The Wild Side of Intellect

by Linda Solomon

“I spent most of my adolescence trying to kill my IQ with drugs and alcohol.”

Andrea Reimer laughs. She holds up a hand, as if to say, “I give up.”

“You want to know what my IQ was? OK, it was 160.”

Some estimate that Einstein, it might be noted, possessed an IQ of 160. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” Andrea says.

When asked what the curse is, she squints. Her look seems to ask: “Are you blind?”

“I’m kind of a freak. I go to a party. People are just hanging out and socializing and then I come in and over-intellectualize things. The blessing is that I can sit on eight boards, run a large organization, raise a daughter, play soccer, and run for office.”

Andrea, the executive director of the Wilderness Committee and a former Vancouver school board trustee, announced her intention to seek a Vision Vancouver nomination for city council in July. She hasn’t been over-intellectualizing her desire to work towards change through municipal government. She’s been reaching out across a broad spectrum of Vancouver, drawing on her background as a street person, an elected official, a leading environmentalist, and a mom, to pull in support.

At 36, she appeals to young people who would like to see government be more inclusive. “I am part of the leadership of a new generation that sees the world not as an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ but as a big ‘us’ that needs to work together to find solutions.”

Andrea lives on the edge. She’s always been there, and it’s easy to guess that she always will be. “When other candidates ask for my support,” she says, “I make sure they know about my past so it doesn’t catch them by surprise later.”

Born in Saskatoon, Andrea was put into foster care as a baby and knows little about her biological parents. At eight months, she was adopted by a Vancouver couple. They settled in Calgary by the time Andrea started school.

Both parents came from abusive backgrounds. Her father was raised in a Mennonite community in Manitoba. He grew up in poverty so dire there was often nothing to eat. He was “beaten, doused with water, and tied up outside, just because that was how his parents thought you had to learn the right way to do things.” Her mother’s father was an alcoholic and used to “beat the crap out of my grandmother and my mom.” Her maternal grandmother, who has been a source of inspiration for Andrea, finally took the kids and moved to Vancouver.

“My grandmother was a fatalist. She had a belief that things happen because they happen, and you can control how you react to a thing, but you can’t control the thing.”

Her parents taught her to work hard at a young age. By the age of three, she had to do the dishes. She was making dinner at the age of five. She had five hours of chores to do each Saturday. “I dusted the whole house, vacuumed, laundered towels, cleaned the bathrooms and the kitchen. Every four weeks, on top of that, my brother and I had to polish silver and clean the chandelier.... Then I could leave the house.”

“I’ve never known anyone who works quite as hard, and is always the first to volunteer to take on yet another task,” says Karen Mahon, executive director of Hollyhock Leadership Institute, about Andrea. Karen laboured alongside Andrea in the environmental movement when the former worked for Greenpeace.

As she neared her teens, Andrea grew rebellious. “My mom used to hit me. When I was about 11, I grabbed a brush and hit her in the face. I didn’t think it through. It was a defensive reaction. And she never touched me again. I think what she realized in that moment was that trying to control me wasn’t going to work. I wondered why I hadn’t done it before.”

She took her first drink and smoked cigarettes at 10. At 11, she tried drugs like hash oil and mushrooms. “I was probably 12 when I did my first acid trip. I was mature for my age and had a good mind.”

She also began drifting towards the streets. It was the first time in her life she felt connected to something. “There was a culture of people who looked after each other. They liked new ideas. They talked about things. They were politically engaged.” After a few months, she stopped going home altogether.

It was a life of danger and adventure. She travelled through Canada and the States, Asia and northern Africa. She was involved in Food Not Bombs. She hitchhiked on sailboats from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy and lived in tiny villages in Central America. She worked in Portugal on a eucalyptus plantation and travelled around Europe with an art-slash-party collective called the Mutoid Waste Company. She got arrested (although never for serious offenses), dumpster-dived, and sat at the edges of food courts, waiting for people to get up so she could scavenge their leftovers.

She wound up in Yugoslavia, where she slept in public parks and on the streets. It was two months before the Bosnian War broke out. “The situation was so tense, I didn’t know if I’d wake up in the morning,” Andrea recalls.

She also got into hard drugs and developed addictions to substances she prefers not to talk about out of respect for her mother. “My mother is a private person and has asked me not to go into the details of what I did back then. She’d rather fill in the blanks.” Her father died last May.

In El Salvador, she went to work with an indigenous solidarity group a few months after the civil war, which raged from 1980 to 1992. The group rebuilt homes destroyed by bombs. One day, Andrea observed children going to a stream that ran right through a bombed-out building for water. On the spot, she decided to go back to Canada, enter university, and use her personal resources to try and help children like these.

She enrolled at Montreal’s Concordia University, hoping to find an environment where she could engage in intellectual discourse. Bored after a few months, she quit. While in Montreal, however, she got involved with a cocaine addict. They moved together to Vancouver. Once here, she signed up for a job training program sponsored by the government and got work with Gordon Neighbourhood House Youth Works. From there, she was sent for a practicum to Western Canada Wilderness Committee. She fell in love with the work.

“Wilderness is something you see and feel. It is about experience. You get it the moment you make eye contact with a bear, or take your first jump in the ocean.”

The boyfriend fell by the wayside, and so did the drugs. “In relation to the job, drugs were boring. I promised myself I wouldn’t get high for a year and I didn’t. Learning I had control over my body and my addiction was pivotal. I’m a fatalist, and it’s good to know that addiction isn’t inevitable.”

At a Wilderness Committee annual general meeting in the mid-1990s, she met Andy Miller, an American wildlife biologist. After a year together, they had Roan. A month later, they married. Roan, now 11, shows signs of having inherited her mother’s brains, independence, and tendency to work hard.

“When she was five, she told us she wanted a new bed. We said, ‘If you want one, you can buy it yourself.’” After one year, Roan had earned enough money from selling lemonade, hot chocolate, and crocuses.

Andrea tries to be open with Roan about her past. “I say that I made choices that weren’t always good ones, but what matters is the next step. It’s not worth sitting there and rueing the last mistake. It’s about trying to get to the next step without making another one.”

Restless, curious, compassionate, and above all else, hardworking and brave, Andrea says she has never believed there was a problem she couldn’t solve through “blunt force, smart thinking, or by bringing enough people into it.” One of 300,000 hopefuls who first applied to train with Al Gore to deliver the Inconvenient Truth slide show, Andrea was one of 500 chosen. She loved training with Gore in Tennessee.

“I went through this intense emotional experience in Nashville that took me from thinking ‘we’re all going to die’ to thinking, ‘holy crap, anything is possible.’”

She has delivered An Inconvenient Truth to more than 10,000 people. Before she left for the training—and before realizing how hard it was going to be to memorize an hour and a half of detailed scientific information—she had already booked an event in Parksville. “When I found out 800 people including the Qualicum city council were going to be there, I was terrified.”

She overcame her fear and got on with it. The talk went so well that afterwards the audience demanded city council do something about global warming, and agreed on the spot to create a citizens’ advisory committee on climate policy.

“What I have is the courage to stand up and do something,” Andrea says. “I get described as fearless. I’m very fearful. I just don’t let it stop me from doing things. When you do it and you see how much difference it makes to step into that terrifying moment, it’s empowering.”

Linda Solomon is the publisher of TheVancouverObserver.com . She says it’s better than paper—SharedVISION excepted.