14 June 2026 – How better to title a blog post being written as I roll toward the St. Lawrence River, than with words from a paddling song of early voyageurs?
And I am rolling along, on board VIA Rail. Just the latest phase of several days of travel, all on the surface, and running the gamut from ferry to bus to train.
Ferry!
The MV Madeleine II at dock in Souris, PEI, after our morning crossing from Cap-aux-Meules, Magdalen Islands. She’s 124 m. long, 6 decks high, can carry 750 passengers and 200 vehicles per trip, which in a year totals some 100,00 people and 41,000 vehicles.
I have time to learn this, also time to admire the red beaches besides the terminal…
because I have a four-hour wait before my local-route bus ride on up to the capital of PEI, Charlottetown.
Bus!
It all goes well. It is the start of my pleasure in the continuing presence of inter-community busses here in the Maritimes, something we used to enjoy elsewhere in Canada but no longer do.
Sunshine throughout the stay on the Magdalens, and now — gusty, drizzly rain.
I brave it for a morning walk to Victoria Park, then — hat and hood pulled tight around my head — turn back into town. My reward is this dramatic mural en route.
At 1 pm my next bus takes off, one that (via a connection) takes me off-island to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, with a little slice of New Brunswick thrown into the mix.
Until 1997, the only way off-island was to fly or take a ferry. That year, a new option opened up. Thanks to the new Confederation Bridge, vehicles could now drive a 12.9 km. link across the Abegweit Passage of Northumberland Strait between the island and New Brunswick.
We’re on the bridge. It is very foggy.
But eventually there it is: the New Brunswick shore.
We’re soon in Nova Scotia and, late afternoon, I drop off in Dartmouth, just short of the final stop, neighbouring Halifax. Next morning, I’m in Halifax, at the waterfront train station
Rail!
Not quite yet, I’ve 20 minutes to kill, so I walk a bit of the Halifax Harbour front.
It’s an important harbour, and I’ll let the signage concisely tell you why.
(Apologies if all this data causes you to resonate with the very cross little boy slapping down a very large book on the library Returns desk and complaining: “This book tells me a great deal more about penguins than I want to know!” On the other hand, I am not looking over your shoulder, so let your eyes skitter on down the page, if you wish.)
Still foggy, which somehow seems exactly the sort of weather we should be having…
… though perhaps lifting slightly. I can now, faintly, make out the lighthouse on the little island directly ahead of us.
Time to catch my train. It runs a route now named The Atlantic, but which began in 1904 as the Ocean line. That date, I later learn, makes this the longest continuous-service passenger service in North America.
I’ll be going almost all the way…
getting off in Ste-Foy for the short connecting ride to Quebec City.
Did you notice that use of the present progressive tense? (“I’ll be going…”) Yes, my friends, as promised above, I am still on board, swaying gently with the train’s motion as I type this post in the WiFi service car.
We have just pulled out of Moncton (consult your map, above)…
and I think I’ll say good-bye. I want to spend my time falling into the passing landscape.
11 June 2026 – Still on the Magdalen Islands, leaving very early tomorrow morning by ferry for Souris, PEI. But for the next 9 hours, I’m still here, and I’m still all about here.
What I really want to do — and will do — is take you with me to Farmer’s Island. That’s not the official name, but by the end of this post you’ll see why I have invented it.
But first, a few quick moments from everything else I’ve been doing since my last post.
* My solo walk to Le Bassin, from La Salicorne, the inn where we’ve been staying on Île de la Grande Entrée, down to Bassin aux Huîtres (Oyster Bay). It took me down a pebble/dirt path, with boards for the boggy bits…
past various exercise stations off to one side…
out to the bay…
with more athletic options, lounge chairs, roped-off areas where they are propagating more Myriques des îles (Morella pensylvanica, Northern Bayberry), a native species but one that needs encouragement.
* Our group walk along the Camarine Trail, in the Pointe de l’Est National Wildlife Area on Grosse Île. Here we walk a sandy path, for this is a sand dune environment…
but one where forest is slowly, steadily encroaching…
although — as we discover in the part of the trail called The Soup Bowl…
there are massive sand blow-outs still being created that continue to re-contour the land.
