The Road To Appledore – cover

In early June, I was overjoyed to hear that Harbour/Douglas & McIntyre have accepted my prose account of moving from Vancouver to southeastern BC’s West Kootenay region in 1989, and all I’ve learned in the decades since about a rural existence. The book, scheduled for publication in spring 2024, is called The Road to Appledore or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place.

The pandemic seems to have accelerated 21st Century urban dwellers’ interest in moving out of the cities, so my hope is that the experiences related in The Road to Appledore are useful to anyone contemplating such a shift of locale. A quote from a 2022 Globe and Mail article about this surge in people relocating to the country sums up the gist of my book: “People from cities don’t always realize what they’re getting into.”

Official Site of Tom Wayman - image: The Road to Appledore, Autumn
The Road to Appledore, Autumn. image by Rod Currie

Writing from and about a mountain valley still without cell phone service, I take the reader through the chores, challenges and joys of the four seasons. Other dimensions to the contemporary rural are described, including me having to deal with a bear in my kitchen, engaging in a vigilante action to protect our community water system, and experiencing the solace of growing my own food and flowers. These events and activities are organized in the book under the rubric of the four classical elements: water, fire, earth and air.

Although The Road to Appledore is more a humorous memoir than a “how-to” guide to country living, the book’s anecdotes do provide the latter, I believe, albeit by inference and in several cases, negative example. Since my own motivations to relocate included an attempt to decide the future of an intimate relationship, the book also portrays what I discovered about myself and my personal behaviors through my move to the mountains.