“If I’m in that bus, I’m good to go.” Katheryn Kebe describes riding as a passenger on Himalayan roads — famously narrow, all hairpin turns, with a rock wall on one side and a sheer drop on the other. “You’d get a full minute of plunge,” she adds matter-of-factly, as if noting a rise in the price of eggs rather than the chance of tumbling into a gorge.
Her story lands like punctuation, underscoring a life guided by a core value: everything is beautiful. She shares this compass with her partner, David, who had already been to India 20 times when they met. From the start, their life tilted toward motion. By day three of their first date, they’d decided to go to India together to start a business. That business became Kebe & Fast Company, the pop-up Asian décor sale that comes to the Creek each summer.
At the Creek Hall pop-up, I moved through the racks like a patron of the arts, fingertips grazing each coat, colour rising in my brain like the smell of bread from the oven: a takeover, not a detail. By the time I tried one on, I’d circled the hall, touched wool shawls, smiled at rugs I knew my cats would ruin.
“You make these?” I ask, still mostly drunk on beauty. Slowly, Katheryn’s words, so vivid, become a tide stronger than the objects around me. They’re made from kantha blankets: once saris, then stitched into blankets, now reborn as coats. Choosing them, Katheryn says, means sifting through piles of colour and heat, tuning down the intensity to envision their next life.
“These coats are powerful,” she says. I agree, because the truth hums through the fabric on my shoulders. They’re on their third life: sari, blanket, coat. Stitched into them are the roads Katheryn and David have taken: a single 16,000-kilometre run on bad buses, storms under a tent on Cortes, $5 rooms with towels rough enough to file a nail (actually), and the community they’ve gained along the way. Each piece carries this lineage — stretching from an Indian market to this hall in Roberts Creek.
I sit in my garden after visiting their shop and wonder: do objects have a soul? Maybe it’s simpler to ask — can beauty be separated from the hands that made it? Did the maker breathe fresh air while working? Do they love their work? That’s the proximity Katheryn and David choose, making the hands inseparable from the beauty.
During the pandemic, a man walked into one of their sales and confessed he’d never noticed how lifeless his house was until lockdown, full of flat-pack furniture. He pressed one of their pieces to his chest and it felt like a hug from the past. That’s the power of what Katheryn and David bring: not just beautiful objects, but a continuity of cultural knowledge reaching back thousands of years. The shawl I went back for carries the trace of hands, traditions, and places that industrial sameness has nearly erased. For now it lives on, warm against my skin. And just as their coats and shawls travel forward, so too do Katheryn and David. This is their last weekend in the Creek before the next road bends. The hall that briefly became a bazaar of colour will return to its regular rhythm.
Here’s the beat of the Creek as the summer winds down:
- BBQ party on the lawn at Roberts Creek Legion, Aug. 28, 5 p.m.
- Full moon peace meditation, Sept. 5, 7 p.m.
- Live music at Sunday Cider, every Friday at 6 p.m.