* And then there’s the sunset over the water!
It’s an easy walk from the opposite side of La Salicorne, to watch the sun apparently drop into the waters of Havre de la Grande Entrée, and it’s a nightly ritual for many people. I can see why.
* More fiery colour, for a different reason: our visit to Le Fumoir d’Antan (The Traditional Smoke House), on Île du Havre aux Maisons.
Those are herring, slowly turning copper-coloured, over the wood fires below.
* Same island, different emphasis: cheese. We visit La Fromagerie Pied-de-Vent, which is able to create delicious, artisanal, award-winning cheeses thanks to…
their herd of Vache Canadienne (the Canadian Cow), a now rare breed that first came to Quebec when it was still New France.
* We walk a beach near Pointe aux Loups (not wolves, but loups-marins, or seals)…
and marvel at the water-scoured caves in the sandstone cliffs.
* Later we visit the sweeping 8.5 km sandy beach on Old Harry Island…
prosaically known in English as Old Harry Beach, but more descriptively known in French as la Plage de la Grande Échouerie. I had to look this word up, I had no idea. Here’s what it means: a littoral area, rocky or sandy, that serves as a gathering place for marine mammals (e.g. seal, walrus). Aren’t you glad to learn that?
I’ve just whooshed you through everything until today. Today we took the 45-minute ferry ride from Cap-aux-Meules over to Farmer’s Island. Only they don’t call it that. Every map, every conversation, knows it as Île d’Entrée — Entry Island. Just tuck that “farmer” reference aside for the moment. We’ll get back to it.
Our group is just 17 of the people on this full-load ferry, about to leave Cap-aux-Meules. The others are, far as any conversations I have, tourists from mainland Quebec. With their babies, and with their woofs. I meet Willow, a Scotch (not Irish) Setter and her owner from the Saguenay area, and the appropriately-named Angus, a Westie (“Bien sûr ‘Angus.’ Il est écossais!”).
It’s a holiday mood. Everybody is clearly delighted to be making this trip.
And here is the local museum’s model of the island receiving this accolade.
We pull in to the harbour you can see in the model above…
and everybody, le gang Salicorne and everybody else, either heads into Chez Brian Josey (“OPEN”) for supplies…
or starts hoofing uphill toward their various destinations. No busses, strictly foot-power.
I lolly-gag, I do, and pretty soon I’m wandering along on my own. Past a pile of lobster traps…
past endless sweeps of the distinctive Magdalen dandelion, tall and so densely petalled…
past a lighthouse…
past a long view of the little Anglican church on the hill, and a sign whose lettering you can’t read without spreading the image. DON’T DO THAT YET. Not yet.
I turn a corner, onto the school-house road, and take in a long view of “La Big Hill”…
deserving its name, at 185 metres high — not only highest on this island, highest in all the Magdalens.
And here I am, at the school…
except it is no longer a school. It is now a museum — and doesn’t that tell you something, about demographics on this island.
Permanent residents now, in 2026, are 50 or so, and aging. Numbers swell to 120 or so in summer, when younger family members return for the season.
That was the 1960s. Still, even then, a remote and poorly serviced life.
I relate to this one! The signage places it before my time, but in my time — in my life as a small child in the Laurentians village of Morin Heights, my mum hung laundry out to dry in winter and brought it in “frozen hard.” I can still see, in my mind’s eye, the sight that so fascinated me as a child: stiffly tented frozen sheets slowly thawing and collapsing into soft piles on the floor.
Remember that photo of La Big Hill? Most of our group truck off to go climb it, their lunch boxes in their back packs. A few of us say an unabashed “No thanks,” and stay below. But we don’t just sit there like lumps. A companion and I set off for a gentler, and much more horizontal, walk of our own.
It gives us a closer view of the Big Hill…
before we veer off to the left, and find a pretty satisfactory long-view-over-water of our own.
And now — and about time too, you may think — I shall introduce you to Farmer.
Meet Farmer.
Part-Clydesdale, indeed a farm horse here on Entry Island back in the early 1920s — and one who now has a sign pointing to his burial site (scroll back to that photo with the Anglican church in the distance, and read the sign). Not only that, Stompin’ Tom Connors wrote a song about him (which Farmer entirely deserved, though I’ll add that Stompin’ Tom was married to a woman from Entry Island).
