Life in the forest: How Stanley Park’s longest resident survived a changing landscape

globalnews.ca:

Christenson Bailey started camping in Stanley Park in 1990. And he still lives there today.He’d moved into a tiny campsite hidden deep in the forest to make art for the last three decades, and he has lived on next to nothing.In the beginning, Bailey survived on just $300 a year by putting his art skills to use, doing sign-writing jobs around the city for cash.“By just doing this sporadically, coming in and out of the forest, no one ever questioned me,” Bailey tells Global News. “I just walked down the street, knocked on doors.

I asked, ‘Would you like this?’ and showed them a presentation. People paid me a good fee.”For the first 17 years, he lived only by candlelight. He made no trouble and kept in touch with park rangers.

For food, he taught himself how to catch wild geese and ducks.“It was easy to do,” he recalls. “Get some grain, go down to the water, throw the grain in the water, they show up, you bag one, pluck it, and you go down to the beach, build a fire and roast it.”With a smile, he remembers the remoteness of that time, seeing virtually no one on Third Beach from sunset until early morning.“The patterns of living and subsiding were basically what I was able to think up,” he says. “One of the happiest periods of my life was that period.”This was how Bailey liked it.He could go weeks without speaking to another person.