Janis Mildred Kyle

A photo album is online at: https://photos.app.goo.gl/NLrv8crfUb6Cs3Eq6

Janis Mildred Kyle (nee Evans) was born in Morden, Manitoba on July 17th of 1946, to Raymond and Mildred Evans. Her early years were spent there, and she had many fond memories of playing with her brother and sister Cam and Dale and her cousins. She enjoyed spending time at a nursery owned by her grandfather and uncle, and remembers helping her father set the type to print the Morden Times newspaper, where all the words had to be written in reverse.

In the mid 50s her family moved to Winnipeg, after her father was appointed to be Queen’s Printer for Manitoba. She graduated from Silver Heights High School, then attended United College, where she obtained a degree in French. Her knowledge of French helped her get a job at the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.

After university Janis worked in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, as a health educator. It was here that she met her husband of almost 53 years, Arthur Kyle. They were married in two ceremonies – a backyard civil service, then one in a Catholic church – on June 26th, 1971.

Immediately after the wedding Janis and her new husband flew to Europe, where they would spend the next two years. They began hitchhiking with two heavy backpacks and by the fall of 1971 they arrived in Marburg where - with the help of friends - they found work and got residency. They worked in Marburg for the winter, and in the spring of 1972 set off on their next adventure, now with a VW Beetle. The trip spanned the distance from the sands of the Sahara in Morocco to (almost) the article circle. In Norway Janis was able to meet some of her Norwegian relatives and see the original Spangelo farm.

The next fall and winter (1972 - 1973) they lived in Oxford, where they both worked at a local restaurant called the Golden Cross. In the spring of 1973, they again loaded the VW Beetle with their camping supplies and headed to the continent to explore more of Europe. In early May, 1973 Janis few back to Winnipeg on her own to attend her brother Cam’s wedding, then came back to Europe.

Returning to Canada, Janis spent a couple of years working for the public school board in Edmonton, Alberta. While working for the school board she became fascinated with statistics, and returned to university, completing a master’s in educational testing and statistics from the University of Alberta. For decades after the Kyle family would write out their grocery lists on the old-style data punch cards that she used for her research.

After obtaining her degree, Janis set up her own consulting firm and worked on a longitudinal neonatal study at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton doing statistics. It was during this time that her son Dylan was born, in 1978. She would often take him to work with her.

In Edmonton, Janis worked hard to develop a sustainable garden in the backyard of their suburban home. But she soon realized that Edmonton was perhaps not going to be able to satisfy her desire to garden well. Janis was able to do her work remotely, so the Kyles moved to the Kootenays, buying about 20 acres of forest about an hour away from Nelson, BC in the Slocan Valley.

So as early as 1982 Janis was working entirely online, connecting to the study through ‘Datapac’ – an early precursor to the internet - and an acoustic modem. Sometimes she would connect through her son’s Atari computer, and her work communications were often done entirely through phone calls and print outs. Much of her career was like this, and her son Dylan would later telecommute as well, working online from places like Latin America to Europe to Asia.

In Vallican Janis was finally able to indulge in her passion for gardening. With a walking tractor, land was prepared, and Janis began planting. She was not only interested in a vegetable garden but planted numerous fruit trees as well. The old hen house on the property was brought back to life and Janis started raising hens. For much of her life – when settled in one place, at least – a large proportion of what her and her family ate came from what Janis grew. Like her mother and grandmother, she canned huge amounts of food, and filled a truly huge freezer.

Growing and eating her own healthy organic food was something very important to her. She also enrolled her son in a local alternative school called the ‘Vallican Whole’, as well as home schooling him. The Slocan Valley was a centre for a lot of the culture from the 60s, and she was strongly influenced by the back-to-the-land movements. The Wikipedia article for the town they lived in, 'Vallican' actually has an interesting and illuminating section about that movement - Dylan attended school at the Vallican Whole, as the building was later finished:

“The back-to-the-land movement began during the late 1960s with new arrivals into the 1980s. The Slocan Valley was the focal point for BC. The various communes flourished 1968–1973. Formed in 1971, the Rural Alternatives Research and Training Society (RARTS) was the umbrella organization that bought 4 hectares (10 acres) at Vallican for the "Vallican Whole" community centre. A $27,000 provincial grant partially funded the work. Completing only the foundations, a hostile local community dubbed the project the "Vallican Hole" and a waste of taxpayers' money. The hippies, US draft dodgers, and deserters, who made up the movement, were considered invaders.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallican

After four years in Vallican, the family moved to Vancouver Island, eventually buying a two-and-a-half-acre hobby farm in Cobble Hill. Janis’ love of gardening continued to flourish there, with a large garden at the end of the property, another beside the house, a greenhouse, and many fruit trees. The family also kept chickens, turkeys, geese, rabbits, and on occasions sheep and pigs. Janis enjoyed preparing huge meals for the pigs on the wood stove with garden leftovers. Things from Janis’ garden regularly won awards at the local country fairs, including an impossibly tall sunflower plant her son grew.

