All posts in category Nature

Crab Walk

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.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 30 August 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 30 August 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/08/30/crab-walk/

Bus to Bay

28 August 2026 – As in, by bus to Stanley Park and then the Lost Lagoon trail out to English Bay.

My bus is remarkably empty for the first couple of stops, and then whammo! it’s pulsing with the excitement of small children, shepherded aboard by their day-camp staff.

Off to Stanley Park!

Too many kiddies for complete back-of-bus seating, so the adults settle some up front. I watch, impressed and amused, as the they count and recount the children, remembering the YMCA day-camp assistant who once told me, “The idea is to bring back as many children as you take out. Preferably the same children.”

The arrangement works just fine until a couple of seniors and a mum with stroller come onboard. The front-section kiddies are told to move to the back. One little boy asks, “Why do we have to move?” Not angry, just puzzled. He is told, “We’ll talk about it when we get off. But, for now? Scoot.” He scoots.

This is what they’ll discuss.

I tap the young staffer close to me, tell her I’m impressed with their care for the children and also this impromptu lesson in good civic behaviour. Her face lights up: “They’re such a pleasure, these kids!” Lucky kids, I think, to have bright, conscientious and affectionate adults like this trio, to guide their outing.

I bail before they do, at the last pre-park stop, and then walk my walk into Stanley Park and onto the Lost Lagoon Trail. My first long view of the lagoon tells me that, despite this still being T-shirt weather, it is also the beginning of fall.

Green trees are turning lemony-green, as their chlorophyll begins to slide away.

Almost-fall images, everywhere I look.

Red among the sumach leaves…

bullrushes tall in the boggy foreshore…

and, at a trail head into the forest opposite…

a reminder of its vulnerability.

People are enjoying themselves: sitting, or wayfinding…

running hard, or slowly pushing a zimmer-frame, or power-walking.

Meanwhile, out in the water, a trio of ducks goes bottoms-ups.

They must have read their Ogden Nash.

Once past the far end of the lagoon, I look for the very rustic, very charming little footbridge that, in spring, is completely inaccessible. Marooned by seasonal high water, you’d need hip-waders to reach it.

Now? It’s just another footpath.

Moments later, I am exactly where the red dot tells me I am:

in the midst of the Second Beach offerings — playground, food stalls, bike racks, the heated outdoor swimming pool and, beyond that, the beach itself and English Bay.

I remember the kiddies on my bus, headed (so the staffer told me) for Second Beach, and then — having watched a young staffer adjudicate a small tiff among children under that tree — I do a double-take.

I recognize the logo on his STAFF shirt. These are indeed “my” kiddies.

It adds to my amusement, as I admire first the fresh-water heated pool…

and then the salt-water Real Thing just beyond.

I join the English Bay Seawall, and turn my feet toward English Bay Beach.

Marine life en route:

freighters mid-stream, Great Blue heron up close.

I expect freighters and a GBH or two, I do not expect a labyrinth.

But here it is. A pop-up installation, due surely to be washed away or kicked away or otherwise altered, and that’s fine too. Something else will emerge.

I emerge at English Bay Beach, where I walk up to Beach Avenue and look for the hot-dog vendor whose pitch this is. He’s here. Same Alberta beef but a new sign, one that makes a point of welcoming Euros.

I’m not sure how much to read into this, and decide… not to read anything into it.

A nod to the vendor, a nod to all that laughter in Morton Park, and I walk on down Denman, to find my bus for the ride back home.

9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 28 August 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 28 August 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/08/28/bus-to-bay/

Context

24 August 2026 – My only context thought, as we set out, is geographic. This sunny day, we are off for a walk in Strathcona, a very mixed but always intriguing neighbourhood in Vancouver’s east end.

We, sort of, have an objective. We want to see one of the installations in the current Vancouver Biennale edition (2025-2027), a sculpture at the corner of East Georgia Avenue & Campbell Street. Titled 241.5 Arc X 2, it is a companion piece to 217.5 Arc X 13 out on Sunset Beach, both of them works in a series by French artist Bernar Venet that explores the “beauty, balance and malleability of raw steel.”

The beach installation is a legacy of the 2009-2011 Biennale; the city installation is very new. The former is a great favourite of mine (you’ve seen it in this blog several times already); the latter, therefore, interests me a great deal. My companion is just as interested, so we are well pleased to have an appealing neighbourhood walk ahead of us, with this sculpture as the grand finale.

