1 January 2025 – And what always tops the Resolution list?
Get more exercise.
Well… Vancouverites are on it already.
Yesterday, after my own get-some-exercise walk through Stanley Park and back toward town from Second Beach, I see this cluster of tents set up on the shores of English Bay.
Coming closer, I hear a deep-bass male voice doing sound checks, and then practising his “Happ-py new year, everybody!”
Coming right up to it, I see this is not prep for some dissolute New Year’s Eve blow-out. It is prep for a serious New Year’s Day feat of athletic endurance.
The annual Polar Bear Swim. Still underway as I write these words, but with years of tradition behind it.
Mind you, I’ve already had my own modest bit of exercise, this 1st day of the year!
Down to False Creek, just to say hello. Where there’s lots of exercise underway.
Including swimming.
All right, they do it year-round, but it counts.
As I follow that False Creek tributary through Hinge Park, I come to the playful little bridge connecting one side to t’other…
and then peer inside.
Where, at the far end, I see a father beginning to swing his little girl down-down-DOWN the steps to enter the bridge.
I meet them toward that far end.
She stamps her feet on the echoing deck, and giggles at me. I stamp my feet, and giggle right back at her. To her father’s vast amusement, she and I then have ourselves a foot-stamping contest. (And a giggle contest.)
Day 1 of a new year, and the exercise box is ticked!
29 December 2024 – Also pandas & moo-cows & more, as I have yet to discover. All I know, before I set out, is that it is positively heaving down out there.
But I go out anyway, because, delightful as holiday sloth has been, it’s time to move my body.
Dripping tree against a sodden sky…
but happy ferns, in this front yard…
and happy winter moss on this tree, plus a cheerful ornament hung by some passing pedestrian.
The Vancouver Special is hunkered down, properly stoic — as it ought to be, here in its own native eco-system…
while the vintage green lampshade next door rises to the occasion, knowing it looks better in rain than sunshine.
Out on Main Street, a trio of pandas advertise dim sum…
a solitary cat advertises records…
three dogs advertise their very own bakery…
and an exceptionally silly cow (through this butcher’s doorway, left) advertises which succulent cuts come from which bits of her anatomy.
What is more dejected than a construction site in the rain? Not yet able to advertise the condo delights to come.
But this trio of guitars is warm & dry & a good advertisement for the magic of music…
especially Mr. Heavy Metal in the middle, whose tiny lettered plaque reads:
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
It’s all very swell, wonderfully diverting.
Nonetheless, I wish to point out that, after all this walking… it is still heaving down out here.
So I go home.
As I bring my dripping self through the door I envy, not for the first time, dogs’ ability to shake themselves dry.
Just look at that spiral shake!
But alas, we humans are not built like that.
So I do the next best thing.
I make myself a mug of spicy Mesoamerican hot chocolate.
(Recipes abound. Mine is 1 c. milk simmered with 1/2 tbsp honey, and a pinch each of ground ginger, cloves & cayenne; and then a generous 1/8 c unsweetened cocoa and bit of vanilla extract whisked in at the end.)
While I’m enjoying the drink — and wiggling my toes to extract maximum flavour — I read more about the long history of cacao & chocolate in Mayan and Aztec cultures.
Oh look, it is still raining. But I no longer care.
30 November 2024 – Vancouverite and, more to the point, horologist Raymond Saunders died one week ago today, age 84. I want to pay my own small tribute because, multiple times most days, I walk by one of his creations. It is part of my neighbourhood, and therefore part of my life.
This is the Mount Pleasant Welcome clock, which he was commissioned to design and build in the late 1980s as part of the uptick then underway in the neighbourhood.
But it is not the clock for which he is best-known.
This one is.
Residents and tourists alike, we know this clock: the Gastown Steam Clock. In the mid-70s, Saunders, already an experienced horologist, was asked to design and build a clock to camouflage a steam vent at the corner of Water and Cambie streets in the Gastown district of downtown Vancouver.
The result, unveiled in 1977, was 16 sculptured feet of bronze & copper designed to reflect the buildings around it. For the first ten years the clock was indeed steam-powered (perhaps, but perhaps not, the first steam-powered clock in the world). Since then it has run on electricity, though the whistle…
emulating an 1890s steam locomotive whistle, is still really-truly powered by steam.
