Maverick Resilience

By Doreen Marion Gee

"The floathouse Zastrozzi was quite wonderful." Mary Hughes' fascinating book, The Life and Times of the Floathouse Zastrozzi, reveals a love affair with a very unique adventurous lifestyle aboard a home perched on water. It is certainly worth the read for anyone looking for something different, something very warm and human and something they will remember long afterwards.

To whet my readers' appetite, I will reveal only a few details. Let the secrets unfold as you personally turn the pages. In 1990, Mary stepped into the dark unknown of float home life after leaving all the glossy trimmings of an executive job and life in Toronto. She joined her husband, Alan Hughes, a UVIC Theatre History professor and Associate Dean of Fine Arts. His waterborne wood-shingled castle became hers as well.

In her forward, Mary honestly describes living on the aqua terrain at Fisherman's Wharf:

"Surviving and thriving at the wharf took a kind of maverick resilience." Her well-written book covers the thrills and travails of the float home life. And bubbles of laughter are always floating to the surface. Trying to move her 1917 Gerhard upright piano onto the Zastrozzi was no small feat. Mary describes shifting the furniture to one side of the room so the piano wouldn't sink her home from the other side. They were always at the mercy of mother nature. One frigid January morning, the winds were fierce and they blew the Zastrozzi away from the dock and onto its side. They survived.

I get my daily fix from local affairs. Politics is my addiction. So that part of Mary's story was absolutely riveting. Her book deals with the politics of Fisherman's Wharf. Mary says that life at the water's edge "wasn't all tea and oranges. One of the things that drew us together was our collective sense of injustice and lack of fair play." Mary was politically active, trying to build support and respect for a treasured harbour and float home community. She championed the need for a local harbour commission and was an outspoken opponent of over-zealous uncontrolled development at the harbour. In the end, it all came down to the basics: "Security of tenure was a concern we all shared." Mary talks about the need for basic services, local control, self-regulation and keeping it a marine environment. 

In 2002, Mary and Alan Hughes moved their beloved Zastrozzi to Salt Spring Island, where it morphed into a regular house on "terra-firma." It is a sweet irony that the new 2011 progressive agreement between the Fisherman's Wharf community and the GVHA almost coincides with Mary's book about the fight for that agreement back in the nineties. "They are to be congratulated," writes Mary in a recent email about the perseverance of the 2012 float home community.

To buy the book, contact Mary Hughes at maryhughes@saltspring.com.