And it is appealing, this historic pocket of the city — shabby and exuberant, gentrified and raffish, very human, very alive. Evidence of all this life, this very mixed life, wherever you look.

A benevolent society on Union Street near Jackson Avenue, painted & polished & scrupulously tidy, with thriving potted plants as décor (plus a barred gate, for prudence).

Just few doors farther east, bikes out front not bamboo, with a few dying plants and a line of beer cans as décor. But, please note, also bright with recent paint and equally tidy.

Still on Union, farther east again, shrubs and trees and sidewalk flowerbeds and wooden-frame homes, this particular one boasting not prayer flags but political flags, flags of all nations. (Or maybe FIFA-nation flags, left over from the games, and it’s fine either way).

An urban glade, as we turn north on Hawks Avenue, close by Strathcona Linear Park — mulch underfoot and a peaceful stand of trees. (Last time I was here, some years back, it was all dug up for sewer-pipe renewal or some-such… now look at it.)

We pause in the Wilder Snail, at Hawks & Keefer, opposite MacLean Park…

which began as a neighbourhood grocery store back in the 1920s and, despite a succession of events and owners ever since, today is still a neighbourhood grocery store and now also a café.

So, you see, Strathcona is delightful, and stimulating, and entirely rewarding, even without an Arc.

But here it is, the Biennale installation, here it is on East Georgia just west of Campbell — and so quietly in place that we almost miss it.

Track your eye from that black crow above the storefront glass, downward to the ground. There.

241.5 Arc X 2, meaning 2 arcs of steel bent to 241.5 degrees. We walk all around it, take some photos, make appreciative remarks to each other, but fact is, I am underwhelmed. I have its Sunset Beach sibling in mind, and I expected… something else. I expected some kind of more, the power I associate with the other one.

But this is still a good walk, there is really no such thing as a bad walk, not if you’re willing to pay attention, so it’s all fine. We walk our way on out of Strathcona, and we are in perfect good humour.

Still, that other Arc is on my mind. Once home, I look up some of my photos of Beach Arc and do myself a little compare-and-contrast.

It surprises me. It gets me thinking about context, about art-in-context. I find myself looking at both installations in a different way.

Here’s 217.5 X 13 (aka Beach Arc) in its context:

It is set in wild grasses and sand, against water and a long line of mountains. Urban Arc (scroll up), is set in pavement and potted plants, against storefront glass and a line of aged townhouses.

City Arc, so slight!

Beach Arc, so robust!

City Arc, rich in urban context..

matt black against the matt black framing for those storefront windows; a companion to that storefront and the time-battered housing next door; with reflections in the windowpane of street and signage and city traffic.

Beach Arc, rich in its very different context…

rusty metal echoing rusty metal on freighters out in English Bay; companion to beach scrub and storm-tossed logs; reflections from sun off water, and the water offering all the dynamics and traffic of that maritime world.

I look back and forth, city to beach, beach to city. I let the Arcs tumble into new places in my mind. Both are by the same artist, both express the same theme with equal skill and grace. Each, in the other location, would be out of scale and out of place. Each, in its own location, is exactly right.

Context.


9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 24 August 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 24 August 2026

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New Eyes: off Main

21 August 2026 – I step off buzzing Main Street, still intent on my Proustian challenge: to bring “new eyes” to familiar landscapes, and in so doing reward myself with a “voyage of discovery.”

I am just one alley east of Main, here at the corner of E. 22nd, but it’s a whole new world. Even as my eyes take in that Vancouver Special on the alley-corner opposite…

my ears register the big difference. Silence! My ears hum with silence.

I am now un-buzzed, and I prowl on up the alley with renewed interest.

Small details, in this stretch of alley, on this particular day.

The awning-covered table & chairs behind a commercial building…

offering employees (so I hopefully imagine) somewhere to take a break…

life in the alley, with two women on the balcony and the young man below all suddenly distracted by a crow’s raucous call…

and the crow himself.

I don’t see the crow…

but I do see his shadow, thrown on a building wall across the alley.

I turn east on E. 21st Avenue, and marvel at how old-fashioned, how peacefully residential, it still is — with vine-shrouded walkways that lead to wooden-frame homes behind tall hedges…

and climbing ropes coiled on the sidewalk…

an invitation to explore the tree from higher up.

I turn again, north this time on Sophia Street…

and think for a moment about Sophia, goddess of wisdom. How badly our world needs wisdom!

The street delivers, if not wisdom, at least plenty of peaceful charm. There is even a whole block with a dirt path rather than a paved sidewalk, guarded at one corner by Mountain Ash…

and at the other by an explosion of sunflowers.

