31 July 2024 – Water is water!
So you drink it where you find it.
Even if it’s at an Olympic Plaza misting station…
in a dog bowl…
and you’re a gull.
All posts in category City
Water Is Water
Posted by icelandpenny on 31 July 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/31/water-is-water/
Grit & Greenery
26 July 2024 – It’s a bright, breezy day and my target direction is Strathcona. I’ve just skimmed a newsletter reference to a week-long Eastside Arts Festival in Strathcona Park, and that’s motivation enough. Whatever the festival does or doesn’t deliver, this old residential neighbourhood is always worth another visit.
I set myself the mild challenge of getting there without walking north on Main Street. Main is a diverting parade of small shops farther south, but from here north it becomes a noisy downtown artery. My plan calls for a clever N/E zigzag — but that’s the beauty of feet! They sure can zigzag.
So down Scotia I go, with the now-sewered creek beneath my feet that once fed the now-infilled last stretch of False Creek. Left turn onto East 1st Avenue, with its contribution to new-build grit, part of the neighbourhood transformation…
and a right-turn onto Industrial Avenue.
Confession: this requires a quick ricochet off Main Street, where 1st and Industrial almost meet, but surely I can be forgiven that hairpin turn?
More grit, as I head north among the terminals and warehouses of False Creek Flats. There’s new-build activity here at well, with high-tech moving in, but that’s mostly farther east. This part, close to Main Street, is still yer actual old-fashioned rust & rolling wheels kind of grit.
But I like it, just as it is, and today it delivers me nicely from any more connection with Main Street. All I have to do is backtrack east to Station Street, then north to Terminal and across Terminal to the building that explains why Station and Terminal streets bear these names:
Pacific Central train station.
It’s more than 100 years old and still in use, with today’s power-washing just part of the regular TLC. This highly functional Old Build will soon be joined by that New Build lurking in the background — the new St. Paul’s Hospital complex, now under construction and due to open in 2027.
My avoid-Main-Street route takes me east on National Avenue, currently reduced to a narrow footpath bordering the hospital construction site. I gawk as I walk.
The area swarms with workers…
a reminder that, for all the machinery and high-tech of our age, every work site still depends on human effort and skill.
I have escaped Main Street!
I am now safely east, just in behind the construction site, where I can cut north through Trillium Park and enjoy my first fix of major greenery. There indeed is St. Paul’s, rising in the background, but here in the foreground…
we have green fields. Green fields both sides of this pathway, with kiddies on each side, busy learning the fundamentals of soccer.
This is all fine, but I keep walking because just to the north lies Prior Street, and that will take me into Strathcona neighbourhood. And then Strathcona Park! And then the arts festival!
A vintage wooden Strathcona house sits right smack on the corner at Prior and Jackson. It is much the worse for wear.
That’s also part of the story of this area — home to Coast Salish First Nations for millennia, and then, with the 1865 opening of the Hasting Lumber Mill, increasingly home to waves of working-class immigrants. The whole area prospered, declined, and is now in that tenuous urban mix of restoration, renewal, rebirth and inevitably destruction as well.
I walk east on Prior. Strathcona Park will be just ahead of me, but before I can quite fix on its location, I am diverted by the sight of an elderly couple with an exuberant grandchild emerging from a path in the woods to my right. I exchange grave nods with the couple, finger-wiggles with the child, and step onto the path they have just left.
Well. Look at this.
It’s just one tiny corner of a community garden, bursting with mid-summer proof of its gardeners’ devotion. I weave between beds, find the Garden’s tool shed and step close to read its signage. I’m admiring the trilingualism of it all…
when the door opens and I get to meet one of those gardeners. She has been a Strathcona Community Garden volunteer for ages, she says, and she’s not going to let a little thing like knee replacement surgery (points to the scar) keep her away.
Do I know about the Cottonwood Community Garden? she asks. No, I do not. Most people don’t, she says, because it’s so tucked away, but it’s amazing and you should go look at it. Where is it? I ask.
She leads me back to the edge of the Strathcona Garden and points the way: turn right here, then left there, along that line of trees, then keep looking to the right.
So I do.
