Compared wth author Andrew Struthers, Henry David Thoreau was a bit of a wimp. After all, Thoreau managed to eke only out two years at Walden Pond, while Struthers spent 10 years living “off the grid” in and about Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island. For the first seven years he lived happily, on a cliff, in a pyramid that he built from cedar and glass. Then the government caught on and ordered the house to be demolished.

Luckily for Struthers, the government also came up with a plan to preserve salmon stocks that did nothing to preserve salmon but did manage to create a sudden buyers’ market in old fishing boats. Soon Struthers found himself the owner and resident of the Loch Ryan, a disused troller with a mysterious past.

The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan recounts the three years Struthers spent on the boat and how afterward he learned to stop worrying and love the grid. The book is a farrago of local history, hippie culture, and the pratfalls, schemes, and tragedies of a cast of colourful eccentrics living marginal lives in a place of overpowering beauty. In Clayoquot Sound, it turns out that “truth is stranger than fishing.”

Ten years ago Struthers won a gold medal in humour at the National Magazine Awards for his account of the logging protests in Clayoquot Sound. There’s no question that he is a funny man. He is also smart. His humour is informed by a formidable intelligence and a keen eye for the absurd. Too often, though, it seems that Struthers is using his intelligence to avoid discussing his emotional journey. His daughter, Pasheabel, who lives with him on and off, is clearly his emotional centre, but she barely appears in this memoir, floating in and out only once every 20 pages or so.

Struthers also has the flaw of not being able to concentrate on one thing for very long, and for most of the book the narrative tends to skip along randomly, like a perfectly thrown flat stone on water. Only in the last quarter, when he finally faces his fear of urban life, does the memoir find a momentum of its own. The rest of the time Struthers seems to be forcing the book along under the power of his wit and smarts.