Chapter 14 recap: Linda began to notice major personality changes in her partner Wayne, who became reclusive and a different person compared to the man she had spent decades building a life in the wilderness with.
By the year 2000, Linda was 47 years old and Wayne was 56. They had been together for 31 years, though they were never officially married, and they never had kids.
According to Linda, Wayne never wanted children because he didn’t want to be tied down. Having kids might mean returning to civilization when the kids needed to go to school, and Wayne never wanted to leave their wilderness homestead in Salubrious Bay.
At the turn of the millennium, Linda was experiencing her best-ever oyster farming years. She had extended their lease into Malaspina Inlet, and from 1998 to 2002, she would average more than $50,000 per year working by herself for a few months on the floats.
Meanwhile, Wayne would spend his days at home fixing what needed it or walking the dog through their myriad trail system in the bush. Once, Wayne even attempted to tame a wild raven as a pet, which only lasted a couple of days once he got tired of raven bites.
A byproduct of Linda’s oyster farming success was that their cabin on the hill in Salubrious Bay now had several modern conveniences, including off-grid solar electricity. Large solar panels along the front of the cabin fed a bank of batteries that powered up just about anything they desired, including lights, Linda’s computer and a television complete with satellite dish.
Linda would eventually learn to loathe both the TV and Wayne’s TV-watching easy chair, as he began spending more and more time zoning out on back medication while watching the Discovery Channel.
Despite their wilderness living, they both maintained their medical checkups as they aged. In 2006, at age 62, his hair now bright silver, curly and wild as ever, Wayne went into town for a standard prostate exam.
Despite having no symptoms when he walked in, Wayne’s PSA test was slightly elevated, and so the doctor recommended treatment, which Wayne accepted.
At his next appointment, the news was much worse: Wayne was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Each treatment seemed to make his cancer come back more aggressively than before. They also noted that the cancer cells had grown beyond the prostate, so surgery was not recommended.
Even though Wayne had been anti-authority his entire life, when it came to his health, he was willing to do whatever the doctors recommended. It was Linda who questioned the recommended procedures.
“Wayne did everything they told him to; everything made it worse,” said Linda. “He did 40 treatments of radiation in a row. He did five different types of chemo. Every time it would work for a little while, and then stop. They finally said there was no more treatment they could offer him. But they did say they could radiate his bones which would help with the pain.
“At that point he was still walking in the bush and carrying on a relatively normal life, but with increasing pain. So here’s what happened: I left the doctor’s office to move the car, and by the time I got back, they had talked him into the bone radiation. He was so excited about the potential for pain relief that I didn’t argue anymore.”
Choosing his own path
It was April 2012 when Linda finally got Wayne back to the cabin, but as Linda feared, the bone radiation didn’t have the desired effect.
“When we got home he spiralled down,” continued Linda. “And so the discussion was about going into the hospital and being zapped on morphine and getting a few more months or weeks or days or… choose his own path.”
During bouts of nausea and crippling sickness no medication could mask, from his easy chair with the Discovery Channel on in the background, Wayne sharpened every knife in the house. Then he got up and fixed a kitchen drawer that had been broken for a while. Then he began instructing Linda as to which of his possessions should be given to certain friends.
Then came the early morning hours of Thursday, April 12, 2012.
“He picked the day,” remembered Linda. “He said he couldn’t stand it, so he went back into town and got a different kind of morphine, but he said it didn’t work. I came down in the middle of the night and he had 15 or so of these patches slathered all over his back. ‘Let’s go to the hospital’, I said, but he said no, because he wouldn’t have any choices anymore.”
Linda hugged Wayne, and as the sun rose over the Bunster Hills, they talked about their wild life together, the life they wanted to live, a love story that stretched for 41 years, always on their own terms.
They ate the food they produced in a home they had built from trees in the forest. They created a lifelong career from the natural resources found on their beach.
They also spoke about a journey they had never taken, a horseback riding trip down the Rocky Mountains into Mexico. Wayne told Linda that’s where he would be waiting for her.
Then he told Linda to take the dog, get in the boat, and go.
You’ll read the conclusion of this story in the upcoming final chapter of Wild Pick, the life and adventures of Linda Syms, oyster farmer of Desolation Sound.
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.