A bit farther north, a happy (albeit wooden) child high in a tree, no climbing rope needed…

and then I’m face to face with Tea Swamp Park.

The name evokes the Labrador tea plants that used to thrive in this boggy stretch of land. Now, drained and firmed, the bog is a small park, a place for people to thrive. Two teens sit on a bench, comparing notes about their mothers (yes, I eavesdrop), while a young woman strides by, carefully balancing that flat of eggs as she walks.

Far distance, a basic but well-used children’s playground; medium distance, the community garden with its allotments; foreground, a stretch of grass, where a mini-drama is being repeatedly played out.

The dog, again and again, fetches the orange ball, drops it in front of the woman, and then bounces & quivers to get her attention. The woman, again and again, briefly interrupts her scrolling to stretch out one hand, pick up the hurling stick, and send the ball flying. Happy woman, happy dog.

Beyond the park, some prayer flags in a doorway…

and beyond that, a time-out nook for pedestrians, complete with chairs, plants and a curious little table.

I walk under yet another towering Horse Chestnut tree.

Look!

All those spring “candles” are now turning into fall conkers.

Finally, finally, I am about to say farewell to Sophia Street.

And to Tattoo Legs as well. She and I have been playing tag for blocks — she walks faster than I do, but I catch up at every red light.

My own legs tell me it’s time to go home. So I do.

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 21 August 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 21 August 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/08/21/new-eyes-off-main/

Benign Neglect

13 August 2026 – An escaped balloon gets me thinking about “benign neglect.”

This is not what caused US political advisor Daniel Moynihan to coin the phrase, back in 1970. In a memo to then-President Richard Nixon, he suggested that the issue of race relations “could benefit from a period of benign neglect.” Not surprisingly, it was controversial, and is still argued today — both his own good/bad faith intentions, and the consequences over time.

My mind is not there. My mind is on this blue balloon.

I am at the corner of Pine and West 6th, early for an appointment and therefore with time to kill. What better than a bit of a bimble into the Arbutus Greenway? That’s the plan, but then, as I’m about to cross Pine and enter the Greenway, I look north on Pine and get distracted by a blue balloon.

OK, first I am distracted by the double hit of blue: car plus balloon. Then I focus on the balloon. And then I focus on what is all around it — the happy eco-consequences, for this street corner, of human neglect.

I start to explore. I’m smiling at everything, even though I can’t identify any of it.

Not entirely true. I can identify a bee when I see one, and I am seeing a great many.

Like this guy, dragging down one of these bright orange flowers.

A late-summer abundance of shaggy growth. There is cool green-&-silver elegance to be had…

and also the hot flamboyance of magenta.

I turn my back on Ms Flamboyance, and notice that there is a degree of human intervention after all: a picnic table and benches.

Severely functional — weathered planks atop metal grids filled with rubble — but also elegant. Designed. And, look, there’s a pathway, edged with the same design signature.

I follow the path out to the corner of Pine and West 5th where I see both a line of grubby concrete blocks and a weathered black plaque.

I read the plaque.

And it all makes sense. It’s a pollinator project in a pop-up park. By the look of it, the project was established some years ago, and since then has benefitted from human inaction. The benign consequences, for nature, of human neglect. Indeed, the plaque urges non-action upon us: “Do not disturb. Please don’t bug the pollinators…”

Later, at home, I read more. This street-corner project is a good decade old by now, and slated to be incorporated into a new park, Burrard Slopes. (On this 2016 Park Board map, it is still place-marked as “Future Park.”)

I am still too early for my appointment. I walk west on West 5th, back into the busyness of the city…

and very agreeably fill the last 15 minutes of spare time with a latte at Elysian Coffee, over on Burrard Street.

See the dog bowl, under the Elysian sign? Yrs Truly took in a near-empty bowl, waited for the barista to refill it, and returned the full bowl to the sidewalk.

Benign neglect has its place. So does benign activism.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 13 August 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 13 August 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/08/13/benign-neglect/

Murder

3 August 2026 – A small murder.

Very small.

But crows they are…

and murder it is.

11 Comments
by icelandpenny on 3 August 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 3 August 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/08/03/murder/

Out the Door

26 July 2026 – It is no longer hot and not yet raining. I am out the door.

Out the door with only the vaguest of plans, but at least the intention to capitalize on this moment of walkable weather. False Creek north shore why not, but farther on down the creek than my casual Cambie Loop and a return by ferry. Also why not.