Obituaries and other articles and videos (click here, and take your choice) tell us he designed and built more than 150 customized clocks world-wide, often in equal part art works but always functioning clocks as well. I’m charmed to know, for example, that his Scenic World Steam Clock, installed in Katoomba Australia, commemorates coal miners and their pit ponies — and, to mark the hours, plays Waltzing Matilda.
Our local clock is much less grand…
but it reflects this neighbourhood, bearing not only the Vancouver coat of arms…
but sprigs of hops as well. After all, this was, and is again, the Brewery District.
The clock’s image, like the physical clock, is part of who we are. You see it incorporated into shop signage…
and on sidewalk banners….
and in my own Winter Solstice blog post, last 21 December…
when I stood patiently in front of the clock, waiting to photograph it at exactly 7:27 pm — the exact moment of solstice, Pacific Time. While my theme was the phenomenon of the solstice, not the clock or its creator, I naturally turned to this clock to make my point.
The obits tell us that Ray Saunders was still fixing clocks and advising collectors world-wide right to the end. They also tell us he was still playing poker right to the end. His last game, with friends, took place last Saturday.
26 November 2024 – I’ll get to “Great Northern.” Let’s start with “bimble.”
I learned this splendid word just three days ago, reading Snow! — James Elkington’s latest post to his blog Mountains, Myths and Moorlands. The post began, “We woke to a lot of snow, I managed to get onto the moors for a bimble.” Subsequent e-chat with this Yorkshireman taught me that the word is both noun and verb, and means “to walk about without purpose.”
(I am not going to rename my blog “Bimble Broad”! Though the idea does have me giggling…)
Yes well, on to Great Northern Way.
I decide to have myself a bimble the length of GNW, so-named in tribute to its earlier life as a stretch of the Great Northern Railway route from Seattle to Vancouver.
Easy access for me, from my home just a bit uphill: down Main, turn right-east on East 6th instead of left-west, then left on Brunswick… and there it is, the Great Northern Way, just a few blocks farther down.
Down by the construction crane, which will be there for a good while yet.
There’s all the activity for the Broadway Subway Project — the westward extension of the Millennium Line — and then there’s the whole South Flats neighbourhood thing as well. I already know about the former (and live with it, in my own neighbourhood); I become aware of the latter in the course of this bimble.
Down/down, north/north, past a curious cat on a gate post at East 2nd…
and here I am, at GNW itself. Already so transformed from its railway/industrial/service area, let alone from its earlier, natural life as the final stretch of False Creek before the needs of expanding commerce decided to fill it in.
To the right of the construction crane, the white, blocky complex of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, whose arrival triggered this latest academic/creative/high-tech/digital era. Far right, the Centre for Digital Media (UBC, Simon Fraser U, Emily Carr, BC Institute of Technology). Far left, the corrugated metal and bright red of Canvas, one of the area’s new-builds catering to the Emily Carr vibe by offering its condo owners such amenities as flexible artist gallery space and collective workshop space, along with the more usual fitness centre and children’s playground.
And, in between, the work-in-progress GNW Emily Carr transit station, with its hoardings and bouncy signage to explain what’s happening, along with viewing slots so you can see for yourself.
I read signage, I peer downward through a viewing slot.
I read more signage.
I learn how to move three elephants, should the need occur…
and, around the corner, I learn why to pat every dog I see.
Still hoardings, still signage, but now with a whole other focus.
South Flats.
With an “s.” Please notice that. Not “z.”
Until recently, this trending area, to prove how very artistic/creative/trending it was, branded itself Flatz. Not like the grimy, grubby old industrial False Creek Flats spelled with a humble “s.”
Nosiree. With a “z”!
And now the anonymous They have decided that “z” is passé.
This whole area, the whole length of Great Northern, is now branded Flats-with-an-s. (I remember a New Zealand academic, at a Learned Society conference I once covered for the CBC, observing that every reputation goes through three stages: “Bunk, Debunk, Rebunk.” Z has been debunked; S has been rebunked.)
My bimble is showing me that South Flats is A Thing. A Very Big Thing. Forgive me this moment of flackery, but I have to offer you the development’s website, its explanation of this emerging “tech and arts hub.” Rapid transit is just part of what’s going on, in behind those hoardings.
A lot of that is still to come. While waiting, you can play South Flats bingo…
or just visit Nemesis Coffee, whose striking petal shape is also (see above) the central icon in the bingo game.
