Paradise Lost: The Johnson/Okes of Sombrio Beach
By Stiv Wilson

In the mid-1960s, people looking for a different way of life came to Sombrio Beach, on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The area was undeveloped and uninhabited Crown Land, a place far off the beaten path and away from the outside world. Bears and cougars roamed freely amongst the large trees and, except for the occasional passing ship, there were no signs of modernity. Over time, settlers came and went, building makeshift surf shacks and cabins that would often be abandoned and later found by new inhabitants who would add to and improve upon them. Barbara Oke, Leah’s mother, grew up in nearby Sooke and first came to the beach in 1974. Some of her friends were building a cabin, and with a smile that could heat her entire house, she recollects the day for me. On her first trip to the beach she carried a window that would eventually be installed in her friend’s cabin. At the beach, the friends played flute to an interested sea lion, which gave Barbara a sense of the beauty and simplicity the place epitomizes, planting a seed for a life to come. This was the place that would eventually become an off-the-grid home, where she would raise a diverse and gifted family—a family of surfers, some 11 children strong.  Her husband, Steve Johnson, an American, came to the island in the late ’60s from Huntington Beach, California, to find purity in the rainforests of Vancouver Island. Faced with the possibility of having to serve in Viet Nam, and surrounded by a surf culture where friends were getting deep into drugs, Steve left California wanting something better. He traveled around the island a bit, spending time on the west coast of Van Isle surfing and working, and then moved back down to the strait where he spent time surfing mysto spots and living the life of an atypical surf hippy. Dave “Hump” Hadden, who lived between Sooke and Port Renfrew, recalled stories of Steve in his days before Sombrio. In those days, a surf club that Hump belonged to had a sauna across the road from the break where surfers would recover from the incredibly cold water of the strait. Recalling Steve, he says, “In those days, we called them moles or shrubs, you know, underground people…and this one day I invited Sombrio Steve to change his wetsuit in the sauna. He was in this big garlic phase, eating garlic all the time for his health, and, man, when he got that suit off, the stench was [laughter]…well, let’s just say, I never did see him with a cold.” Hump went on to describe Steve as a very good surfer and a kind, soft-spoken guy who, “if you did right by him, he’d do right by you.”

Steve and Barbara spent the summer together in 1980, and gave birth to their first child, Isaiah, in 1981. In 1982, they moved down to the beach for good, settling in a cabin called the Roundhouse, one of the first cabins built on Sombrio Beach. Partly because of their youth, their beliefs in a simple way of life, Steve’s love for surfing, and the fact that other people were settling the beach, they were compelled to have the courage to live their lives in the wild. For a surfer, this place was utopia. Three distinct waves were right outside the door, and sitting in the lineup gives a vantage of a dense, old growth rainforest whose beauty is unrivaled anywhere in North America.

The following year, a second child, Meghan, was born. Right after, an alder tree fell on the house during a storm. Barbara recalls making the decision to leave the Roundhouse, fearing that its location adjacent to the many trees was too dangerous to raise a family in. As she says, “That’s what alders do; they grow big and fall over.” Together, Steve and Barbara began to build their own cabin that would serve as home for the Johnson/Oke family until the late ’90s. Over the years, some of the children were born in town, others at the beach with the aid of a midwife, and others were born there without. Birthing a child, alone, in the woods, exemplifies the difference between life in the bush and life in society. But what Barbara exudes from her being is the pure strength of a true matriarch, an innate resourcefulness, and an astute ability to have the courage to think outside the box. And love. Lots of love.

Leah remembers her mother being very handy and being the main carpenter in the family, though Barbara says Steve was the one who operated the chainsaw. As the family grew, so did the house, eventually encompassing as many as seven bedrooms. The house also had two barrel stoves and running water from a gravity-fed stream. Barb tells me about how they devised the first system by running a hose uphill from the house into a stream at a higher elevation. At first it worked, but was eventually abandoned because it kept silting up. A second stream worked better, allowing them to have reliable water that fed into a sink in the house. They built cedar plank beds lined with foam, and eventually acquired a stove fueled by propane. They bathed in basins with stove-warmed water, or, later, a larger cast iron tub that fit on the stove. Leah remembers the tub fondly, telling me how she would sit on a board in the tub so she wouldn’t burn her butt, and if it got too hot, she’d just pour in cool water from the stream. Food was plentiful. With the aid of an outrigger canoe they kept, Steve and family caught a lot of fish from the ocean just steps from their front door. What they didn’t eat straight away, they either smoked or gave away to other settlers. Barb misses the taste of smoked whitefish: “a little salt and sugar and it was just like candy…yeah, that wouldn’t last long.”