While living in Cobble Hill, Janis was active in her son’s school, the Evergreen Independent School, run by a bunch of ‘granolas’ who didn’t give grades to their students and spent a lot of time in nature. She also served on the Official Community Plan committee reviewing changes in zoning requests, and the family was involved in 4H. Dylan’s friends fondly remember her desserts, and the plates of fruits and vegetables that she put in front of them to quickly disappear while they played dungeons and dragons or video games.

In 1996 the family bought a home in Victoria, BC and moved there. Her son Dylan continued his education in Victoria, eventually obtaining a master’s degree from the University of Victoria. During this time Janis’ consulting on the longitudinal study was slowing so she worked on some studies at the University of Victoria and then, during the tax season, worked for H&R Block in Sidney, BC.

Four years later Janis and Arthur moved back to Cobble Hill and Janis was able to spend more time in her gardens, orchards and with animals. During this time she continued to work on the neonatal study part time but also worked for H&R Block in the Cowichan Valley during tax season. They also took a couple of trips to Mexico - one from Cobble Hill to the tip of Baja California in a truck camper - and spent four months in Australia.

In 2004 Janis and her husband moved to Cheltenham in the UK. Shortly after they arrived, they bought a VW campervan and began travelling the UK and Europe once again. They would often spend the summer travelling the UK and the winter travelling on the continent to southern Spain, Sicily and most places in between. They also spent about a year on a farm in Hope Mansell near Ross-on-Rye, sharing the farm yard with the family there. In England they worked at the post office over the Christmas rush and in the spring Janis was a waitress at the Gold Cup in Cheltenham – working these jobs were adventures in and of themselves, and cultural experiences. In 2007 Janis and her husband moved to southern France and lived on a vineyard for about eight months using the VW campervan to explore the area.

After this they returned to Victoria, but would continue travelling - spending half the year travelling in Europe or North America, then returning home. This would be the pattern she followed for most of the rest of her life. Her son Dylan travelled with her in Europe repeatedly, and they also visited him in places like India or Honduras.

They would soon have an RV in Victoria and another in France. France is known for its bureaucracy, and it can actually be a little difficult to own a vehicle there. But they bought their van and registered it - Janis kept extensive spreadsheets and was convinced that doing it that way, it was in fact cheaper to travel around Europe than stay in Victoria. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the easiest way was to start a company, dedicated solely and entirely to owning one van. So they registered ‘Les Vagabonds En Camping Car’, which is still doing business out of Sens, just a couple of hours south of Paris.

From Victoria they would make many trips across Canada and down to California, always visiting friends and family along the way. One trip went from Victoria to Winnipeg and then south to San Francisco and home. One of her favourite trips was to Anza Borrego Dessert State Park in southern California. In Victoria she and Arthur volunteered at the Kiwanis Tea House at Willow’s Beach, which they did every summer for almost ten years. Janis and Art were always avid bicyclers, but during this time they rarely drove, and biked or walked almost everywhere in Victoria.

Balancing her twin priorities of gardening and travel took some effort – Janis always had to be in Victoria over much of the spring and summer. But with Europe that’s just as well, they preferred travelling in the shoulder and off-season, when there aren’t tourist hordes everywhere and you can generally just park your van for the night anywhere for free.

Janis and her husband’s last trip to Europe was in 2020, with the pandemic hitting while they were travelling in France and Spain. They managed to get the very last commercial flight out of Charles de Gaul to return home, while their son and his partner Paola got stranded in Slovenia en route to India.

More recently Janis’ memory and health had deteriorated, she was finding it more and more difficult to walk and stand and spent many hours sitting and listening to music from the 1970s or watching old TV shows. The Rifleman and MASH were a couple of her favourites. Nonetheless she always had a smile on her face, and no matter how much her memory disappeared she always remembered who her husband and son were. Up to her very last days she went for an evening walk almost every night, eventually having to stop several times along the way but still pressing on.

Her last trips were a two-week RV trip to the sunshine coast – which was probably a pretty crazy idea, given the circumstances, but was a beautiful experience. Then finally a weekend in Lake Cowichan for her son’s birthday. On the way home she was dancing to the music playing in a grocery store, using the shopping cart as a walker.

Down-to-earth, independent, easy-going, adventurous, Janis Kyle was a woman who made her own path in life. In many ways she was a pioneer, a model feminist who was the breadwinner for many years, someone who lived outside of many of the traditional systems and structures of our world. But she also took a middle way, and in many ways also lived a very normal middle-class life. She wasn’t very political, she just liked doing her own thing with the people she loved.

She lived the definition of a full life, whether it was passing time with good friends, living out of a van and setting out every morning without knowing where she would park for the night, or having long conversations with her family. Janis was a loving wife and mother, a friend and companion and will be missed more than can be expressed.