Far side of Nemesis, the eastern entrance to Emily Carr…
and facing it, the Centre for Digital Media. Except I’ve stopped gawking at all that high-design high-tech.
I am now gawking at winter moss.
The season has begun. I remember, my first winter here, becoming totally enraptured by the vibrant green of winter moss. I am still enraptured.
On east along Great Northern Way, lots of chain link fence, with Things Happening in behind.
Nature likes chain link fence, vines especially, they climb all over it. Even when the fence is mostly draped in bright blue tarpaulin. Vine still finds a way.
I am fascinated to see that somebody has deliberately, carefully, spray-painted some of those leaves blue, to match.
I am now, almost, at the end of GNW. The thoroughfare itself won’t end, it will just — yet again — change name. (West 4th to West 6th to West 2nd to East 2nd to GNW to East 6th.) Never mind! Here opposite China Creek North Park, it is still Great Northern Way. As I look back, I can read the purpose behind its broad, straight lines, and see again the railway track it was designed to carry.
And then, just like that, I find I have left Great Northern Way. I have passed Glen Drive, I am almost at Clark Drive, and I am now on East 6th Avenue.
I am also passing one of the City’s icons: the East Van Cross.
Currently behind chain link and tarps, because that’s the here-and-now of things, the artwork has its own decade-plus of history, and speaks to a much longer history than that.
Asked by the City to commemorate Vancouver’s role as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, artist Ken Lum created this sculpture. It is not a symbol of Christian piety. He drew his inspiration from a graffito image of the day, frequently seen in East Vancouver alleys, the intersection of “East” with “Van” in a spare, elegant shape dictated, Scrabble-like, by the interplay of letters. “Over the years, the symbol had been adopted as an emblem for East Vancouver as a whole,” said Lum, “but its appearance has generally been tentative rather than overt.” Lum brought it out of the alleys, made it overt.
As I turn north onto Clark, my bimble ends. I am now walking with purpose. I shall briskly take myself on down to East Hastings, and start the bus trip home.
The Coast Range Mountains are before me. The light is failing, the sky is snowy, and the mountain peaks — look at those Grouse Mountain ski runs — are white with snow.
Snow! It’s perfect. James Elkington’s post about snow taught me to bimble, and my bimble ends with snow.
23 November 2024 – A play on “bright & early,” of course, and a favourite winter-time quip of the host of the CBC early-morning radio show that I listened to for years.
He’d sign off, promising to greet us again the following morning, “Dark and early.”
What came to mind yesterday, as I walked an alley just off East Broadway & Brunswick…
is that, this time of year, “dark & early” describes both ends of the day.
It is exactly 3:53:36 p.m. — not yet 4 p.m.! — and Nomi Chi’s VMF mural (2016, the Festival‘s inaugural year) broods with extra drama in the failing light.
(I know the change is increasingly dramatic, the farther north you go. I do know this. I spent time in Inuvik, one January, and learned that the Arctic is not only the Land of the Midnight Sun, it is also the Land of the Mid-day Moon. But… now I am here, and here I am now, and this is what I notice, in my here-and-now.)
18 November 2024 – This weekend — for the 28th year — was the annual Eastside Culture Crawl. I take advantage of Sunday’s better weather (merely iffy, as opposed to torrential) to join in.
I’ll visit studios like this one…
but mostly, as seems to be my personal Crawl tradition, I’ll just go for a big old walk. And visit some studios along the way.
When I cross 2nd Avenue, northbound on Scotia Street…
flaming beech trees welcome me to official Crawl territory: it runs from the waterfront farther north to right here, 2nd Avenue. (And, east-west, from Victoria Drive to Columbia Street.)
Also part of my personal tradition: my first visit is always to the bustling Arts Factory on Industrial Avenue, but before that — just to get in the mood — I loop my way through the False Creek Flats, taking in their evolving mix of new facilities and old warehouses as I go.
Streets in here have helpful names. Western Street runs up/down the Flats’ western boundary; Station Street to the east runs to the train station; and they are connected, you’ve guessed it, by Southern, Central and Northern streets, in the appropriate geographic order. North of Northern lies Terminal, and beyond that, Industrial.
I pass one of my all-time favourite rusty warehouses at the corner of Southern and Western, now with a gleaming new high-ish rise in the background…
but I’m even more taken by this tear-drop puddle reflecting the warehouse back at me, as I round the corner to head north on Western.