Here’s the story. Well, here’s the version we heard, and details vary, as befits a legend. So don’t sweat the details, because the core facts are true and every legend earns some embroidery.
When a new foal was born on Richard McLean’s farm, and emerged with a white F-shaped blaze on his black face, the McLean children promptly named him Farmer. They were devoted to the horse, and vice-versa. All went well until McLean, who had a bit of a gambling problem, got in over his head during a game on Grosse Île, wagered the horse on the next throw of the dice — and lost. He paid his debt. It being winter, he brought the horse from Entry Island to his new owner via the “ice bridge” that formed every year, and gave Entry Islanders access to the other islands.
The McLean children were devastated. Farmer wasn’t too happy either because, one day when the gate was left unlatched, he took off.
He then walked the entire stretch-C length of the chain of islands, from Grosse Île over the top of that northern curve, down the beaches and long middle stretch, and around the bottom southern curve, right out past Havre Aubert, to water’s edge facing Entry Island. He smelled Entry Island on the wind and — it now being summer, no ice bridge available — plucked up his courage, plunged into the water, and swam home.
Here’s the map. Trace it for yourselves.
The new Grosse Île owner agreed that Farmer deserved to live out his days back home. That is where he stayed, and where he now is buried and honoured.
On the ferry-ride back to Cap-aux-Meules, the steward asks our boat-load of day-trippers if we enjoyed ourselves. “Ouais!” we roar. Fine, he says, and did you all learn about Farmer? Silence, blank faces (except for our little group). And so the steward tells the story. With gusto. At the end, there is a round of applause.
He adds one more apocryphal, but who cares, detail — every legend needs its apocrypha. “Richard McLean was so moved by the horse’s courage and devotion that he never gambled again. He was cured.”
So that’s Farmer’s Island for you. I yield to the temptation to add… maybe if Farmer could do the impossible, maybe the island can as well? Maybe, somehow, it will rebuild to a stable population that can sustain a school and a community?
Probably not. But I like the idea.
*****
P.S.: read about Farmer here … and listen to “A Horse Named Farmer” by a current singer here (I can’t find any Stompin’ Tom original online, but maybe you can).
P.P.S. Yikes, by now I’ll be leaving this morning, 4 hours from now.
9 June 2026 – No, no, don’t start multiplying those figures. It’s my shorthand for what got me from there to here. Namely: 6,085 km, over 2 days, through 4 time zones. And here I am: on Grande Entrée island, in Auberge La Salicorne (Salicornia europaea, Samphire aka Glasswort aka Sea Asparagus, in the northern curve of the stretch-C that is the Magdalen Islands.
A couple of moments, en route…
Dramatic clouds & contrasts as we climb out of Trudeau International Airport (Dorval Airport, in my childhood) for my second flight that first travel day, onward from Montreal to Quebec City…
and a happy hour of fresh air the following morning in Parc Robitaille, near my hotel in turn near Jean Lesage International Airport in Quebec City. A little googling and navigation brings me to greenery and a creek…
and a children’s playground that offers some intellectual exercise along with the physical.
Fill in the missing letters! (Which are helpfully listed on the right.)
Give it a try. Exercise your French.
That afternoon, back to the airport, meet some of the group who will also be on this week of eco-discovery, and finally our Ligne Pascan flight is called. I feel an absolute surge of joy when I realize we’ll be walking across the tarmac, and up the steps of a sturdy little twin-prop plane. Yes!!!
(It’s a Saab 3408B+, says the seat-pocket card, and I invite Lynette to tell us if, and if so why, this is a good aircraft choice for this kind of local run — in this case, 1 hr 40 min to a location known for fierce winds.)
Frédérique reads the usual instructions, in the usual official languages, and away we go.
And we leave the sunshine behind us. We land at fast-dropping dusk, in gusty drizzle. One last streak of setting sun as we motor off to La Salicorne…
and the day is pretty well done.
Next day, yesterday, our first day of activity and lots of us are doing it with heads still scrambling through the time zones. Tant pis! We don’t care, we are up for this.
