Gilean Douglas: Writing Nature, Finding Home

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Gilean Douglas, born in Toronto in 1900, wrote most tellingly about the
wilderness in British Columbia. Orphaned in childhood and survivor of
four marriages (one hitherto unpublished article is entitled “Can You
Marry and Live?”), she spent eight years of her life isolated in the
mountains above Hope and her last 40 years on Cortes Island.

From the start, she worked as a journalist for magazines and
newspapers, traveling widely in her search for stories. However, when
she arrived in the mountains in 1939 to live alone in a wood cabin, she
began to write about the valley around her because she felt its way of
life would soon disappear. These writings were not published in a book
until 1953, when River for My Sidewalk was released under a male
pseudonym on the advice of a publisher who felt the Canadian public
could not accept such a story of isolation from a woman.

Douglas wrote of the beauty and the mystery of nature and also of her
own solitude and search for a home. Isolation was frequently her theme,
but on Cortes Island she began to involve herself in the community. When
a ferry and hydro threatened the island with subsequent development, she
turned to local politics to protect what she loved. She was one of the
early prophets who advocated the sharing of our natural environment
rather than its destruction.

The authors of this book have given us a generous selection of
Douglas’s writings, including some poetry, together with a clear
account of her life and many pages of black-and-white photographs taken
by Douglas herself. It is unfortunate that Douglas’s articles are
presented in small type that gives the book a somewhat daunting look,
for the descriptions of the land we share are in no way pedantic.
Douglas’s words flow as if she were writing us a letter; she tells of
the life around her in simple and lovely detail and moves us with her
own deep attachment to the land.