18 October 2024 – By the time Act 5, Scene 3 rolls around, Shakepeare’s Macbeth has numerous causes for lament.
But had he spent time…
in the VanDusen Botanical Garden...
on a cool and wet..
but also luminous fall day…
he might at least have reconsidered his opinion…
of the autumnal colour palette.
Posted by icelandpenny on 18 October 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/10/18/the-sere-the-yellow-leaf/
16 October 2024 – There’s “boring old Clock Time,” as I observed in my post of 13 July, and then there’s Crow Time — an infinitely more enjoyable way to measure the changing length of day. This means I can determine dawn-to-dusk by looking up the stats, or by simply looking out my window.
Crows leave their Burnaby roost for Vancouver roughly at dawn, and return from Vancouver to their roost roughly at dusk.
When I wrote about all this in mid-July, the afternoon commute passed my window at around 9:30 pm.
Today?
At 5:34 pm.
Oh yes. The days draw in.
Posted by icelandpenny on 16 October 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/10/16/as-the-crow-flies/
14 October 2024 – The second Monday in October and here we are: it is Thanksgiving.
Indigenous peoples have long honoured nature’s bounty; in 1578 Sir Martin Frobisher and crew celebrated their safe arrival in eastern Arctic waters (now Nunavut) with salt beef, biscuits & mushy peas; in 1606 Samuel de Champlain founded the Ordre de Bon Temps (Order of Good Cheer) to encourage settlers in New France (feasting and musketry volleys); in the 1750s what we now view as the traditional fare — turkey, squash, pumpkin — became common in Nova Scotia. Our Thanksgiving celebrations have gone on from there — finally, officially, settling on the second Monday in October by a 1957 Act of Parliament.
Back to 2024. Yesterday was the last Farmers’ Market of the season in Dude Chilling Park. By the time I arrive, late in the day, a lot of the produce has been snapped up. My own purchases are non-trad: a bag of pierogis and a jar of Malvani simmering sauce, both made by descendants of immigrants who brought these recipes with them. Traditional fare is still available as well, albeit in depleted quantities.
Tomatoes, for example…
squash…
and even squash that needs an explanation.
This Thanksgiving morning I visit our wonderful rooftop garden. I’m eager to see how much the pumpkins have grown since I photographed one of them during our Garden Party up there on 9 September.
Here’s what I saw then.
Here’s what I see this morning.
What did I expect?
Of course everything has been harvested, clipped, tidied away!
Fortunately…
we can always be thankful for the view.
Posted by icelandpenny on 14 October 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/10/14/happy-thanksgiving/
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.
Posted by icelandpenny on 30 September 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/30/water-words/
16 September 2024 – Two of the surprises were bonus additions to the plan; the other was a subtraction, that turned out not to matter.
Plan # 1
A friend and I meet at the VanDusen Botanical Garden where, in addition to a walk in the Garden, we plan to take advantage of a bonus activity — free admission for Garden visitors to an unrelated fundraiser event in one of the facility’s meeting rooms.
Surprise. The event is a separate ticket and, as befits a fundraiser, at a hefty price. We decide we are not that fascinated by the event’s focus, and settle for the Garden walk, all on its own.
And it is plenty! Despite heavy skies and intermittent rain…
the air is luminous, and the grounds pop with colour and texture.
The mossy curve of a tree branch, weeping over a brook…
the colour patterns of a Birch tree, bold against its backdrop…
colour intensities along a pathway, so green, so purple, with the glistening silver of rain drops…
and the tonal palette of freshly raked gravel…
in the newly restored Stone Garden.
Plan # 2
The next day, my only plan is to put myself in the hands of my companion, out there in Surrey, who has curated a trio of walks for us to explore. I know about the three walks; unbeknownst to me, he has a surprise in mind for one of them.
BC is chock-full of soaring trees, and sometimes all you have to do is tilt back your head to be wowed all over again.
This head-tilt has me in the middle of Redwood Park, an 80-acre park that contains “the largest collection of Redwood trees north of the 49th parallel” (which is Canada-speak for this stretch of the Canada/US border).
It contains more than 30 other species of European, Asian and North American trees as well, testimony to the park’s backstory. In 1881, on the occasion of their 21st birthday, a settler gave his twin deaf sons a land grant each of 40 adjoining acres. Instead of simply farming the land, the reclusive brothers began re-timbering it, starting with Redwoods and expanding their activities over the years.