(But you’ll have to excuse the fact my impressions of the day are few & scattered.)
Morning visit to La Musée de la Mer, tucked far south (some 100 km south) in the bottom curl of the C, where we stand ’round a splendid nautical floor map of the islands for the start of our private visit.
Quick highlights of history: visiting indigenous peoples from millennia ago, travelling back & forth from the mainland to hunt & fish; two significant Acadian settlement periods (after their expulsion from the mainland by the British conquerors); further accidental arrivals via shipwreck (helping to populate the anglophone pockets); further deliberate arrivals; waxing/waning/etc of fisheries; something of a current up-surge, including among young people choosing to stay and develop new small businesses.
Why does this tiny island chain out in the Atlantic belong to Quebec and not to one of the Maritime provinces? It all goes back to 1774 — when the British authorities were busy sorting out What To Do with their newest acquisition, New France. Yes, fold it into British North America. Ummm, what about these islands? While we’re sorting things out, maybe reassign them? Ohhhh, who cares… leave ’em with Quebec. And so an Act was passed, by Imperial authority, and les Îles de la Madeleine became, and are to remain, part of Quebec.
We pass two lonely wind turbines along the highway, and ask the backstory. Given this particular day has 35 km/hr winds gusting to 50 km, and given that although this is enough to keep some fishers in port, local people, les Madelinots, rank their strength as merely “moderate”… given all that, you’d think wind power would be a good option. No. Pilot project not pursued. Partly environmental issues (impact on birdlife), partly aesthetic (the whine, the visual impact on the landscape), partly demographic (very small population base) and very much financial. By the time the initial costs had been recovered, the turbines would have reached their life span and need to be replaced.
Nature on all sides, all day.
Cliffs…
and pebbly beaches…
and salt marsh pushing into the narrow interior of the islands, often up again forest.
And, and… the first Toe Tap of this trip.
Some of you may remember, during my fall trip last year to Winnipeg, up to the Arctic, back down and east to Toronto, that I made a ritual of tapping my boot toes in water all along the way. Pacific Ocean, Red & Assiniboine rivers; Hudson Bay; Lake Ontario.
Yesterday, on the sandy curves of La Grave…
I tap those boots into the Atlantic. Just as I promised them.
Plan was, a minimalist little post titled Tended & Wild, contrasting much-pampered Tended…
with plucky little Wild…
and noting that, much as I appreciate well-tended gardens, my heart is with the spindly alley plant smack up against a grubby window with wonky blinds.
That was the plan.
But then I zagged right, landed myself on Quebec Street, kept walking south, crossed East 19th, and came up against The Fence.
The Fence! The Fence of happy memories! The Fence I can never find on purpose! The Fence with its — admittedly now deteriorating — wildly exuberant artwork. Like this:
And this:
A block-long demonstration of this identity:
I toss Tended/Wild aside, and plan a little tribute to Quebec Street.
I keep walking Quebec (BC), right until it swerves west…
and morphs into East 24th Avenue.
When I turn back north, I decide to follow, not Quebec, but, let’s call it, Back of Quebec — the alley beyond Quebec Street.
And then I laugh. All this is the perfect tease for posts to come, next week and all month long.
Because.
Because tomorrow I will exchange Quebec (BC) for Quebec (QC)…
in a two-flight bounce from Pacific-coast Vancouver to mid-St. Lawrence Quebec City.
The next day, one more bounce will take me to the real Back of Quebec…
this red-tinted archipelago beyond mainland Quebec, poised in triangulation with PEI and Nova Scotia in the Atlantic Ocean — islands that, despite their location, are part of Quebec.
The Magdalen Islands.
Les Îles de la Madeleine. I’ll be staying on Île de la Grande Entrée, but exploring more widely. Then, next Friday, I’ll take the ferry from Cap-aux-Meules and follow the dotted line to Souris, PEI.
After that? After that, the adventure continues. I’ll keep you posted.
The title of this 1981 steel sculpture (Alan Chung Hung) is Spring. Of course it is! Even with that bit of temporary fencing on the left, we can see that the structure is a spring, a handsome great spring that earns its keep — or would have us believe it earns its keep, holding up the second level of Robson Square.