As I walk, I realize I am now in one corner of Strathcona Park. Damned if I can see any sign of an arts festival. And damned if I care, because finding Cottonwood seems so much more interesting.
Right; then left; then keep looking right, into the trees. Oh yes. Signs of gardening in there.
And a sign very politely telling me to keep out. It explains this particular section is home to sacred medicinal plants, and asks anybody not involved in their care and rituals please to remain outside the fence.
An adjacent sign welcomes me in.
Even though invited to come on in, I feel shy about intruding. I stick to the external foot paths, and peer over fences as I go.
This string of garden plots lies in quite a narrow ribbon of land between Strathcona Park to the north and Malkin Avenue to the south. Looking south, I can see the tops of buildings, one of them marked Discovery Organics and, right here in front of me, the top of a mural marked Produce Row.
Framed by a gaudy arbutus tree on the right and a discreet birch tree on the left, my pathway disappears back into the woods…
and then, soon after, leads me out onto more open ground. Here the garden beds lie right next to the Strathcona Park playing fields.
I meet another gardener — this one a relative newbie, someone who comes from West Vancouver for the pleasure of digging in her very own patch of soil. She offers me a bag of lettuce. I explain I have so much fresh produce right now it would probably spoil. “Me too,” she sighs.
I wave good-bye and then stop at a park map, to get my bearings. Since I am dog-free as well as lettuce-free, the map’s primary purpose is irrelevant, but its coordinates interest me a lot.
Later online research tells me even more, makes these two gardens even more impressive — and suggests thy are under threat.
According to the Strathcona Community Gardens Society, which manages them, both Strathcona and Cottonwood gardens began through local activism: Strathcona on an unofficial dump site in 1985, winning a 25-year lease from the Park Department in 2005; and Cottonwood on an industrial waste site in 1991, still apparently without any legal status. Depending on what happens next to Malkin Avenue — perhaps expansion, to compensate for planned viaduct demolition — both Produce Row (the string of fresh food wholesalers on Malkin) and the adjacent garden might be bulldozed. (I can’t find dated, documented, recent data on this, hence my careful language.)
I don’t yet know all this, as I again walk north.
I am still kinda-sorta wondering about the arts festival, but I am easily distracted — and more distraction is soon on offer.
Who could resist Strathcona Linear Park? It leads me alongside Hawks Avenue, and splashes mid-summer foliage all over me, including this magnificent Mimosa grandiflora (thank you Pooker, for the ID).
Right under that pink splendour, some turquoise chalk on the sidewalk. “Free…” it begins, and I wonder which political cause is about to claim my attention.
Ahhh! I look around hopefully.
No cupcakes in sight. And still no arts festival, either. By now I totally don’t care.
I stick with the Linear Park, admire the False Creek mosaic as we cross the bike path at Union Street…
and walk one more block that now borders MacLean Park. It takes me right to where I next want to be: on the N/W corner of Keefer and Hawks, tucked up with some lunch…
in the Wilder Snail café, with its giant snail as a ceiling ornament.
It is finally time to head west, to start looping toward home.
Past the MacLean Park notice board at Keefer & Heatley, promoting everything from World Hepatitis Day (“free testing”) to evenings at the Dream Punk Piano Lounge, and then a quick detour across the street.
To view an entire residential community, right there on a single massive tree stump.
(Well, what would you call it?)
On west along Keefer to Princess, where I pause for another of the City’s sidewalk mosaics.
Nobody could accuse this mural of being happy-face PR! Look at that power shovel, knocking the end home to smithereens.
Happily, as I carry on west, I pass still-standing vintage homes. Including this one near Princess Avenue…
protected by its hedge of giant guardian Gunnera.
Once i cross Gore Street, I have changed worlds. I have passed from Strathcona into Chinatown.
I walk with that world for a while, then hop onto a Main Street bus, and go home.
Where, finally, I read the Eastside Arts Festival promotion more carefully.
And discover that (a) it consists of pop-up events at scattered times in scattered locations and, (b), this particular day, the only event is an evening urban-drawing workshop being hosted in a local brewery.
Good thing I didn’t go there solely for the art.
.
