This Dangerous Place

My Journey Between the Passions of the Living and the Dead by Betty Krawczyk

While imprisoned for Contempt of Court in the spring of 2003, Betty Krawczyk searched for understanding into the reasons for her actions. Had she signed a paper promising not to go back to the forest where she was arrested for blockading logging trucks, she would have been released from prison until trial. But she refused. Her own stubbornness and intransigence before the courts of British Columbia baffled everybody, including Krawczyk herself.

In This Dangerous Place, Krawczyk searches for answers from her childhood by revisiting in memory an old plantation house in southern Louisiana. It was from this setting of long ago that Krawczyk’s father wrestled with a ghost he didn’t know, didn’t ask for, and didn’t believe existed. Until it was too late.

While This Dangerous Place plays out in present time it is intimately connected with Krawczyk’s past. Through childhood experiences and her love of British Columbia forests which have imprisoned her, Krawczyk feels compelled to question the universe at large: what is the source of the human will? And an even more elusive question: to what degree can humans interact with the dead? Do the passions of people long dead still hang around in certain situations and seek to interfere with the lives of the living? This book is dedicated to posing these questions from lived experience. The answers belong to the future. This is a true story.

Betty Krawczyk

Betty Krawczyk immigrated to Canada at the height of the Vietnam War in 1966 with a physicist husband and six disgruntled children. The children were annoyed at being uprooted and the husband was temporarily jobless. These problems righted themselves soon enough. One major problem did not. Born and raised in the southern United States, Krawczyk found she couldn’t tolerate the long winters of northern Ontario where her husband had found a teaching post. Eventually the family split up and Krawczyk moved to British Columbia where the rainforests were lush and the snow was sparse. Children grown, Krawczyk retired to the stunning beauty of the forests and waters of Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island to live in a rustic A-frame built by her son Mike.

By the time she discovered Clayoquot Sound Betty Krawczyk was already an experienced writer. She studied Creative Writing through the University of Oklahoma and had written primarily for women’s pulp magazines. While she had also been active in human rights issues and women’s issues, Krawczyk yearned to write about the natural world. Instead, she found herself writing about the destruction of the natural world by international logging companies.

In 1993 Krawczyk joined a group called “Friends of Clayoquot Sound” that blockaded logging trucks going into the Sound. And Krawczyk found herself in prison for the first time — but not the last. She was given three other more lengthy sentences for subsequent blockades and as this book goes to press is waiting to hear if the Supreme Court of Canada will hear her appeal on her last sentence for protesting at Eagleridge Bluffs in BC two years ago. “I am still on a blockade,” Krawczyk says when questioned. “I will be on a blockade as long as the BC government and BC courts give out injunctions to every pillaging, polluting, privatizing international logging corporation that asks for one. These forests give life and breath to us all. It’s the ancient role of elders to be stewards of the land. I’m simply trying to do my job.” Her previous books include "Clayoquot: The Sound of my Heart", "Lock Me Up or Let Me Go" and "Open Living Confidential: From Inside the Joint".