I play along.
See? There’s a sturdy spring end, doing its job.
I’m used to this particular joke, so my attention moves on, enjoys the play of sculpture with context: the light, the shadows, the plaza lines of Robson Square, the hints of the BC Provincial Law Courts above, the stripe of green shrubbery, the bicycles.
I move in, start prowling, curious to see the play from different angles.
Peer low: glimpses of that upper level, one fragment of the magic on display over my head, the marriage of Arthur Erickson‘s architecture with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s landscape architecture to create the flowing, harmonious Law Courts whole.
Peer high: a view the other way, back toward downtown city towers.
Come closer, peer through the spiral — and frame another photographer. (Photographing the architecture, please note; not himself.)
Come even closer and, in all this sunlight, the uniform gloss of the red starts to break up.
Come even closer than that, and my eye starts telling me lies. Look! it says; alternating twists of silver & red! My brain knows this isn’t true, and my eye doesn’t care. It sees what it sees. Or… “sees.”
Time to back up a little? Restore agreement between eye & brain?
Still close, but at a different angle. All the spirals are once again red. Set off by the green of that modest, meticulously placed, line of shrubs-in-tubs.
One more re-angle, and now the spirals and their reflections bounce back and forth across the line of shrubs. I imagine an invisible tennis ball of light rays, flashing across that net of visible green…
And then, I walk on.
Deliberately one street over, now southbound on Howe…
where a cascade of Oberlander greenery washes my eye clean of all that red.
17 May – It’s the walk up-slope Marpole Avenue that brings the old movie title to mind.
Is that not the living, leafy definition of “discreet charm”? Quiet, understated, harmonious and soothing.
In other words, nothing at all like Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie! Luis Buñuel’s 1972 comedy was a satire that skewered the more hectic, and less appealing, characteristics of the upper middle class.
Doesn’t matter. The title still rings in my head as I cross The Crescent and enter Shaughnessy Park.
For one thing, this small park (1.45 Ha) was very much originally for, and is still surrounded by, the bourgeoisie. It is the circular heart within a circular street (confusingly called a Crescent) that crowns the height of land in Shaughnessy and was designed in 1909 — homes plus park — to become the city’s new upper-class neighbourhood, on the assumption that the original West End enclave was losing its exclusive character.
I’m climbing my way to that circle-within-a-circle, shown upper-right in this 2015 City of Vancouver Heritage Action Plan map.
The park is not only surrounded by the bourgeoisie, from the moment I set foot on its gravel pathway, it glimmers with its own discreet charm.
Nothing flashy. Trees, grass, this path, a few benches, and…
one endearingly simple swing, whose wooden seat is wide enough, and sturdy enough, to snuggle two at a time.
Who needs flash, when you’ve got these trees? I am lost in ignorant respect for the size, quantity and variety on offer, everything from towering west-coast conifers to shrubs and small trees riotously in blossom.
Some, like this rhododendron, are still in full bloom…
while others are past their peak, now transformed into discreetly charming ground litter.
I only learn later, thank you VHF (Vancouver Heritage Foundation), that this is more than an impressive bunch of trees. It comprises a small but carefully selected arboretum — 47 species, many rare or unusual, some found nowhere else in the city. (Japanese snowball, says the list, flowering ash, English hawthorne, copper beech, sourwood, large leaf linden…)
Not surprisingly, the trees are well maintained. There is some selective tree removal…
where even the stump is a thing of discreet charm, shade upon shade, ripple by ripple.
The homes ringing The Crescent are as true to their era as is the park, one typical example glimpsed here through mossy park-tree branches.
Tudor Revival, says the VHF: a Vancouver phenomenon 1910-1940, a period of “romanticism and nostalgia” when wealthy local WASPs wanted not only to pretend they were Very-Very-British, but also wrap themselves in pseudo late-medieval architecture. There are relatively few homes around The Crescent, and most of them are now registered heritage sites.
