30 August 2026 – I’m down at the grotty north end of Main Street, north of Powell Street, well into the DTES (Downtown East Side). Just ahead: the bridge over the tracks and Waterfront Road that then curls down to the waterfront itself.

This not my usual walking territory, but that bridge will take me where I want to go, somewhere I’ve not visited since pre-COVID: Crab Park.

Spend a moment with this battered city map of mine. There’s Main Street running vertically up the right-hand side, there’s Powell St. crossing it, and there is the curl of bridge + ramp that drops down to 3.31 Ha of green space on Burrard Inlet.

“Crab” does not refer to the crustacean (though pier signage forbids crab fishing). It is an acronym for Create a Real Available Beach — the rallying cry of Don Larson and other activists back in the early 1980s, pressuring the federal government to convert this bit of its unused land into badly needed green space for the residents of this under-serviced community.

We are indeed right downtown. From the bridge, the long view west, with boxcars on the tracks, and city structures old and new rolling to the distance.

Over there on the right, behind trees (and the bulk of what looks like an apartment building but is in fact a cruise ship), the pointy white “sails” of the Convention Centre roof. Also down there, running back eastward: Canada Place, hotels, Waterfront Station and SeaBus, the cruise ship terminal, and all the busyness of the Port of Vancouver. And also Crab Park.

Curling my way down the north-side ramp, I get peek-a-boo glimpses of what lies below. Cranes and stacks of the shipping containers they manipulate…

and some of the smaller Port work vessels, all trim and functional — such contrast to the indolent sprawl of that mammoth cruise ship behind them!

Ground level, I walk eastward for a bit, no access allowed to the working Port, but some relatively close views possible even so — this agglomeration of facilities, for example.

Later, curious, I look up a few Vancouver Fraser Port Authority stats. The home page lists multiple categories, from the container sector to international trade, bulk liquid and auto. It also announces that 2025 was a record-breaking year for the Port of Vancouver itself, up 11% overall and moving 170.4 million metric tonnes of goods in total. (There is special reference to the success of the year’s diversification strategy, strengthening trade with the rest of the world beyond you-know-which-country.) These stats don’t include cruise ship traffic, which also comes under VFPA control.

I don’t particularly care about exact numbers and I don’t much understand the technicalities of what I see happening. I just really, really like it — like the functionality, the action, the purposeful sight of work being done.

And then I turn toward Crab Park, and really, really like that as well. It too has a purpose, and it is serving that purpose. Its work is to provide open space for people who lack space of their own, and it is doing just that.

Benches to sit on, grass to run your dog or take a stroll (or turn a cartwheel), playground for the kiddies, also a splash pad where said kiddies can run back and forth under the nozzles.

Okay, at the moment, it’s Canada geese not kiddies, but the principle still applies.

Here, as on every Vancouver waterfront park beach, logs are arranged…

places to rest your back or park your bum and watch the world and the waves go by.

Also a pier…

with its no-crab-fishing sign visible there in the left foreground.

I follow the curve of the park westward, admiring this rock balanced on log struts (and temporarily adorned with a crow)…

before looping eastward again, passing a used-needles disposal box as I go…

and then finally leaving the park.

I don’t walk back up to Powell and take Water Street through Gastown (scroll up to the map!). Instead, for the first time ever, I follow Waterfront Road, effectively a service road for the harbour area.

Under the walkway from Waterfront Station to SeaBus quay…

one last backward glance out to the water…

and I’m underground. It is cavernous.

I’m in the bluntly utilitarian world of loading bays and garages and parking space, all the work stations needed to service the world of hotels, tourist attractions and convention centre above. A friendly hotel employee having a bit of a breather assures me that, yes, there is an exit ahead. Just keep going.

So I keep going, and then I take an up-ramp, and finally I emerge just west of the Convention Centre, west of the Flight Centre, smack in Coal Harbour Park. Slightly dazzled by my return to sunshine, waves and greenery, I climb the steps up to Bute Street…

and start the final, in-city, leg of my walk. It’s the first time I’ve walked south-south-south on Bute Street, and it rewards me almost immediately with this sight in a hotel forecourt.

First, it offers me a big rock, and I am a sucker for big rocks. Second, it offers those irregular shards of rock in the quarry area beneath, fractal geometry made visible. And, third, just below the big rock, there is a quote from Leonardo da Vinci. “In rivers, the water you touch is the last of what has happened and the first of that which comes, so with time present.”

Farther south, Bute becomes quieter, more residential, more vintage-residential. It offers me sprays of berries in front of graceful buildings.

Finally I turn east on Davie Street, the stretch that will drop me down to False Creek and my bus ride home. Lots of small shops all along Davie, and signs to go with them. My favourite is the most astoundingly practical, precisely defined and polite sign that I think I have ever seen:

I swear I’m laughing for a whole block, imagining the deluge caused by one large wet dog, shaking himself dry in a narrow aisle.