Posted by icelandpenny on 26 July 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/26/grit-greenery/
Shadow Play
20 July 2024 – Not the elegant, intricate shadow play of the wayang kulit puppets that entranced me many decades ago on Lombok (Indonesia). No, instead, the very humble shadow play that entranced me yesterday, in the sun-baked heat of a deserted school yard.
Right here.
Looking east as I walk north on Main Street: strong schoolyard structures that, in the absence of any children, have only their own shadows to play with.
I veer in, I join the game.
To my left, the sprawling complex of General Brock Elementary School. It is named for Sir Isaac Brock, one of the British generals who, with British troops, Upper Canadian Militia and — crucially — Mohawk Nation chiefs & warriors, defeated American attempts to conquer British North America during the War of 1812. (Should you want to plunge down that historical rabbit-hole, you might start with this Canadian Encyclopedia entry.)
My thoughts are neither with Asian puppetry nor with General Brock. They are, as I step farther into the school grounds, entirely with the shadows.
The basketball hoop standard looms large over what seems a very timid shadow…
but I view it from another angle and up close. Then the shadow asserts its own sassy presence.
The lattice work on the prosaic fence to the right throws lacy relief onto the pavement…
and the wild morning glory blossoms, rampaging on that fence, sulk because they have no shadows to play with.
Pretty indeed, but I don’t linger.
My eyes & mind are already back on the playground, where a disc-swing and its supports dance with the wood chips below.
A ring-seat goes all circular…
and blocky cubes go all angular…
and by then I’m at a left-turn option. Pavement leads me around the back of the building…
toward the raised garden beds and more playground beyond.
The raised beds, signage tells me, comprise the General Brock School Food Garden — this school’s participation in the SPEC School Garden Program, which in turn is part of the larger SPEC mandate to promote urban sustainability.
Between those garden beds, now tidily put away for summer, run a couple of hopscotch grids. Smack-dab in the noon-day sun, they have no children to play with, and no available shadow, either.
Except mine!
So I oblige.
Posted by icelandpenny on 20 July 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/20/shadow-play/
Crow Time
13 July 2024 – Oh, there’s Standard Time & Daylight Saving Time, and there’s Pacific Time & Mountain Time & Central Time & Eastern Time & Atlantic Time (& Newfoundland Time). Plus the zones and adjustments that grid the rest of the world. All of them coded to numbers.
Clock Time.
Then there’s Crow Time.
No numbers, just quality of light. The shifting intensity of light that signals, each dawn, the right moment to leave the roost and, each dusk, the right moment to return. That timing also measures the changing length of day.
Vancouver crows (corvus caurinus) are ours by day only. Each night they roost in neighbouring Burnaby, and my building is beside a major flight path between the two locations. While (I must confess) I’ve never witnessed the morning influx, I have often watched the evening exodus spell-bound.
Sometimes a flurry passes close to my balcony…
but, more typically, air currents stream the birds a bit farther north, speckles against a more distant sky.
In between waves, it is an empty sky.
But only until the inevitable straggler comes into view.
Flapping his wings like crazy as he tries to catch up.
In Crow Time, Vancouver dusk these days occurs about 9:30 p.m. Mid-winter, it’s more like 4:30. Allow for the seasonal time-shift — that’s still a four-hour difference.
Sigh! I can hear you muttering, “Fine, but… total length of day? Because that’s only the dusk half of the equation.” True, and since I’ve never personally witnessed Vancouver dawn, Crow Time, I have to trust boring old Clock Time calculations found on the internet.
At summer solstice, some 16 hrs:15 min. of daylight; at winter solstice, just 8 hrs:11 min.
Come mid-winter, those crows get to do some serious sleeping in!
Posted by icelandpenny on 13 July 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/13/crow-time/
Shade
6 July 2024 – I step into shade on a hot summer’s day.
First I feel the relief. Then I see the beauty.
Posted by icelandpenny on 6 July 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/06/shade/
Hinged & Heated
4 July 2024 – I am again approaching False Creek. Again. Yet again. For the umpty-third time.
Even so, I expect not to be bored. I am reassured by the wisdom of Heraclitus and, some 700 or so years later, Proust, who observed (respectively, in translation): “No man ever steps in the same river twice” and “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new lands but in having new eyes.”