I stand by the swing, and look across The Crescent at the two horse chestnut trees immediately opposite. Both are splendid, both a-blaze with their spring-time “candles,” but while the towering white tree on the right is a common sight in various parts of Canada, including here, the diminutive red variety next to it is not. Both were carefully placed, as was the rest of the public and private landscaping, all of it laid out in that encompassing 1909 design.
Little traffic up here, as befits a discreetly charming enclave.
I politely wait for crow and cyclist to pass on by — I, too, can be charming — and cross the street. Time to follow The Crescent to one of its spokes, and down-slope myself back to Granville Street.
Now out of the park, now up against homeowners’ boundary walls, I discover there is nothing discreet or charming about their security arrangements. An ornate old side-gate may make do with a padlock…
but every front wall is adorned with large, blunt signs.
Not content with shouting WARNING at you, the security firms usually also boast that their response time is less than ten minutes.
10 May 2026 – I expect the boots, and the overall look of things. It’s all glorious and impressive, but also to be expected. We are in a large (153 hectare), forested park in the BC Lower Mainland…
rich with Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar and Western Hemlock soaring high overhead…
and, back at eye level, massive stumps of earlier growth…
the textured bark of current growth…
and the bright green of the newest growth of all, this season’s growing tips.
There is a creek chattering its way down-slope, to be crossed on wooden bridges, sturdy and firm despite moss on the railings…
or, for the sure-footed high-steppers in the crowd, to be crossed here and there on a log.
All normal, right?
What I do not expect is a camper trailer. Hanging in a tree.
We see two: this one is the better-built, more colourful, and — given the circular openings — more hopeful of an avian tenant.
I spot a boardwalk snaking through the trees…
and I am mildly puzzled: we are not in a bog, and there does not appear to be any need to protect the ground from hikers’ boots.
All very logical… if this were indeed a boardwalk.
It is not.
It is “a wooden feature,” says my companion, “for mountain bikers.” I believe him, because he is an MBVE (Mountain Biking Voice of Experience). Four decades of mountain biking to his credit, including many marathons both provincial and international — and with a lot of his training for all that, in this very park.
We are in Watershed Park. It is the largest park in the City of Delta, and well-laced with 11 km of trails, almost all of them multi-use — walking, jogging, biking, horseback riding. We entered at Pinewood Drive, the upper of the two sites shown on that vertical block on the right-hand side, and we are wandering along in a clock-wise loop. It takes us down to the lower tip of the triangle, and then back up and around via The Meadow, across some dedicated biking trails, and past the Gravity Bowl jump before returning us to city streets.
Because the MBVE is looking at the forest and its trails with a biker’s eye (and memories), I now experience the forest from that same perspective.
“I used to bring the grandsons here,” says the MBVE, “taught them the basics. There’s a lot of good features here for that, places where people can build skills and confidence.”
As we walk, he shows me what to look for, helps me see.
“This ladder is really good for beginners. Wide, uncomplicated, and…” — he beckons me to come take a closer look — “really sturdy. Look how well everything is connected, nailed in place.”
We pause at another wide, sturdy, ladder-type wooden feature. This one, though, is considerably more precipitous in the drop.
We are viewing it from the descent side. Nobody, he assures me, is expected to grind their way up that incline.
These wooden bike features are not all ladders. Sometimes…
they are log features. (Bumpity-bump.) And — the MBVE again invites me to check the construction — as stoutly connected as the ladders.
We pause at the Gravity Bowl jump. It was definitely NOT one for the grandsons’ level of skill, back in 2020 — but one where Grandpa got to strut his stuff. Nailed it! He grins at the memory.
He leads me to the edge of another bike-trail — the trail and its signage more proof that not everything in this park is beginner-friendly.
Big laugh from the MBVE, who points out not just the hard-ass metal lettering on the sign, but also the black biker’s helmet visor nailed to the tree above it.
I peer into that twisty gully, and cheerfully recognize a risk I will never take.
We comment as we walk on the very slightly “curated” feel to the forest. Nothing unnatural, nothing jarring. Just… an awareness of a little openness & breathing space in the canopy, of a lack of obstacles underfoot, of a lack of sharp twigs at eye level. Of very selective attention. We therefore stop with some interest, on the way out, to consult the Before & After legends in the Preventative Measures Diagram.
