Salt Spring Island Lamb

SALT SPRING ISLAND—From here, it all looks so normal: a field of tents and tarps, RVs, and picnic tables. Yet I know the membership fee can be life or death. Some will be here with only a blanket and the clothes on their backs. Others will be sleeping in cars or not at all, because their sobriety is measured in the minutes and hours of withdrawal. We’re not camping, we’re counting.

I’ve just turned off Rainbow Road and into the dirt driveway that skirts the tree-lined pastures leading into the Islands Farmers Institute fairgrounds on Salt Spring Island, BC. The crop of tents sprouting between apple trees and outbuildings is here for this August weekend’s fifteenth annual Salt Spring Island AA rally. For weeks, I’ve argued with myself: You’re twenty-two years sober—you don’t need to go to another rally.

Recently, I’ve finished a summer writing course taught by Susan Musgrave at the University of Victoria. Of the craft’s discipline she said, “It’s no secret—you’re at your desk writing when everyone else is at the beach.”

Salt Spring Island had Robert Bateman beaches and a Saturday morning market that was an apostolic banquet. What about working on your book? The debate had capitalized on the morning’s ferry line-up leaving Victoria. You really can’t afford this trip.

The driveway curves into fairground parking, a short walk from the main hall. Well, I’m here now. I park the Honda and stand for a moment in the full sun, hoping to melt the feud between my dour muse and the loneliness that has driven me here. Writers need solitude. Laughter carries from the hall. I need this too.

The international tradition called a “rally”or “round-up”is a celebration of recovery: the host town’s AA membership extends a general invitation to share “experience, strength and hope.”Some members rally-hop all summer long, as I did a few years ago, one town after another: Port Hardy, Ucluelet, Powell River, Courtenay, Campbell River. A rally is a revival meeting of the spared and the sober; an unlikely flock of head-butting individualists now dry under the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous and their Higher Power.

I’m welcomed at the registration desk and given a small wooden lamb for a name tag. It’s appropriate: Salt Spring Island is renowned for the quality of its sheep. A pamphlet published in 1902 by the Islands Farmers Institute describes their sheep thriving, “secure from beasts of prey.”In local parlance, crippled or nonambulatory sheep are called “downers”when they are unable to bear their own weight. Here in the fields, 105 years later, the lame and the grafted still lean on one another.

“We’ve got felt pens on the table over there for you to decorate your lamb with,”says one of the women. A few members are already hunched over and giving their lambs fancy polka dot and rainbow treatments. I pick up a green felt pen and print my name in block letters unevenly across the body. A pink eye. A red mouth. Done. At least a half-dozen of these lambs from years past rattle around in a drawer back home. And every one of them has in some way marked me.

Lamb pinned on my shirt, I step outside. A row of chairs lined against the wall is punctuated by sand-filled coffee cans for cigarette butts. Old-timers smoulder in the shade, squinting at the newcomers to sobriety—talking too loud, too fast, or not at all.

“Hey Barb!”