A huge stump marks the corner of Western and Northern. The building looks more derelict every year, yet it is still in operation, as its grumpy shipping-receiving notice makes clear.
After my visit to the Arts Factory, I double back west to Main Street. This makes no logistical sense at all!
It’s the most perversely roundabout way possible to get to Gore Avenue, which houses the three studios I’ve decided to visit this year — but, hey, I’m out for a walk, right? The rounder-about it gets, the better.
And I’m glad for my few blocks on Main. They take me past something that may look bleak, but deserves respect.
Yes, it’s behind chain-link fence and yes, it is November-dreary. But it is also a seasonal community garden, here at the corner of Milross, and it bears our local Yarn Bomber’s tribute of a crochet heart — recognition of the resilience of people doing what they can, in a tough context.
Back east along Prior, heading for the end of the block where I will turn north on Gore. I plan to scoot right along, but I’m stopped by this Mexican cervecería, just past Hogan’s Alley.
A moment for a giggle, and then eastward-ho to the corner of Gore Avenue, with the venerable Hunnybee Bruncheonette [sic] on the left and equally venerable Strathcona homes on the right.
I’ve walked along Gore on other occasions, but it’s always been the ground-level shops that caught my attention — I’ve never thought who might be doing what, higher up in these old buildings. Today, I start to find out.
First target: Godzilla Studios, where one workshop — Street & Saddle — will be open to visitors. Once inside, once upstairs, I’m distracted en route by the instructions I see through an open washroom door over the waste paper bin.
Politeness seems to work! The bin is full to the brim, but the floor is clean.
On down the hall to Street & Saddle, a warm, welcoming and very impressive workshop of cheerful people and good clothing. Good business practices, too, as I learn from this sign on a counter top:
Isn’t that the best? Each year, their little shop keeps a whole pony’s-weight of fabric out of landfill.
Back down the stairs, out the door, on up the street to the Pot Spot Studio.
A word about stairs. Stairs literally come with art-crawl territory, since studios are usually located in the higher reaches of their respective buildings. Savvy artists, like these Pot Spot folk, make sure you know which stairs to climb…
and then give you a bonus.
Turn the corner to climb those red-arrowed stairs…
and a serpent leads the way.
As the potter at this top level studio wraps some purchases for other visitors, I hear a bit of his backstory: from his Russian homeland, to art school in Jerusalem, to — one year ago — Vancouver. I think of the losses, the struggles, the terrible choices that must be locked up in that chronology, and tell him I wish him well in his new life. His eyes soften, he nods acknowledgment.
North again on Gore, on to the eponymous Gore Studio, can’t miss it, just follow the sign for Kim Hung Noodles. (It’s the doorway I teased you with, at the start of this post.)
In, and up.
Again up.
And the invitation to go on up yet again. Again.
I’m not sure what that is! A multi-coloured toilet roll? An aerosol paint can? Doesn’t matter; It’s of a piece with the fantasy-land all around.
I find myself taking photos for some enchanted visitors who are struggling with their selfie technique, then do my own tour of the wonders, and then leave. Back down all those stairs, back out onto Gore Avenue.
With a last glance at that impressive building, noodle ghosts and all…
I walk past the Himalayan restaurant next door…
past the gloriously pungent Chinese market spilling out over the sidewalk…
and finally take myself back out to Main Street, and a bus ride home.
16 November 2024 – I enjoy walking this ‘hood, this part of Fairview. It’s a quiet stretch of older wooden homes, all very human scale and welcoming, with their front porches and front gardens.
But this street, indeed this whole area, is adjacent to the Broadway traffic artery and lies within the ambit of the comprehensive Broadway Plan — which, for all its consultations and talk of public space, is focused on intensification.
Land Assembly billboards have become commonplace.
The future is on its way.
I’m with Graffito Guy. It’s gonna be ugly.
On a happier note!
The Very Large Waterfowl I showed you in the previous post has been identified.
In her comment on the post, Lynette d’Arty-Cross was cautious enough only to say she was “reasonably certain,” but that’s good enough for me. We’re looking at a juvenile trumpeter swan.
Thank you, Lynette.
Do the rest of you know her blog (In the Net! – Pictures and Stories of Life)? If not, click here. You’ll be glad you did.
12 November 2024 – It’s definitely a leaden sky up there, but down here there’s lots to look at. Plus there’s a rain jacket in my backpack. I am equipped.
Colours pop against all that grey.
