Chapter 15 recap: After a six-year battle with prostate cancer, and years of debilitating back pain that had often confined him to an old easy chair in their cabin, Wayne Lewis was done, and he refused to return to the hospital for anymore treatment. He instructed Linda to get the dog, get in the boat and go to the neighbour’s cabin.
On the morning of April 12, 2012, Linda motored her aluminum skiff from Salubrious Bay and out across Okeover Inlet, with her dog at her side, headed for her neighbour’s nearby home. As the boat cut through the waves, she was overcome with waves of emotion.
Moments ago, she had said her final goodbye to the man she had loved for 41 years, ever since she first spotted him in that smoky basement in North Vancouver in 1969, when she was 15 and he was 24.
“I had to respect his wishes,” said Linda. “He gets to choose how he leaves this world and he didn’t want to drag it out. I wasn’t going to make a big scene in front of him, crying and saying ‘no, you can’t do that.’”
Moving across the inlet, Linda felt relief that Wayne’s suffering would soon be over, but on the other hand she felt frightened for her uncertain future without her lifelong partner. She was also dreading dealing with the police, but Linda knew that was coming.
“We had been talking about it for a long time,” confirmed Linda. “Wayne was determined that he was going to have control of his life and his death.”
Wayne even had Linda prepare the house for this day, and for the inevitable police investigation, by cleaning up and hiding the pot plants.
Linda was headed for Dave Hamoline’s cabin on the Coode Peninsula, about a five or 10 minute boat ride away. Dave was one of the friendliest guys around. Originally from Aberdeen, Saskatchewan, Dave had spent many years as a race-car driver, having once held the title of Canada’s second-fastest man for driving a race car at speeds of 370 kilometres an hour.
After hitting the brakes on that career, he moved to the Desolation Sound area for the much slower pace of oyster farming. The shelves in his rustic cabin are chock-a-block with gold race-car trophies.
Dave provided a safe, warm haven for Linda to wait out the inevitable. After what seemed like the right amount of time, she contacted the authorities.
“I phoned the coast guard,” she recalled. “Then they took it out of my hands and had the police there. Dave had to go to the dock and get the cops. He took them out there, and it was a gong show, apparently.”
Alone in the aftermath
Wayne killed himself with a sawed-off shotgun. According to Linda, in an effort to avoid making a mess, he ended his life on their outdoor compost pile.
Linda’s wild pick in love and life was gone: Wayne Vernon Lewis was 68 years old when he died.
The RCMP seized the shotgun, as well as four other guns in the cabin. Then they interviewed Linda, Dave, and Dave’s wife Cindy. Despite Wayne’s condition, he had the wherewithal to leave a signed note that read that he was taking his life on his own free will. No charges were laid.
On the blustery April 2012 day that Wayne died, Linda wanted to return to her home, but Dave and Cindy wouldn’t let her, both insisting she spend the night at their cabin. The next day, when Linda did return home, she had an unexpected burst of emotion.
“I actually had a little bit of a temper tantrum,” admitted Linda. “The first thing I did was drag his easy chair out of the cabin and chop it into bits with the axe. That’s where he had spent the last five or six years. To me, that chair was the epitome of what was wrong with the entire scenario.”
For the first time in more than 40 years, Linda was alone with her back against the wilderness.
A little over a month after Wayne’s passing, she held a wake for him, down on the beach in Salubrious Bay in front of their cabin, on a sunny day in May. The bay filled up with a pell-mell parking lot of beat-up oyster barges, rowboats, canoes and aluminum speed boats; the neighbourhood showing up to pay its respects to a polarizing Desolation Sound legend.
As weeks turned to months, Linda became increasingly lonely, and realized that, without Wayne, living off-grid full time in Desolation Sound had run its course. Even though the garden was still overly abundant, it was no fun to cook for herself, or to schlep her supplies up and down that hill, and bad weather seemed that much worse when she was out in the boat alone.
Not-so-simple sale
Linda planned to keep up her oyster farming, but she wanted to do so from a new home on the side of the water with roads, people and plumbing. She listed her Salubrious Bay property for sale.
However, as you may remember from way back in chapter seven, Linda and Wayne had split the purchase of their lot with another hippie couple in 1977. Both couples built separate cabins on the lot. And while that other couple never lived in Salubrious Bay full time like Linda and Wayne did, they still owned their half of the property, and weren’t interested in selling.
As Linda would find out over the next several years of real estate irritation, it’s hard to sell half a property. Eventually, she put up her oyster lease for sale as well, but again, no takers. She was determined to move on.
Then, in 2016, a full four years after Wayne’s death, an American couple sailing through the Sound heard about Linda’s half-lot property for sale. Back in 1977, she and Wayne paid $12,000 for their half. In 2016, Linda sold it for $120,000.
Undervalued, Linda thought, but she wanted out. Soon after that, her oyster lease also sold. In turn, Linda bought a sunny lot in Wildwood and built herself a lovely home, fully on the grid.
Most notably, for the first time in her adult life, she had her own flush toilet. That’s right, for her 39 years in the wilderness, Linda had to go outside, in all manner of weather, to use an outhouse.
She kept her boat and her wild pick licence. In her late 60s, she is now both as tough and as tender as the oysters she farmed for so many years. It was out in those saltwater inlets, islets and beaches of Desolation Sound that she knows so well, where love bloomed again for Linda Syms.
A few years earlier, the aforementioned former race-car driver-turned-oyster farmer Dave Hamoline had split up with his girlfriend. Linda and Dave quietly started dating in 2017, and for the first time in 20 years, she now has an upbeat, friendly, fun and salty companion she can have further adventures with.
Best of all, Dave shares Linda’s long-lost love for sailing, a passion buried in her Norwegian DNA that she hadn’t been able to embrace for decades. And so, Linda and Dave have spent the last several winters in the warm waters off Central America on the Cat’s Eye, a 38-foot catamaran sailboat.
Knowing her, those adventures will be a whole other story, because as Linda Syms has proven again and again, the world really is her oyster.
Grant Lawrence is the author of the new book Return to Solitude; he considers Powell River and Desolation Sound his second home. His book and Linda’s two books: Salt Water Rain and Shell Games, are for sale at Pollen Sweaters in Lund, and Pocket Books and Marine Traders in Powell River.