We nod. It feels right.
Something else is very right, as we emerge from the park — a little girl has set up a lemonade stand. A loonie a glass, and the MBVE springs for two. Yes, she made the lemonade herself (we nod approvingly, it’s not too sweet) and yes, the money is for her. “Are you saving for something?” asks the MBVE. “A bike!” she exclaims.
You know what happens next. He beams at her, and is soon deep in conversation with her proud daddy, who wants to know more about skills-building in Watershed Park. Finally she collects our empty cups, and scampers off to deposit them carefully in the complicated bear-proof litter bin.
Pretty soon we scamper off as well. It’s time for steaming bowls of Vietnamese pho, and some rich Vietnamese coffee.
5 May 2026 – We meet in among the 14 bronze statues that comprise the A-Maze-ing Laughter art installation in Morton Park. The statues are all laughing…
and so is every visitor, which means the statues fulfill their objective: to spread joy.
Fun as they are, they are our rendezvous, not our destination.
We take ourselves a bit farther west & north, and join the Comox-Helmcken Greenway pretty well where it starts, at Chilco Street just outside Stanley Park. Seawall to the north (along Burrard Inlet), Seawall to the south (along English Bay / False Creek) — but what if you’re stubborn enough to want a city-street path across town?
You put your wheels, or your feet, onto the Greenway. That’s what.
It is well-developed between Stanley Park and Hornby Street, more concept than reality from Hornby to Pacific Blvd. at the False Creek end — but well worth the hoof when (ingrate that you are) you’re a little tired of all those sparkling waves.
Out here in the west end, the pedestrian/cyclist amenities are well-established:
e.g. bike lanes, freshly painted.
e.g. sidewalk art, almost freshly chalked (we comply, giggling).
e.g. bright new spring growth, glowing on every tree and shrub.
e.g. volunteer-tended corner gardens, part of the City’s Green Streets program.
e.g. murals on the walls of Lord Roberts Elementary School (this particular section, Dizzy Dancers, the work of the kids, who first threw their silhouettes on the wall, and artist Steve Hornung).
e.g. a multi-component art installation, Triumph of the Technocrat, punching up the grounds of a high-end rental building at Broughton, with a corner sculpture…
a flowing watercourse…
and even an Xs & Os table…
conceived by Reece Terris, and an equally flowing narrative poem all along the watercourse by Greg Snider.
e.g. alcoves with benches, chairs, greenscape & inventive hardscape — here bicycle wheels.
e.g. whimsy-artsy bird houses up above allotment gardens. (My companion sees a real, live bird fly into one of them.)
And then.
And then the Greenway changes.
We cross Hornby, we’re now on Helmcken, and we hit gritty Granville Street.
The Regal Hot (look beneath the traffic signal box) was impressive in its 1910 day, and still wears its heritage Art Deco architecture, but it is now better-known for its SRO (single-room occupancy) notoriety.
That said, things are changing — which makes this stretch of the cross-town walk as interesting, as valid, as the attractive part out west. SROs are being decommissioned, proposals for new projects are being presented. This is not a good-news story for everyone: if the SROs badly failed the marginal community they were meant to serve, fancy new developments won’t solve our housing crisis either. No, this is not necessarily good news, but it is all part of the city story.
Now solo, I carry on east past Granville, past that shape-shifting story; onward to a story of revival and glitter. I’m about to drop down the slope into Yaletown, with its boutiques and its artisan-everything and its cafés & restos and, yes…
its bright pink parasols at Hamilton Street.
Yet another block east, corner of Mainland, and I stare in amazement at one of the street’s mani-pedi establishments. My mind flips back to my friend’s comment, as we read the Triumph of the Technocrat text. “I understand every single word,” said this extremely well-educated person. “I just don’t understand what those words mean, all together.”
Same thing here. “Russian manicure?” I ask myself. “Authentic or otherwise?” I have no idea. This is so not the real me! In fact, anybody reading this who knows the Real Me is by now in fits of laughter.
As am I. The amusement carries me another few blocks, right down to Pacific Blvd., False Creek, and my route home. Laughter started the walk; laughter ends it.
"Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
WALKING WOMAN 