Rarely a day goes by that Dee Elliott doesn’t get a chance to tell her How I Got Here story.
Since it has a happy ending — yes, there are ways to cope with the ferry; yes, it’s an amazing place to raise children – it’s the perfect story for the Bowen Island realtor to tell people as she drives them to see the houses that may one day be their new island home.
She’d grown up in West Vancouver and, for some reason, Bowen Island wasn’t on her radar. When her father, an engineer, got transferred to Ontario for five years, she remembers getting on her bike to explore southern Ontario and yet it wasn’t until she was in her twenties that she and her sister ventured across the Howe Sound.
“I remember how pooped I was,” she says of her tour around the island by bicycle.
After she married, she and her husband knew they couldn’t afford a home in West Van but with her sales job requiring her to be on the road a lot, Bowen was simply not feasible either. It wasn’t until their sons, Frazer and Bryn, were aged two and 10 months that they finally took the mortgage plunge. It was either Bowen Island or Maple Ridge.
Peter Dive, who is still a Bowen realtor, sold them a 1970s Panabode in Tunstall Bay 28 years ago.
“It was supposed to be our starter house but it will be my finishing house,” she says of the home that’s still her refuge and joy.
Those early years weren’t easy. She became BC Guide Dogs’ first employee, which meant a daily commute to Richmond. Then, when her marriage dissolved, she needed to find work on Bowen so she could be close at hand for her sons.
Necessity is a single mom’s mother of invention and Elliott thinks she had 15 to 20 jobs before she became a realtor 10 years ago.
She delivered the Undercurrent, keeping a barf bucket in the car in case Frazer and Bryn got car sick as they accompanied her across the island. She worked at what’s now the Ruddy Potato, drove a truck to pick up nursery supplies — “Frazer called me Mother Trucker” —, owned her own landscaping business, was the island’s animal control officer and then assistant bylaw officer.
“When I had the landscaping business I had the boys work for me so I could have them right under my thumb,” she says. “The only thing I haven’t done, and still want to do, is drive the bus.”
There were some tough financial years but she worked hard and did what it took to make those mortgage payments.
A realtor doesn’t work nine to five so that career was out of the question until the boys left for university. Bryn is an engineer in Ottawa; Frazer was a teacher and lived in Australia. When Frazer and his wife moved back to the island so he could join her as a realtor, it validated every thing she says about Bowen being a great place to raise a family.
That last sentiment is what draws most of the prospective home owners who get picked up in her Volkswagen Tiguan at the ferry and set off for their tour of Bowen Island.
Elliott knows she’s selling lifestyle as much as she is houses. The ferry ride is the first release of the tension of city life and she watches it melt away even more as she takes them to the beaches, the forested roads, the school, and all the social amenities. It’s surprising how many of them are young couples with children right around the age of Frazer and Bryn when the Elliotts first arrived here.
The ferry is still the biggest concern for people trying to decide if Bowen is right for them. Many people now rent for a couple of months or spend a couple of weeks as cottagers to see if island life is for them.
“It’s not for the A-type,” Elliott says.