My eyes, and my feet and everything in between, we all step off West 1st Avenue near Columbia Street to head north into Hinge Park. It is a wetland park adjacent to False Creek, named for the sharp kink, the “hinge,” in the traffic grid right about here.
The park features a run of train track and buffer stops close to its West-1st edge, which is both a tribute to the area’s railway heritage and a handsome installation in its own right.
(If you like rust and industrial artefacts.)
Still morning, but already very warm. It is summer! I am hinged & heated indeed. The bullrushes and other greenery have erupted all along the tiny rivulet that runs through Hinge Park, almost completely obscuring the thread of water below.
It’s only when I reach the little mid-point bridge that I can look back and see the channel.
I also see the distant figures (left side of the walkway) whose animated conversation briefly filled my ears as I walked by.
A lanky pedestrian, a keen birder, is chatting with two Park staffers, who pause in their clean-up duties long enough to talk wildlife with him. “Yes,” says the vivacious young female staffer, “yesterday I see the heron, also this morning, and yesterday I see the dogs but not today.” “The dogs?” repeats the birder, puzzled. “In the water?” The woman laughs, waves her hands. “No, no! I must be so careful to pronounce! I mean ducks.” She repeats it, heavy on the final consonants. “DucKKSS.” Turns out she is from Mexico, and still getting her mouth around the physical shape of English words.
A quick look forward, from this handy little bridge, tracing the channel on north into False Creek…
and soon after here I am, on the SeaWall at False Creek.
Hinge Park is behind me, Habitat Island is before me and a horde of excited kiddies are in the causeway between the two, being sorted into teams for whatever adventure is next on the schedule.
I right-turn myself eastward, surprised by the lowest tide I’ve ever seen between the park and this island.
Traffic in the Creek to entertain me, as I walk along: a trim False Creek Ferry heading west with canoeists and a paddle-boarder in the background for company…
and then a bright red Japadog food truck to lure me onward to Olympic Village Square.
I resist, but I am tempted. I thoroughly enjoy this Vancouver A to the Q: “What happens when Japanese sensibilities meet North American fast food?”
A chattering group of friends relax in the sunshine in the Square — and, look, they are obeying the sign. They are not climbing on the artwork! (The Birds, 2010, Myfanwy MacLeod.)
A necessary sign, I have to add: attempting to scale the birds had become A Thing To Do, and as a result both installations needed extensive restoration.
One last False Creek image, a bright Aquabus ferry loading passengers at the Olympic Village dock…
and I finally turn away from the water, to zigzag back home.
(P.S. Heraclitus and Proust got it right.)
Posted by icelandpenny on 4 July 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/04/hinged-heated/
Immersed
16 June 2024 – Immersed. Immersed in “immersive exhibitions.” Cascades of sound, visuals and high-tech wizardry. The global phenomenon of Imagine Van Gogh, for example.
Tchaa! Nature got there long before high tech.
For proof, just stand near the corner of East 8th and Brunswick, one sunny mid-June afternoon, and look up.
“All greens,” I whisper to myself, as Miles Davis’ 1959 jazz great, All Blues, begins to run in my mind. I fall into those enveloping greens for a while, with cascades of sound in my head — a mixture of jazz riffs and leaf-rustle — and cascades of motion before my eyes, thanks to the breeze.
But there’s nuthin’ wrong with a little high-tech, come to that.
The next day I hop a SkyTrain out to Port Moody (POMO to its friends) for the 2024 Art Shuffle. Where, at the corner of Moody and Spring streets, I jump into “an immersive electronic art walkthrough,” courtesy of Dusk2Dawn Productions studio.
Immersive and interactive as well: sweep your arms before all those pink flower petals, and they swirl to your choreography. The gestures needn’t be large. Even a simple finger-flick evokes a rivulet of motion on-screen. Charmed, I stand there and dance with the petals.
I can do this in the absence of crowds or commotion, because I am early. Pre-Shuffle, as t’were. They are still setting up, and I have the venue to myself.
It is the perfect omen. As I write this post, I am still in set-up for a Shuffle of my own.
Is that a tease?
Yes it is.
Posted by icelandpenny on 16 June 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/06/16/immersed/
Sunshine!
