Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley

This fascinating memoir recounts two years of adventure, hardship, and life lessons as a woman moves her family to the Camelsfoot Commune in BC, Canada.

The time is the early 1980s. Judith Plant and her new partner, Kip, are ready for a change. Inspired by Fred Brown, their professor at Simon Fraser University, they join a commune in a remote valley near the Yalakom River, deep in Coast Mountains of British Columbia, Canada.

Culture Gap tells the story of Judith and Kip's two-year sojourn. The challenges and privations, the joys and adventures of rural communal living, form the backdrop to a moving human drama. Judith's son Willie takes to the new life, but Willie's sisters feel the strong pull of the life they left behind. Meanwhile Fred, the inspiration for the commune, is dying of cancer.

An absorbing account of a lifestyle emblematic of a time, Culture Gap also shows a young mother's struggle to reconcile her ideals and her responsibility to those closest to her.