Bright autumn leaves snagged in a still glowing shrub…
seed pods tawny against yellowing foliage…
seed pods cascading from their vines…
and a small tree, starkly elegant against its stone & brick backdrop…
all of them my companions, as I walk my way north down Scotia Street, flanking the east wall of…
the Brewery Creek Building.
Not its original name! Even “Fell’s Candy Factory,” still visible above the brass lettering, is not the original name.
Built c. 1904 as a storage cellar for Vancouver Brewery Ltd., this building was later (among other things) a candy factory, a creamery, a grease works and a stucco manufacturing plant before the restoration and renovations that, in 1993…
transformed it into a collection of live/work condos in a Class A heritage building.
New-builds are now springing up all around. It more than holds its own.
Though I like some of the sassy newcomers.
Especially ones that prove modest building materials can also hold their own — when deployed with bold colour and strong, clean lines.
And this is the back-alley view!
A bit farther north, I’m still caught up in the old/new mix that is Mount Pleasant these days. Low vintage buildings and early (2017 or so) Vancouver Mural Festival artworks mark East 3rd and the alley just off Main Street..
but behind them to the south rises one of the sleek new eco-conscious work facilities that are now reshaping the area, East 5th in particular.
I’m headed in the opposite direction, north & west to the east end of False Creek. My route takes me past Mountain Equipment now-American-Company-not-Canadian-Coop. I consciously Don’t Go There; I instead enjoy the exterior of this mass timber building. Including the corvine slogan under one pillar’s footing…
and droplets sliding down the water course built into the Quebec Street façade.
You see? It has rained, it will rain, but at the moment, it is not — not quite — raining.
I’m closing in on False Creek…
but it’s not the geodesic dome of Science World that catches my eye. it’s the runaway red balloon down there against the railing.
And then I forget all about the red balloon.
I can hear chimes & gongs & cymbals & whistles, and I know how to interpret them. They tell me that the glass tower by the Science World entrance, sadly silent during a long restoration, is once again in glorious, ridiculous, delightful, full-tilt operation. It has no name that I can find, but if ever any 2024 contraption deserved the name Rube Goldberg Machine — this is it.
Things clank, whiz, fly around, spiral and drop, tip and tilt, climb and do it again. A woman grins at me over her children’s heads. “The kids are the excuse. I could stand here all day.” I nod.
But we eventually move on …
I, past the reclining question-mark outside Science World’s creek-facing west wall that invites us to consider our daily choices, all of which affect the environment.
Question-mark nicely suits what happens next. I find myself in an impromptu focus group of SeaWall pedestrians — diversified in our demographics, but united in our conclusion.
Despite much conjecture among us, we remain puzzled. Goose? Swan? We settle for Very Large Waterfowl. We also agree that he/she is gliding over a sunken boat (the hull gleams greenish-white, the mast protrudes). Pleased with ourselves and each other, we go our various ways.
By the time I reach my Cambie Bridge cross-over point, the threat-of-rain has become really-rain.
I stand under bridge ramparts, exchange forecasts with a guy also pawing his backpack for a jacket, and watch a young woman toss her red umbrella aside so she can kick up her heels on one of the playground swings.
Jacketed & be-hatted, all zippered up, I climb my way up onto the bridge and head out over the water. I am so charmed by this graffito on the railing…
that I stand here until a ferry obligingly comes along, to include in the picture. (The wait gives me time to compile a Glad They Exist list, ferries being just one item. I find it a helpful exercise, very soothing, a counterbalance to all that I wish did not exist.)
And then I put the camera away, because, good grief, this is now serious rain.
And I then I take it out again, one last time.
Here at West 8th & Yukon, a living demonstration of the slogan back there under the MEC pillar.
Crows know! This crow knows he is very wet. And he is telling us all about it.
5 October 2024 – A theme that has unexpectedly imposed itself, and yes in places it’s a bit of a stretch, but you’ll work with me on this, won’t you?
First up, a photo from a few days ago, taken not with any tribute in mind, but simply as a cityscape moment: the dome of a heritage building against a lowering sky, framed by tram wires and traffic lights.
But I can pull it into the tribute theme. It is a tribute (A) to the Carnegie Foundation capital grants that sparked the creation of public libraries all over the world, including, in 1903, this one at Main & East Hastings in Vancouver; and, (B) to the City of Vancouver that restored and revived the building and reopened it in 1980 as the Carnegie Community Centre, a new name and new breadth of services for the same core purpose — respect, support and more opportunities for people who need them.