6 June 2024 – After a very long stretch of drizzle days, we have sunshine. Given the state of both wildfire season and our water table, I react to the sunshine with mixed emotions. To draw on one of Susan Sperling’s “lost words” that deserve to live again, I am feeling “merry-go-sorry.”
(And isn’t that more fun than mere “mixed emotions”? Go find Poplollies and Bellibones if you can, Sperling’s glorious 1979 celebration of lost words. It will also, for e.g., teach you the perfect epithet for a lascivious priest. He is a “smellsmock.”
(But I digress. Back to the sunshine.)
Yes, sunshine! So I walk myself down to the Olympic Village dock, to wait for the next False Creek ferry. My vague plan is to ride it west to Granville Island, and then walk my way back east to home.
Warmth + sunshine = other people also waiting for a ferry, several with toddlers and strollers.
One child, surely age four at most, turns into Boy Busker: he reinvents the popular children’s song as “The ferry on the creek goes round and round…” and then spins off into his own sing-song about up-and-down tides and repair boats and how you have to be quick-quick when the ferry arrives.
We applaud. He tells us sternly that he hasn’t finished. Abashed, we still our hands and wait for more. But then the ferry does arrive…
and everybody (including Boy Busker, turquoise helmet) climbs on board.
Not so very quick-quick. There are strollers to off-load first, and then three strollers to on-load, plus an unwieldy skateboard, and many questions for the patient ferry operator to answer. But it all happens, and away we go.
A lone canoeist skims by, just off Coopers’ Park…
and I admire yet again the multiple and largely smooth and peaceful uses of this public waterway.
We approach the Granville Island dock, welcomed as always by the Giants mural, spray-painted across the six silos of Ocean Concrete for the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale. They begin to show their age, but I am cheered by the little banner announcing their upcoming “renewal.”
We climb up the long zig-zag ramp used at low tide, and pass by another inevitable welcome to the island: crows!
I’m almost tempted to tour market shops, but don’t. I’m here to start a walk.
So instead I turn south-east-ish into Sutcliffe Park, which wraps this side of the island, and head for the Seawall. My route takes me past an imposing piece of industrial-heritage equipment that I cannot explain, because there is no explanatory sign to be found.
But it is indeed imposing, is it not? Complete with raised scrollings that were either intrinsic to the original industrial purpose or are recent artistic additions, and I can’t explain them either.
But then… Something that explains itself. Lots of signage.
I’m at the Granville Island pavilion, here on Alder Bay, of the Trans-Canada Trail. It is just one dot on a Trail that runs 28,000 km coast to coast to coast throughout the country, and is, if this website claim is still true, “the longest network of multi-use recreational trails in the world.”
Off I go, happy with sunshine and a trail beneath my feet. As I pass the point where Alder Bay merges with False Creek, I am also happy with an official “view corridor.”
Back in 1989, City Council voted to protect specific public views and view corridors, to ensure that despite city growth, at designated spots we would still have a clear view through to the North Shore mountains.
See them? Back there through the towers toward the right?
There are lots of closer and unofficial views as well. This clump of Common Foxglove, for example, that has established itself in handy crevices in the Creek’s riprapping.
Every part of this plant is toxic, I later read. I knew anyway: it was the favourite poisoning device of all those Golden Era murder mysteries I used to read. (It is beautiful, though!)
Signage at Spruce Harbour Marina includes old photos of the Creek in its dirty, polluting, industrial heyday, when great booms of logs (here, 1912)…
covered the waters, waiting to be milled.
Look around now, and the waters are covered with boats.
But a more interesting collection of boats than I originally thought, for this marina is home to the Greater Vancouver Floating Home Co-operative. Most of these boats are permanent homes, though the marina also welcomes visitors.
Farther east, down by Charleson Park, I stare at the pond…
and contrast all this water with the dried-up mud flats I remember horrifying me, one year when we were in the middle of a category 5 drought. Look at it, the result of all our recent rain.
The signage patiently reminds us this is a seasonal wetland, and it is supposed to dry up periodically, that’s how it works. Got it?
Yah-but, I mutter to myself, meanwhile I’m happy to see all that water.