Lots of flexibility in the plan, which I promptly celebrate with an extra loop into/around City Centre Artist Lodge — long a city motel, slated for razing & redevelopment, meanwhile the entire complex is covered in murals and its 79 units are reborn as low-rent artist studios.

Rivers of colour, on the walls and on the ground.

When I get to real water, it is silver-grey.

I’m now at False Creek, the eastern end that proves it is a false creek not a real creek at all, just a whopping long inlet, and here’s the end of it. To my east Science World; at my back Creekside Park; immediately west of that, an exercise in PR:

The map excludes Creekside Park since this development corporation didn’t create it, but it does feature their own “Community Pop-Up Park” right next door. I grr-grr slightly about the use of “pop-up” to describe a park that will continue to be here for some years yet — even as I recognize it’s an exercise in managing expectations. Don’t get too comfy, folks! it tells us; we will eventually be building on this land.

But not yet. So, meanwhile, I eye the map and let it inspire me. I’ll at least walk past Cambie Bridge and Coopers’ Park, at least to David Lam Park. Maybe farther?

I don’t know it yet, but the answer is yes. Farther.

I’ll carry on past George Wainborn Park, under those two distant bridges (Granville and Burrard, respectively), past this map’s named territory, all the way to Sunset Beach before doubling back to a ferry dock at the Aquatic Centre.

Probably under the joint influence of map plus planned ferry-ride home, I begin noting where I am in terms of those two sets of landmarks.

Parq Casino, for example, with its splendid reflections…

is located just behind the Plaza of Nations ferry dock, east of Coopers’ Park.

A bit farther west, mid-park, I eye this dragon boat in some amazement. It’s just sitting there! I’m used to seeing them furiously in motion.

I want motion? I get it.

Coopers’ Park (on the footprint of Sweeney Cooperage and Saw Mill, which operated here until 1981) includes a playground, right under Cambie Bridge. The playground is closed these days, for upgrade work on the bridge — but that doesn’t mean nobody is playing.

Skateboard city on the detour path! With two young skateboarders taking turns, and one photographer filming their jumps.

Watching Seawall action, yet another crow, on yet another lamp post.

I happen to see him as I approach the Yaletown dock, midway between Coopers’ and David Lam parks, but he could be anywhere.

Each time I’m at the Yaletown dock, I read another of the incised historical vignettes. This one reminds us of the Great Fire of 1886, when a fire set to clear brush instead razed the entire community.

(Reader alert: I later look up further references, including the link above, and discover discrepancies in the data, even in the June date itself. )

More small discoveries as I go, including this mini-causeway as I round the curve that will give me my first view of the eastern end of David Lam Park. (It’s been here all along; I’ve just never noticed it.)

The David Lam shoreline contains two of my favourite False Creek sculptures — more precisely, the twin elements that comprise one art installation: Marking High Tide and Waiting for Low Tide, by retired landscaped architect turned sculptor Donald Vaughan.

I pause to read, as always, the words written around the High Tide concrete ring, set on tall pillars. “As the moon circles the earth the oceans respond with the rhythm of the tide.”

This time I also note, crossly, how grubby it now looks. I’m all for new installations, all for upgrades — but could we please also maintain what we already have? Even if you just give them a scrub, every now and then?

On west I go, on and on west, past George Wainborn Park and under the Granville Bridge…

with its slam-damn view of all the activity across the water on Granville Island, in the water itself, and among the marinas and complexes here on the north side.

Things are markedly tonier than they were farther east, and private property suddenly disrupts the public Seawall. Arrows direct us around these towers; signs politely tell us that if we instead insist on walking through the grounds, we are to keep moving.

I walk through. I stop moving long enough to contemplate the sidewalk promo for Ancora, which on one side advertises its sake/oyster offerings, and on the other…

invites diners to bring their dogs.

I decide not to spend time sulking about the fact that dogs are more welcome, in this enclave, than I am.

My non-sulk policy is promptly rewarded. Back on public-access Seawall territory, at the foot of Hornby Street, I see a cheerful, handwritten invitation to walk half a block up Hornby and visit the inBtwn Café. I am charmed. I walk the half-block.

It is indeed a tiny café, clearly a local hangout, with a DIY artistic vibe. Ancora offers sake and oysters; inBtwn offers watercolour paint-pots and brushes. People use them.

