Musician Brody, constantly talked about his longing to shed the material trappings of society and go off –grid, his mother told a local TV station. To her delight she nopw knows he is safe and has resurfaced on Canada’s East Coast
This web site has invited Brody to write a diary of his travels and post some of his music up on our YouTube channel.
“He always rebelled against social norms, even when he was a little kid,” said Mrs Roch Macmillan. Police issued a bulletin to find Brody MacMillan earlier this month, two months after he told friends and family he had become enamored with a “60’s type hippie lifestyle” and intended to hitch a ride on a semi-truck out of the province.
He fled the province without identification or a cell phone – even cash. But he did have his guitar.
Roch said she her son left town with a group of 20-somethings who were happy to play music and panhandle for money. But she contacted police in B.C.’s Interior after learning the group had come back to the West Coast without him.
Roch said her son idolizes Chris McCandless, the subject of the novel ‘Into the Wild’ who hiked into the Alaskan wilderness with scant food and equipment and died of starvation.
The search for the teen was called off after he reached out to his family this week from Halifax after seeing news about his disappearance on a social networking site.
“He’s got a 15-year-old brain and for those reasons he didn’t want to call home,” Roch said. “He was quite fearful that we were going to find out where he was and drag him home.”
Roch said she doesn’t know where her son is staying, but knows he’s been busking for money.
“He says he doesn’t make a lot, but he makes enough to eat,” she said.
11 Responses
I know Brody well, we went to grade school and what he could do at high school together.We were good friends, the stoner type: close in the sense that we both had the same ideals. I remember the day he first left here, he came to the park where we all used to hang out one day with a suitcase and this girl we all used to know but went her own way with life. I didn’t think much of it at first because he told us he was only gunna be gone for 2 weeks but Kamloops changed him and he started a new wild life and decided to stay out there. Then one day on the news I heard he went off somewhere else, didnt know where the hell he was going but he ended up in halifax safe and sound, which says something if you ask me; I admire him for getting across the country alive. Some winters he would come back to visit, we would hang out and do the whole catching up bit but I couldn’t help to notice that he wasn’t the same old Brody I knew. He had defiantly seen some shit that could change a person. This winter he came back and I saw him after a long while, this time I could see a a bit of the old Brody but still very different. I noticed many things about him this time he came back, I understood that he was a lone trooper that could really get through with what he wanted in life, which like any man is to be free. What got me the most was when I met these two homeless woman outside of a fairways and we talked, i brought up how my good friend was back and after a short explanation they knew exactly who he was. They told me how they thought he was pretentious and exploited animals to make money (which Is complete nonsense). On the inside I wanted to smack a bitch but I just reacted regularly telling them they really didn’t know him or what he’s gone and done. They shrugged my comments off as if they knew better and so I thought to myself, why do these people have such a high perspective of themselves. It made me think of when Brody and I were strolling around downtown as we often did, and he’d have his guitar or ukulele and we’d be hanging out by the water or just on some corner and almost every time we would see this other homeless woman who looks about 22 or 23. She always gives him shit like she knows the world better than everyone else. She would yell obscene nonsensical untrue things to him when he would do his thing. Brode would just shake it off, tell her to leave him alone trying to speak over this witches shouting, but it never got to him, not once. Me on the other hand I just couldn’t understand.
Brody is smart and he does what he does, I just hope that he stays alright and comes back to visit every so often.
Cyapadilla, have you nothing better to do than talk down about a kid plainly doing what he wants to do, and his mom? Don’t you know what a moral is? Offensive statements shouldn’t exist. On another note, Brody, I wish the best for you. You’ve some balls bro. It’s unbelievable how much you are like me, from looks to (from what little I’ve heard and can assume about you) quietness, to passion for beauty and other things.
Live and Be Happy.
he is brave and he made it . thats more than most people can say . i admire him for believing in his heart this is where he wanted to be and going for it . some people may think he is stupid , or whatever they may , but he is a smart kid to survive the way he has and no one can argue with that . AND i bet he’s alot happier now , living off-grid , than most of us are living in the comforts we are all so use to . Don’t Judge someone til you see the world the way they see it , cause to him , his world is beautiful .
Little does he joke to compare with his lies.
Would you be so conceitful to see you also think That this boy has something to stand for?
That he is afraid of the big picture?
He will always be the prince and never the pauper?
McCandless never reckless, always a prophet?
Have you met a derelict without an innocent heart?
Cyapadilla paints syntax on the screen.
did he ever get high, did he ever get high.
I loved him once, i thought he could win!
Didn’t like where he was or where he has been
I wanted him to leave and come live with me
Cyapadilla, where do you live?
This kid is a joke. Sounds like a damn bum. If he thinks he is McCandless, well then I have no respect for him … mainly because this kid was probably sucking straight from the tits of material society before he got high and watched Into the Wild and wanted to get out of his fat moms section 8 studio. You guys are pathetic for thinking this derelict stands for something
im glad you found him… take care of him.
i remember him well, he moved to Kamloops to live with his dad. He was so quiet and you would barely ever hear him speak, in a conversation he would diddle on guitar and listen to everybody speaking. Every single day he would go downtown Main Street and sit on the corner with an old busker named Milo and they would jam till it was late, i saw him out there in the dead of winter, -20 with heavy fingerless gloves on. We took alot of LSD, MDMA and shrooms together in Kamloops, he became more and more introverted, and i watched as he started to disconfigure and classify his life, we once sat on a street corner and blurted out words in the english dictionary that we thought were completely meaningless, we called them Ampersans. A couple friends were travelling across the country in a shitty 60’s cookie box R.V. and he jumped at the chance to fulfill his fate. A year later he came back, but he was very different, he wasn’t so young anymore, nor was he a carefree hippy who sat at the park, he seemed as if he had a plan to fulfill or he was on some epic quest he had made up, he seemed delusional and honestly okay with it, he had a ferret and i remember once he didn’t have a guitar, but i saw him on the street with his ferret in his lap sleeping, he had a cardboard panhandling sign titled “spare change for operation to the remove the slinky from a mexican rat”. He would blow on his harmonica or slap away the Jaw Harp, that week he hopped a freight train from Kamloops north, to Jasper, Prince George, Prince Rupert, so on… When he came back i ran into him again, he was covered head to toe in train dust and he looked tired. He hopped freight that week back to Vancouver, i remember the last thing he said to me was “step light.”
i miss the younger Brody, and i wish i could see him again, the well travelled version seemed so lonely and disconnected, the only thing he seemed be joyful about was the ferret and the music. Last i’ve heard he is living happily in Haines Junction, Yukon with his Aunt and Uncle and finishing his 10th grade of school. I had many good and bad times with this little whelp, i knew him quite personally. Wish him luck.. and happy tracks.
Brody’s in St.John’s, NL. He seems to be doing OK. He’s not hanging out with any bad folk, as he seems to have a good sense for what people are like. I certainly had no idea he was 15. He’s a brave guy. I did a fair bit of traveling myself with not much but a guitar, but I have since gone back to the nonsense 9-5 hell that is modern society.
–
i want to follow you brody, good job.
have posted info out on facebook groups, for buskers, and any related to halifax, canada…. can everyone please do the same… as pages get updated etc…. better he gets told 20 times than zero..
pleasant to read about a young man enamoured w/ nature and independance rather than the materialistic trappings of today’s society, very brave he is! good luck brody macmillan and stay safe. what a story to tell your grandkids one day.