Finally I’m back to where I set off, Olympic Village. Or, to Millennium Water Olympic Village, in the official words of the plaque by this commemorative installation.
This immediate cluster of buildings, which initially served as the athletes’ village for the 2010 Winter Olympics & Paralympics, was North America’s first LEED Platinum community, and a catalyst for the reinvention/rejuvenation of the larger area.
The reinvention continues, and features considerable development of new residential complexes.
Like all these.
But notice also all that green space.
In the rear, a Pollinator Meadow, with species introduced for that purpose, and here in the forefront, a bioswale. ??? Fortunately, a bright blue sign tells me it is not just a ditch, it is a deliberate creation that collects one-third of all the rainwater falling on public spaces in Olympic Village, thus diverting it from the sewer system and mitigating any pollutants before the water empties into False Creek. (And if that makes you want to know more about the City’s rainwater strategy, click here.)
I’m about to weave between towers and head for city streets, but stop at one more bit of stubborn wild greenery. The City may be busy with planned & managed pollinator meadows and bioswales and all — and hurray for that — but nature keeps plonking herself where she wants to go.
Even smack in front of the next planned burst of exclusive waterfront residences.
(I know. Sigh.)
Posted by icelandpenny on 6 June 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/06/06/sunshine/
R & R
28 May 2024 – R&R, indeed.
Reflections…
one day…
and…
Raindrops…
the next.
Posted by icelandpenny on 28 May 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/05/28/r-r/
The 20 Colours of One Afternoon
23 May 2024 – Not my personal afternoon, you understand: a borrowed afternoon I don’t yet know I am about to experience.
At the moment I am lost in wonder that the traffic roar of King-George-meets-88-Avenue is so effectively muted by the tall trees of Bear Creek Park. The park is not large, the intersection is just steps away, and yet…
I hear bird song in the trees above, and the gurgle of water below as the creek tumbles its way through all those rocks.
This moment in nature is a fitting preface to my visit to the Surrey Art Galley, for a retrospective of the works of Japanese-Canadian printmaker Takao Tanabe. Born in 1926, Tanabe was interned during WWII, and therefore had to overcome many obstacles before he managed to attend art school in Winnipeg post-war. He went on to build an impressive career, and he is still active today, from his Vancouver Island base, and still in demand.
I move fairly quickly past the hard edges and colours of his 1960s abstractions (works of their time!) and settle with awe into his later, quieter, more contemplative exploration of the natural world that surrounds him.
He captures the prairies (here, Prairie Hill and Cloud, 1980)…
and, with equal resonance, the waters and islands of our west coast (here, Queen Charlotte Islands, the obsolete name for Haida Gwaii reflecting the 1988 date of this work).
I’ve been lost in the works, not thinking about how they make their way from sketch pad to final print. Then I turn into a second room, dominated by three long tables, two of them visible here. Together, they tell the hidden story of that print visible on the end wall: Nootka Afternoon, 1993.
Confession: I am not always very patient with tables of background material! However, I do at least read the key signage. Which, obediently, I do for this grouping as well.
And I am fascinated. Fascinated by the long partnership of these two artists, and all the dimensions of respect embodied in that partnership. Respect for each other, for nature, for art, and for the materials and processes and patient time with which they translate nature into art.
So I do not walk past these three tables. I linger. I move, in my own act of respect, from table to table, block to block.
I also amuse myself with some silly time/space math: daily x 3 months = (1+1+1+1+1+1) = 6 wooden blocks + 20 colours = 1 Nootka afternoon.
Count it out.
One…
and one…
and one…
and one…
and one…
and one.
That’s six.
Together, with the depth of three months and 20 colours, they capture one Nootka Afternoon.
Please note this is not my photo. The combined limitations of my photography and gallery lighting threw annoying reflections into my every attempt. I downloaded this image from the Kelowna Art Gallery website — entirely appropriate, since the Kelowna gallery organized the current exhibition, which further benefited from Ian M. Thom as guest curator.
Posted by icelandpenny on 23 May 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/05/23/the-20-colours-of-one-afternoon/
Walk, Talk, Rock… B.C.-style
Since 14 August 2014
WALKING WOMAN 