Today’s outing had no theme in mind. Well, none beyond visiting two parks on the eastern edge of the city — one for the first time — and then walking residential streets back home.
And if I must, I’ll defend this bucolic shot of Trout Lake in John Hendry Park…
by saying, “Yah, well, it’s my tribute to a weeping willow doing what weeping willows do best, plus look at the fancy trick it plays with its trunk!”
(You are, however, allowed to roll your eyes.)
It’s en route the next park — Clark Park (second-oldest in the city and, official blurbs point out, “the only one that rhymes”) — that, still unbeknownst to me, the tribute theme starts to gain traction.
I’m on East 14th, moving right along because I’m eager to cross Commercial Drive and set foot in the Park-That-Rhymes for the very first time.
And I stop.
This is odd. Where some previous tree trunks have twee little “fairy houses” as adornments, this one has two mugs.
Deliberately there, pushed into place.
I lean in.
I don’t know if this is a tribute from Mike & Ella, or to Mike & Ella, but tribute it surely is. I am ridiculously pleased that, on July 23, 2022, such a good time was had by all.
Next tribute, the other side of the Park-That-Rhymes, and the other side of its other street boundary at that, on East 15th.
It is a tribute to graffiti. By a developer. Really.
Conceptually, I am totally in favour. Aesthetically, I wish the resulting murals were more interesting.
And then I run into busy Knight St., and it’s horrible and crowded and there’s no near-by traffic light to get me to the other side and suddenly trying to continue west seems like a bad idea. So I stomp north on Knight for a bit, and catch a bus to take me even farther north, where I’ll jump off and go walk through Strathcona for a while.
Off a bus at Clark & William, and I wander north-westish for a while and suddenly know where I am.
I’m on the edge of freight train tracks and if I follow them, I’ll slide in behind Parker Street Studios, a wonderfully delapidated collection of buildings that manage to stay upright and house lots of creative studios.
Yes, look! A mannequin at the door, and train tracks beyond.
These buildings and everything in/on/around them — all a tribute to creativity. (And survival.)
Lots of art up and down the outside walls, as I walk along the tracks-side of Parker Street Studios, but this free-standing tripod creation is my favourite:
Finally across the tracks and a bit farther north & west, and I’m in Strathcona. I zig and I zag and I stop for some lunch and much-needed glasses of water at the Wilder Snail café, and then I straight-line it across Keefer Street, heading for Main and a bus uphill to home.
I’m deep into Chinatown, practically at Main, when my eye is snagged by one more mural, in the alley just before the intersection.
Yucho Chow, yes.
I remember watching a documentary about his life and work, the city’s first professional Chinese photographer who, from 1906 to 1949, documented not just the lives of Chinese immigrants but of many other ethnicities as well — people who weren’t comfortable going to white photographers, given the power structures of the day. This link takes you to a portal page about Yucho Chow, because the page includes lots of video options as well as text websites, and shows his importance to our records of life in this city.
I keep reading the alley wall, and realize that one tribute leads to another.
Bottom left corner of the photo above, you’ll see the words “Time for changes” and a name, the name of the artist who painted this mural. The name is in black, hard to read: Smokey D.
I take a few steps farther into the alley, just past that wooden utility pole, and find the next tribute.
By Smokey D. to the city. (I later learn online that the City, in return, paid tribute to him by proclaiming March 11, 2023, his birthday, as Smokey D Day, honouring his artistry and activism on behalf of the Downtown East Side community.)
There’s one final tribute in all this, don’t you think?
30 September 2024 – I expect lots of water, given my general plan for the day, but I do not expect a torrent of words. Yet, late in my walk, there it is: “a slow wet meander…” of words, albeit one closely allied with yet more water.
You’ll see.
It all starts when I hop off the westbound #19 bus, right there at the Georgia St. entrance to Stanley Park, with the waters of Coal Harbour visible on my right, and my immediate target, Lost Lagoon, not yet visible at all.
What is visible, is the 2010 sculpture by Rodney Graham, Aerodynamic Forms in Space, that marks this park boundary. Truth is, I like disaggregated bits of it better than the sculpture as a whole. This bit, for example.
