. That was until one fateful day, when she was working at the Big Scoop on Denman Street in the West End, when who should stroll in, but the long, tall and cool Wayne Lewis. Their connection was instantly rekindled. In 1971, two months before she turned 18, Linda eagerly moved onto Wayne’s 30-foot trimaran sailboat that he was living on in Deep Cove Marina.
So began a life of oceanic adventures that would last for 41 years. But their relationship almost sank – literally - on an ill-fated voyage across the North Pacific Ocean a few years later. You’ll read that story in the next chapter of Wild Pick: The life and adventures of Linda Syms, oyster farmer of Desolation Sound.
Grant Lawrence is the award-winning author of Adventures in Solitude, and a radio personality who considers Powell River and Desolation Sound his second home. Wild Pick originally aired as a radio series and podcast based on Linda Syms’ two books: Salt Water Rain and Shell Games. Both are for sale at Pollen Sweaters in Lund and Marine Traders in Powell River.
