Opinion: Meet a Squamish local who is a nomad no more

Do you ever wonder about some of the faces you see around Squamish but don’t know?

This is a tale about just one of them.

About her, one could say the wanderer has finally settled.

Home at last in Squamish.  

Twyla Brooks, raised in West Vancouver, has been on the move for most of her life.

Marching to the beat of the 1970s, in her 20s, she signed up with an all-women band called Women of the World (WOW), singing and playing sax in a funk and show band that covered Earth, Wind & Fire.

An agent based in Texas booked them for gigs throughout the U.S. and Canada. They would play six days a week and, on Sunday, move on to the next gig.

“He had us booked around 400 miles between engagements, travelling in two vans, one containing the equipment, with a sound technician, musical arranger and roadie,” she said.

They travelled through the south from Texas, through the Louisiana bayou, where she almost stepped on a poisonous snake and saw rows of flowering cacti that bloomed only every 20 years. Most memorable was a stay in Whitehorse for six weeks, where they would stop performing long enough for the audience to take in the northern lights.

“There was less pollution then, and the air was so clear that when a fellow took us up for a plane ride, we could see the curvature of the earth ... That should debunk any flat earth theorists”, she said.

They were on the road again for four years before Brooks married the arranger, who also built musical instruments, staying with him in Hartford, Connecticut, for a while.

Then, a restless vagabond spirit took her away to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. There, one of the teachers suggested she take up the bass as a way to compose music and continue a professional musical career.

A vibrant music scene drew her to Quebec in the 80s. She spent a decade in Old Montreal, where she lived in one of the row houses with the iconic spiral iron staircases. She had a steady gig playing bass at a restaurant and learned to speak fluent French.  

The 90s brought her back to B.C. where she joined a vocal group playing the streets of Gastown.

“Gastown was just opening up as the main tourist attraction in Vancouver at the time. The streets were packed with people,” she said. She also had a steady gig at the now-gone Classical Joint in Gastown.

With all this toing and froing, Brooks still managed to attend the Vancouver Community College music program in the early 2000s.

Moving to Galliano Island, she touched base with Vancouver pianist, playwright, musical director and composer (Governor General Literary Award winner) Dorothy Dittrich, sometimes accompanying her on bass in Vancouver and on the Island. Between gigs, she cooked and catered at the Hummingbird restaurant.

“My life’s been playing music from city to city to city and cooking and catering sometimes to make ends meet,” she said.

Through the years, Brooks studied Homeopathy and moved to Squamish to help a friend who ran a vet clinic and later worked as a caregiver for an ill friend.

Now retired at Westwinds, she still treasures the special bass made for her by her former mate long ago, playing only now and again when the spirit moves her.

Melody Wales is a long-time writer and Squamish resident.