I love the history and I’m enjoying the trails, all per plan. Then my companion leads me to the secret.
A sort-of clearing, with lots of fallen logs and stumps, and… And what is all this?
It is the park’s “Farie forest,” per this child’s plaque, aka “faerie village,” per Atlas Obscura language, or just plain old Fairy Forest. It is the designated place in the park where children who have been encouraged/helped to build tiny farie/faerie/fairy homes elsewhere come to tuck them into their own ever-expanding community.
Lots of them.
Lots and lots of them!
All of them obeying the signposted rule: “Do not nail or screw them into a tree and do not remove bark.” So, for example, this tiny house with its fresh-moss décor…
is simply looped into place.
While we’re there, a birthday-party’s-worth of young children arrive and are guided to search out the little gift globes that adults have hidden among the fairy houses. Soon small hands are waving large turquoise globes, and laughter fills the forest.
Two more park visits after that, per the Surrey plan, and I have had a splendid day.
Plan # 3
So the only remaining plan, come late afternoon, is to ride SkyTrain and bus back home to Vancouver and my own neighbourhood.
A simple plan that, as I step down from the bus, offers me one final surprise.
It is Main Street’s turn to host one of this year’s Car Free Days, here in the Lower Mainland! Twenty blocks with no cars, but lots of feet, dog paws, kiosks and tents and tables and things to buy, watch, eat and do.
I join in. I could buy anything from earrings to hand-embroidered T-shirts to goat’s milk hand-milled soaps; I could check I’m registered for the upcoming provincial election or sign up as the newest volunteer at a neighbourhood community centre; I could buy Japanese or Thai or Sri Lankan or Mexican street food (or a cone of old-fashioned day-glo candy floss); I could hold out my hand for a henna-dye pattern or bare some other bit of anatomy for an ink-&-needle permanent tattoo; I could even try my skills at skateboarding in what is surely the world’s tiniest skateboard arena.
But I don’t.
Instead, I watch a judo demonstration, and a juggler, and next join the crowd watching this performer not swallow his sword after all.
Then, finally, I turn around and go home.
Per plan.
Posted by icelandpenny on 16 September 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/16/3-plans-3-surprises/
7 September 2024 – It’s suddenly hot — so much for the pivot to autumn! — and I decide to go chill with the Dude, in Dude Chilling Park. As you probably know, I’ve done it before. Today, I want to do it again, and for the same reason.
Half an hour, I tell myself: half an hour on a bench, to share once again the pulse of this little neighbourhood park with no amenities but so much community.
One amenity: the Michael Dennis bronze statue…
whose appearance gave rise to the nickname for both the statue (officially, Reclining Figure) and the park itself (officially, Guelph Park).
I find a bench in the shade, with the street to my back, a breeze in my face and a clear view across the little square of grass that constitutes the park.
I sit. I watch all the quiet ways that this park, and this community, engage.
It’s a whole lot of nothing, isn’t it? It’s just nothing.
It’s also everything, I think. Quiet pleasure in simple actions, simple interactions.
{Later, I will cross paths with a neighbour, who tells me his very small, and very old & frail, dog likes this park: “The dogs are always friendly.”)
I rise from my bench. I only then notice the plaque…
and realize that I have not been sitting here alone.
Posted by icelandpenny on 7 September 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/07/nothing-everything/
3 September 2024 – Yesterday, Monday, was the pivot.
Holiday Monday, Labour Day, and good-bye to summer. One season ends; a new one begins — kiddies go back to school, organizations launch fall schedules, our clothing is suddenly no longer / once again appropriate.
I do myself a Monday loop down around my end of False Creek. Me plus half the city. We are at play!
Cyclists stop to buy yerba mate from a tricycle-based vendor…
a lone kayaker veers toward the Creekside Paddling Centre…
a busker sets up shop outside Science World…
but, oh, not everybody has a holiday.
These two are hard at work…
turning the white railing white again.
Over at Plaza of Nations, Batch (a pop-up shipping container bar) is closed for the day…
but right opposite, on the other side of the Seawall pathway, Alien E-Bike Rentals is open for business.
Locals may depend on their own bikes, or their own two feet, but visitors like what the six-language website tells them: rent a bike for two, or three, or even five hours, and loop your way around the whole Seawall.
Any day, the basketball courts in Coopers’ Park resound with the thunk of bouncing balls.