I settle for a latte, not artistic expression, but I do ask co-owner Christy Evans about the backstory. She had hospitality experience, and COVID pushed her to act on what she meant by “hospitality”: bake treats to go with the coffee, create a community hub for socializing, give people resources for creative expression while they are socializing and eating treats and drinking coffee. Eventually husband and co-owner Wade Edwards quit his construction business and joined her full-time — as an artist (whose works always include a tiny red Christy-figure) and, it turned out, as master scone-maker as well.

After that break I carry on, energized by more than the caffeine.

Past the Hornby dock, past Burrard Bridge, I’m right up to the Aquatic Centre dock at the eastern edge of Sunset Beach. I could just drop down for a ferry — but, no-no, I can’t do that. I have to walk on. Down there, halfway down Sunset Beach, I can see my absolute-favourite False Creek artwork.

That dark, U-shaped curve on the sand toward the right? That’s it.

I keep walking. I want to visit it close up, and then I’ll double back to the Aquatic Centre dock. (Since it’s the last dock on this north shore of False Creek, I have no choice. Not if I want to stick to my home-by-ferry idea. And I do.)

Pretty wild flowers along the way, also tangles of bushes to which I’m not paying much attention until a woman striding past me points at them and calls out, “Blackberries!” I look, and yes they are. Not yet black, but working on it.

Then, finally I’m up to the sculpture. I can never remember the title, but when I read it again, it makes literal, mathematical sense.

This is 217.5 Arc X 13 — 13 arcs of metal, each curved to 217.5°. It is the work of French artist Bernar Venet, one of his Arc series designed to celebrate “the beauty, balance and malleability of raw steel,” and a legacy installation from the 2009-2011 Vancouver Biennale. (Later, I learn the 2025-2027 Biennale has brought us 241.5 Arc X 2 by the same artist, which is already installed at 884 East Georgia Street in Strathcona. Yes, I will go visit it.)

It’s ferry-time. To get all the way back east to the Village dock, I have to transfer to another boat on Granville Island — which I do.

I chat with the couple next to me, who, it turns out, used to live right opposite where I now live. We agree it’s a terrific neighbourhood. We also agree that it’s an uphill climb from the dock. We grimace, they in memory and I in anticipation. (I do not confess that, just sometimes, I wimp out and take the bus.)

No wimping today. Uphill I walk heading south, and then more uphill as I swing to the east. I pause a moment crossing Quebec Street. Not to catch my breath! How could you suggest such a thing!

I am merely paying my respects to les belles dames. the guardian angels, of Quebec Manor.

11 Comments
by icelandpenny on 26 July 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 26 July 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/07/26/out-the-door/

Sea to Sky to Tanabe

21 July 2026 – Mist hangs in the air as our shuttle bus prepares to leave downtown Vancouver for Whistler, some 120 km to the north…

mist still with us, as we drive the aptly-named Sea to Sky section of Highway 99 that will take us there, threading its way between the Pacific Ocean and mountain ranges, beneath a great brooding arc of sky…

and mist still, though beginning to clear, as I approach the building that has called me here: the Audain Art Museum.

More precisely — though the building itself is a joy — it is the current exhibition that has called me here.

Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage celebrates the life and extraordinary eight-decade career of this BC artist, who will turn 100 years old on 16 September 2026. I think of Tanabe in terms of his iconic coastal scenes — for example, Rivers 1/01: Jordan River, 2001. These works breathe mist. Today’s weather is an appropriate homage.

But the exhibit teaches me that the words “Inside Passage” in the title refer to more than these coastal scenes. They also honour Tanabe’s life-long curiosity, his own internal or “inside” passages that have been reflected in his evolving artistic expression.

Pure abstractions early on, during a 1950s stint in New York (here, Interior Arrangement with Red Hills, 1957)…

a brief period of hard-edged abstractions, in the 1960s…

followed by a fascination with the Canadian prairie landscape, as of the early 1970s (here, The Land 10/72).

Curatorial notes refer to the “hard-edged discipline” of this 1972 work, one of the earliest of his prairie pieces, “announcing the shape of an entirely new direction.”

I look around, and admire the prairie era as a whole.

I also admire the building — the way it serves the works and frames the forest beyond. Later I visit the Patkau Architects website, the Vancouver firm that designed this building, and read their intention that its form and character be “deliberately restrained [so as] to form a quiet backdrop for the collection.” Bravo.

I go upstairs to visit the linked exhibit Vistas: From Takao Tanabe’s Travels, where I again think about art galleries and their architecture.

The power of this space!

