At 23, Kate Coffey owned her own home in Dublin, flew to Milan for weekends on a lark, worked “crazy long” hours for Rothschild International and earned oodles of money.
At 29, she thought to herself, “Oh my God, I’ll be dead by 40.”
The lifestyle was one thing; the pace of life needed in order to sustain it was quite another.
“I didn’t know what life was meant to be like but I knew it wasn’t supposed to be like that,” she says, sitting in a Vancouver coffee shop almost kitty-corner to where she’ll hop on Peter King’s express bus back to Bowen Island at the end of a work day.
To the shock and horror of everyone, particularly her family, she decided to quit Rothschild’s and apply for permanent residency in Canada.
“My first choice was New Zealand but it was too far from Ireland. I had three criteria: it had to be relatively close to Ireland, English speaking, and close by the ocean.”
Within six months, the embassy in London was on the phone, asking her about her plans, her work experience and how she intended to provide for herself in a place where she knew absolutely no one. When she mentioned Rothchild’s and told them she’d live off the proceeds from the sale of her house, she literally heard the stamp of approval as her application was marked “good to go.”
She chose Vancouver as her final destination because of its weather but didn’t want to just plop down in her new life. In April 1997, she flew to Halifax and boarded the train to Prince Rupert. Well, she got on lots of different trains, taking nine weeks to travel across the country.
After finding an apartment in the West End, she started taking a good look at her surroundings. She picked up a tourist brochure which told her to discover Bowen Island. Little did she know her second OMG epiphany awaited her there.
Sitting on the bench by the lagoon and looking over at the North Shore mountains, she realized, “Oh my God, this is it, this is where I want to be.”
There was only one small problem: money. With no work experience in Canada, it wasn’t easy at first to find a job. She went from a six-figures-in-a-European-currency job to thinking that a once-a-week Starbucks coffee was a treat on a $36,000-a-year Vancouver salary.
Her talent is to be able to process a hundred things at the same time, “pick out all the silly bits” and then be able to communicate a strategy to both the president of the company and a person on the street.
Among larger international companies, those skills are more highly valued than the university degree she doesn’t have. The only problem is that not many of those companies are based in Vancouver. But one job led to another and eventually she hung out a shingle as a consultant for boutique firms. “I knocked on doors and said ‘Here I am.’”
At the second door she was invited in for a year-long contract. It was time to move to Bowen.
The house she liked was, in Bowen parlance, “Gordie Begg’s mother’s place” on Lenora. Gordie was a big, tall man and he didn’t want to sell the house to just anyone. He wanted it to be loved and nurtured and told Coffey that she had to come for an interview. “They met me and came back and said, ‘You’re it; you can have our mother’s house.’” Later, Gordie was moved to tears when she invited him to see how she’d infused the house with her own personality.
Settled on Bowen, Coffey’s life went into overdrive in town when a two-year contract put her smack dab into “the craziness of mergers and acquisitions.” Every week it seemed she was on a plane to somewhere, her only requirement being that by Friday at noon she was touching down at YVR for a weekend of being restored by life on Bowen.
“It’s that sense of belonging and that Irish thing of owning a house. To own land and a house is a big thing for an Irish person. My parents were the first generation to own a home,” she says.
As well, “my work is complicated and maybe it’s the simplification of life on Bowen. I get on Peter’s bush and I go ‘whoosh.’ You’re on Bowen already. No one cares who you are or what you are.”
Although Bowen will always be home, her curiosity and quest for meaning will always be her passport to a world of discovery. After one of her work contracts ended on a Wednesday, the following Monday she was on her way to Nepal to start a year of “mid-life enlightenment.” In Nepal she volunteered at a rehabilitation centre for people with spinal cord injuries; in Bangladesh her focus was micro-financing. When she left Nepal, part of her heart stayed behind and, after the devastating earthquakes, she’s been working hard to raise money for the centre. (It’s chronicled on her blog, www.bowen2bangladesh.wordpress.com.)
“Nepal is very close to my heart,” she says, just before the bus arrives. “It’s another one of those Bowen-like places.”
