23 October 2025 – I had a much longer title in mind. To wit: “Above/Below/In Front/Behind/Then/Now/Here/There… and All the In-betweens.” Aren’t you glad I restrained myself?

That verbal onslaught is prompted by yet another walk along the north shore of False Creek, from foot of Davie east to Main. More specifically, prompted by this:

I only now, after all these years, bother to learn that this artsy structure has a name. It is one of the two shelters + glass panels that comprise Lookout (Dikeakos + Best, 1999), which traces the natural & industrial history of the area and is an early contribution to the public art we enjoy on both sides of the water.

You can spread the image, read the keywords panel by panel — or just read this paragraph! L to R: “box cars, flat cars, tank cars” / “dining cars, sleeping cars” / “… the yard master makes a train…” / [then a panel written to be read from the other side] / “all built and all rebuilt” / “gone and a thousand things leave, not a trace” / “lumber co yards, islets of gravel.”

I climb up to the street, take a closer look at the inscribed and silhouette steel uprights, also part of the story.

Natural + industrial history indeed, from “mudflats” upper left to “red caboose” lower right.

Then I check the panel meant to be read from this, the street, side:

This one you can read for yourselves. And, given all these prompts, you can also take a stab at imagining “as if it were” all still present as it used to be.

What you will have trouble reading, even if you spread the image, is the black-lettered graffito neatly inked in just below “across the waters.” It says: “build a washroom.”

I think this is perfect. An interjection of a “now” reality in a tribute to “then.”

It is also a further prompt to do what I do every time I pass this installation, with its invitation to remember the past, superimpose it on the present, build it into my understanding of how much more is still Here-And-Now than is Right-Now visible. Every time, my mind flips back, vaguely but insistently, to Italo Calvino’s 1972 book, Invisible Cities. As one astute reviewer observed, the novel is “a travelogue to places that do not exist.” It also invites us to think more richly about how we define “exist.” (Side nod to the wise fox, who taught The Little Prince, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”)

I am primed, in other words, to read above, below and ‘way inside the everyday sights that greet me as I walk.

Jerry Pethick’s Time Top sculpture, for example, that invites us to imagine a time top spinning across the galaxy…

to crash-land on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, right here…

or the blue bands of A False Creek (Rhonda Weppler, Trevor Mahovsky), that invite us to imagine what all this will look like if climate change indeed causes ocean levels to rise 4-6 metres…

and, right next to it, another interjection of a “now” reality, again in the form of a polite and neatly lettered graffito. This one, beneath the No Dogs Allowed notice there on the right, yanks our attention back to the present. “Clean The Water,” it snaps.

I stop my fancy metaphysics for a moment, offer myself a simple contrast between sky-high…

and shoreline…

then, sideways, a panorama of nature, reminding us that it invented fall colours long before built structures began to emulate them…

followed by, at my feet, the tight focus of a single fallen leaf…

reminding us that diversity, whether in or out of political favour, is the building-block reality of life.

However pure green this leaf long appeared to be, all these other colours were woven into it right from the start and are equally part of it. As are (side nod to Thich Nhat Hanh and the concept of interbeing) sunlight, water and soil, plus all the nutrients of those three elements as well, all of which made the existence of this leaf possible.

Quite literally, the universe in a single leaf.

Enough. I think I’m done. But, no.

There is one more juxtaposition. One more interweaving. One more dance to vibrate my own little world, as I walk on by.

Upper right: nature’s wasp nest. Lower left: street-guy’s sneakers. Both at home in the tree. A tree shedding its leaves, itself at home with the cycles of the universe.

I laugh, shed my pomposity, and take myself home.