I salute it, and then slide on by, down the steps, under the underpass, and onto the city-side path around the Lagoon. The path soon winds close to the water…
and offers Park and distant mountain views northward across the Lagoon…
close-ups of exotic ducks (un-exotically named Wood Duck)…
some Lost Rivulets, off-set from the Lagoon…
and a definitely Lost Footbridge…
which is even more drowned and inaccessible on the far side than it is right there.
Pretty soon I am exactly where the “You are here” bubble says I am…
namely, just steps from the Seawall at Second Beach.
The tide is wonderfully low.
Like many others, I leave the Seawall and walk right out to water’s edge. In places it is rock-strewn…
and, elsewhere, it offers long stretches of firm, wet sand.
Out there, orange-hulled freighters awaiting their turn to carry on down to the Port; here on shore, orange-shirted girls running into the waves.
The scene is happy, and there is an important message of hope and optimism in these shirts, but they commemorate something dreadful and dark: the abuses of the Indian [sic] Residential School System. These abuses battered the children physically and emotionally and, in more than 4,000 documented cases (2021 stats), caused their death. In 2015 the non-profit Orange Shirt Society was formed in Williams Lake, B.C., and began marketing tees that proclaim “the enduring truth that EVERY CHILD MATTERS, every day and everywhere.”
The inclusivity of the slogan invited, and has won, widespread acceptance. You now see the shirts on people of every ethnicity, of every age, and as every-day apparel. Today the shirts are especially appropriate. Today, 30 September, is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day to honour “the children who never returned home and survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities.”
All of that is now part of all of us, as it should be. I take it with me as I continue my walk.
On toward English Bay, past more sand and rocks and squealing children and tail-wagging dogs and, up there on separate Seawall tracks, cyclists and pedestrians. Finally, I head for the Seawall myself. I am ready for a city component to this walk and, I realize, more than ready for something to eat.
Out to Beach Avenue, with the A-Maze-ing Laughter sculptures in Morton Park in the middle distance, and Doug Coupland’s soaring mural on a refurbished vintage apartment tower just beyond to the right, and, closer than all that and of more immediate interest to me…
the red & white striped awnings of a hot dog stand.
Hot dog or Bavarian Smokie, it’s all 100% Alberta beef, says the hand-lettered signage, and the Calgary Girl in me nods approval. I eat my Smokie on the beach, and then…
turn down Denman St. for a latte in Delaney’s Coffee House. My front-window seat gives me the inspiring view of this pigtailed cyclist, surely damn near my own age, who is not even breathing hard as she locks up her bicycle.
Next comes a zig-zag through West End Vancouver: I’ve had water & nature, now for pavement & city. A few blocks on Denman, then right turn onto Comox and I stomp right along — until I get to Broughton.
I’ve walked Comox before, I’ve passed this building before and I’ve noticed the thumping great sculpture at the street corner before: Triumph of the Technocrat (Reece Terris). What I’ve never noticed is the curling channel of water along Comox that connects with the sculpture…
and, especially, the words incised into the channel wall.
Thanks to an article and overhead photo in The Source (issue 27 Jan – 10 Feb 2015), I can not only show you the entire channel with its pool at one end and Terris sculpture at the other…
I can also tell you the channel is the work of Vancouver landscape architects Durante Kreuk, and the text is by Vancouver artist Greg Snider.
Snider’s creation is a whole bravura torrent of words, and I want it! So I inch my way along the channel, taking pictures as I go, just in case the text is not available online.
And it is not. Or, not that I can find. So here we go, I am about to put it online — all but the bits I couldn’t catch because they are obscured by particularly vigorous lavender bushes. You’re not word-crazy? Skip the next paragraph. You are word-crazy? Settle in for the ride.
“A slow wet meander along stoned plaza of frenetic urban structure toward the demiurge of public art, the fiscal trace of exacting development moving with pythagorean acuity the eart [lavender bush…] objects of our collective culture through the bureau of civic demand, the spirit of heavenly smoke spirals from the burnt wood of transcendent aspiration over the long marsh of pantheistic decor as the seemly secular rises around us and art sluices down a crafty pipe — sleepy second [more lavender bush…] arch, techtonic upscaled for perpetuity’s long view (fifty years max) in a device for reflection called triumph of the technocrat.”
My own slow, not-wet meander now complete, I walk on. I pause one last moment on Comox, just before I turn onto Bute, for a cheerful and timely bit of sidewalk art.
Buoyed by that, I carry on — north & east, east & north — to Burrard & West Pender, where I catch a # 19 bus, and ride on home.
"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 