Yet it does not overwhelm the art (NWT 1/97: Beaulieu River, 1997). I pulse between the art and the space, the space and the art.

I remember my volunteer years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in the days when the Frank Gehry expansion was still very new, and the joyous reaction of visitors to the building itself — not as informed architectural connoisseurs, purely as people who liked where they were. The little boy, for example, who barrelled into the atrium, spun 360 degrees, gulped and spluttered and just had to blurt it all out to somebody. I was the somebody. “This is so cool!” he cried. “And… and, and… and I haven’t even got to the art yet!”

I do not spin 360, but I do spend some additional vertical time with the building itself — namely, outside and underneath.

To quote that little boy: “This is so cool!” Hard-edged, like Tanabe’s prairie paintings, but at home with the surrounding shaggy forest, just as Gehry’s AGO extension is at home with its own busy neighbourhood (where Gehry’s grandparents lived and very much part of his childhood).

Then I take myself back up to ground level, back onto sidewalks and gangways.

And a good thing, too.

It puts me at a safe distance from which to enjoy this bit of … oh, let’s call it… street theatre.

A black bear ambles out from under the building, and begins a leisurely snuffle of the shrubbery.

I keep a watchful eye out for bears as I walk through Florence Petersen Park en route the bus depot…

but none jump out from behind these old logging stumps.

By the time we are rolling back south, the skies are bright and blue.

8 Comments
by icelandpenny on 21 July 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, Nature, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 21 July 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/07/21/sea-to-sky-to-tanabe/

A-Flutter

3 July 2026 – It’s the motion that first catches my attention.

Not what is moving; just the fact of motion. Then I register what is moving. Lots of little white tags, dancing with the breeze that flutters through the branches of this tree.

Odd how one’s attention moves through stages, refining focus.

Next, I register the tree trunk, with its arc of red & white letters.

Finally, I tip back my head and start a flutter-dance of my own, reading tags.

and…

and…

and…

and…

and…

and…

and also…

Ditto to that!

1 Comment
by icelandpenny on 3 July 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by icelandpenny on 3 July 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/07/03/a-flutter/

Moss, Change, and Canada Day

1 July 2026 – It starts with moss. No. It starts with my desire — fresh from travels that have grounded me (literally) in realities of maritime and eastern Canada — now to ground myself once again in my temperate rainforest home.

I decide to visit the Camosun Bog, once again to spend time “listening to the moss.” Influenced by Gathering Moss (author, Robin Wall Kimmerer), I did this once before, and described it to you in my post of 3 February 2026.

Approaching the Bog, about to walk under that leafy arch and turn that pathway corner…

I know that, this time, it will be different. The February visit was at the height of winter rain; this July visit is full summer.

Now, the bog itself is dry…

and the mosses at the muddy edge …

are citrus green, not emerald.

Beyond, where moss beds mingle with bog plants, patches of moss are fast bleaching…

to the ghostly pallor of mid-summer.

“It is seasonal,” murmurs the moss. “Seasonal cycle, seasonal change.”

All around, all nature demonstrates that truth. As mosses step back, others step forward. Growth tips on the evergreens…

and riots of wildflowers along the paths — yellow…

purple…

and blue.

I sit on a bench, and let my mind drift with the pulse of change.

Drift past seasonal change to the open-ended, larger truth enunciated by Zen Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki: “Everything changes.”

Then, perhaps inevitably — this being Canada Day and I so recently immersed in so many components of this magnificent, fractious, generous, squabbling, exasperating, beloved country of mine — I let my mind drift into the possibilities of change in Canada.

Not just the risks. The possibilities.

What if?

Though constitutionally this country is a federation, we have confederation at our core — Canadian Confederation was “the process of federal union in which the British North American colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada [both Upper and Lower] joined together to form the Dominion of Canada.” (The Canadian Encyclopedia)

Our self-image is a mosaic, not (cf that country to the south) a melting pot. We live this image through our evolving concept of multiculturalism, which currently has the support of 66% of Canadians, a support base that even includes people who’d like to see less new immigration (Canadian Diversity Study 2026, the Environics Institute and Global Migration Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University).

What if we were to look for new ways to embrace these multiplicities? Ways that, instead of shredding us into isolated fragments, could strengthen the whole as a supple, breathing organism?

Celebrations around me, as I head for home, both public and back-yard private.

What if?

10 Comments
by icelandpenny on 1 July 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 1 July 2026

https://icelandpenny.com/2026/07/01/moss-change-and-canada-day/

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