The Ubyssey
(UBC Student Newspaper)
Living beyond the edge
Tale
of an intentional Castaway
by John McCrank
NEWS
STAFF
When
he talks about his year of self-imposed isolation
on a desolate Chilean island, UBC PhD
candidate Bob Kull has a knack for understatement.
'This hasn't been easy. It's not the path for somebody who is
looking for the easy way
through,' he says.
A
former truck driver, logger and then scuba
instructor in the
'When I
was 40, I wiped out in the
After
completing his undergraduate degree,
Kull
headed into
"I
felt myself' come back alive. I realised that I
had become an empty
shell at McGill. It was
all
theories and hypotheses, academic life
had no
relation to my real life," says Kull, who
then went
traveling through
When
he saw the rugged Chilean coast, he thought
that he might have found the perfect place to conduct the year-long
retreat
that he had
been planning in the back of his mind. He
wanted it to merge real
experience with academic
life. After
a barrage of faxes and phone calls, the experiment was set up and Kull
found himself back in
Kull's home
base at UBC is in the
"Bob's
dissertation will raise many intriguing
questions about ecology, solitude, community,
urban living, biology, spirituality and the complex
workings of the heart," says Leggo,
who
joined Kull's supervisory committee because of his focus on narrative
and poetic writing.
Kull
didn't go into the project with a specific
hypothesis, but said instead that "what I'm
going to do is make a commitment to spend a year in solitude and
over and over – just
like in a meditation retreat – come back
into the present moment and experience mindfully what's going on.''
"And
one day I mentioned mindfulness [to Leggo] and he jumped on
it and said "That tradition has been around for thousands of years.' It's an exploratory, well-recognised
methodology, mindfulness.' Together with
writing a
journal, it became a big part of Kull's
project.
To fund
his work, Kull applied for and received a National Science and
Engineering Research Council (NSERC) grant
as well as
several small scholarships and a grant from UBC;
he
also took student loans and worked as a teaching assistant before
having the
Chilean Navy drop him off on the small coastal island.
Kull
was there from February 2001 to February 2002.
"[T]he
coast there is very similar to the West Coast of BC,"
says Kull, "the difference being that there is just no one there. It is separated from society by the natural
barrier of the
"The
wind was a really strong presence and it became my
enemy," relates Kull. "I felt that the wind
was out to get me – it flipped my boat and [flooded] both of my motors
in salt
water. And there were times that I would be
in my
cabin and it would feel like the whole island was shaking."
Eventually,
Kull came to accept the wind, and at one point,
"watching the condors and the seagulls just grooving on the wind,"
Kull got the idea to build a kite, which he attached to the end of his
fishing
rod.
"It would disappear into the clouds and I
would
be controlling it with my rod, and I was literally fishing for the
wind...The
wind was a major teacher in surrendering."
Another of his teachers and his only
companion, was an
epileptic kitten named Cat (because there was only one) which the
Chilean Parks
Board had recommended he take to test for toxic shellfish. However,
he quickly became attached to Cat and only fed him the same fish that
he ate
himself.
Kull said that what he learned from Cat was
that
"[he is] just a piece of the world and Cat is just a piece of the world." In other words, he couldn't control Cat and he
was not
responsible for Cat being Cat – this is where Kull delved into Buddhist
philosophy"
"I
spent time everyday in meditation, listening to the sounds of
the water and little by little, things got simpler.
And
I started to recognise the basic Buddhist
teachings
of what causes our grief – it's desires...wanting things to be
different than
they are, and that materialism gets into the spirit."
And of
course, Cat had his own agenda— you know, cats don't believe
that we're in charge," he added.
Sadly,
Cat – who went home with a friend of Kull – disappeared three
weeks after the end of Kull's isolation. A veterinarian friend of Kull's
said Cat probably died of natural causes, owing to the fact that
epileptic cats
don't live very long.
The rigours of island life took their toll on
Kull, who tore both of the rotator cuffs in his shoulders
when he slipped on some rocks and, at another time, had to
pull one of his own teeth when
it became abscessed. Still, the opportunity
for self-analysis and introspection
that the experience of solitude enabled led to periods of enlightenment
and
equanimity that he had
never before
experienced.
The
next challenge for Kull was coming back to
society. •
"After
I was on the island a year, my friend Patty Kuchinsky
came, and she stayed on the -island
for a month so that I could have somebody
that I could reintegrate with before I went
back to society." Kuchinsky
told him two
things upon arrival, that a close mutual friend had died, and that the
World
Trade Centre had been attacked.
Currently, Kull is working on his
dissertation, and
giving slide show presentations. Anybody
interested in
having Kull give a slide show presentation on his trip can contact him
at
bobkull@exchange.ubc.ca. •Photos of his
journey can be
viewed at www.forestry.ubc.ca/portal/bobkull.
Kull said he's still not quite sure how to
put the
experience he had on the island in to words:
"I'm reading [my] journals now, and I'm in
the
place now where I'm questioning the depression and the darkness and I recognise that I need to include that into the
psyche...it's [the questioning] that's never complete –it's the job of
a
lifetime."