Sometimes — as in, a moment from now — they also ring with yelps of triumph, when someone sinks his shot. Look slightly above & to the left of the net. See? That ball is on its way.
It’s not just humans, pivoting from one season to another. We only do it because nature leads the way.
As I climb the incline ramp at the north end of Cambie Bridge, I look between the levels, and there it is…
colour! Our very own Trooping of the Colour.
It’s not yet officially fall, here in Canada. That arrives with the Fall Equinox, this year at 8:43 a.m. on Sunday, 22 September.
So: officially, no. But viscerally, in our bones, in our blood, in the quickened rhythm of our day? Oh yes.
Fall is here.
Posted by icelandpenny on 3 September 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/03/we-pivot/
31 August 2024 – Post-COVID yay! we can travel again. But, whoa, what’s going on? World-wide, attitudes to tourists have changed. Some locations are now actively hostile and others are imposing stiff restrictions.
British Columbia still puts out the welcome mat. However, as signage next to the Information kiosk on Bowen Island demonstrates…
the province now expects more from its visitors than money.
Want to be a better lover? Click for info about impacts and solutions that are relevant well beyond BC boundaries.
Posted by icelandpenny on 31 August 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/08/31/love-death-all-of-us/
17 August 2024 – Nothing as grand as the slippery nature of abstract nouns is on my mind. Not even the nature of heritage, within that slippery world.
I’ve simply decided to go look at the very specific, very tangible, very proper-noun Barclay Heritage Square that I’ve just noticed to the right of the caption WEST END on my Downtown Vancouver Walking Map. My route develops from there. I continue down Nicola to English Bay and along the Seawall to (bottom-centre of map) the David Lam Dock on False Creek.
It’s only after all that, that I have my moment of linguistic/philosophical fuss about the meaning of words.
Back to the beginning.
I’m at Broughton & Haro, north-east corner of Barclay Heritage Square, an enclave designated under the National Trust for Canada that preserves 12 Edwardian-era homes and woods in combination with an adjacent City park.
The houses are lived in…
and the woodland now contains a children’s playground, used by residents…
as well as families from the modern condo towers you can see in the background — the kind of towers now increasingly dominant in the West End environment.
For no particular reason, I make Nicola my route on south to the water. It rewards me immediately. I’m already a fan of Little Free Library kiosks & their unofficial equivalents, so I gurgle happily at the sight of this Pet Food Pantry, just past Barclay.
Wet & tinned dog & cat food are welcome donations, ditto dog & cat toys and accessories, but please nothing large and nothing for other small animals: “We don’t have the space.”
One more block, and here’s the Vancouver Mural Festival 2020 tribute (by Annie Chen & Carson Ting) to Joe Fortes, the City’s first official lifeguard.
In 1986 he was also named Vancouver’s Citizen of the Century by the Vancouver Historical Society, and for good cause — a Trinidadian immigrant, Fortes spent years unofficially guarding the beach and rescuing people before receiving the official appointment.
The Nelson-to-Comox block down Nicola is friendly underfoot…
and bright with flowers on vintage apartment balconies overhead.
The day grows steadily warmer. I am ever more appreciative of the shade offered by street-side trees, sometimes combined with lush ferns, as in this display near Pendrell…
and sometimes high over bare earth, as in this half-block interruption of Nicola’s vehicular status between Pendrell and See-em-ia Lane.
Yet even barren like this, it is a welcome space, a little spot just for people, very neighbourhood. The lane title is part of the charm: like other area lanes, it honours area history, in this case Mary See-em-ia, granddaughter of Chief Joe Capilano and a Squamish Nation matriarch.
A reminder as I cross Davie Street of real-estate trends…
and later a reminder, down at Harwood, of developer/cultural handshakes, here in the form of this Beyond the Mountains mural commissioned by the builder from Heiltsuk artist KC Hall.
On downhill to the water. I’m now at the foot of Nicola, about to emerge onto Beach Avenue, bordering Second Beach.
Apartments of various eras face the water, dozing in the afternoon sun…
and “open-air museum” installations, courtesy of the Vancouver Biennale, are as much part of the beach scenery as flowers, palm trees and sand.
I first pass Dennis Oppenheim’s Engagement…
and then, as I walk east along the Seawall…
I come to my all-time favourite, Bernar Venet’s 217.5 Arc X 13.
Not much shade, here on the Seawall.
I pause under handy palm trees to cool off, agree with a bemused pair of Austrian tourists that outdoor palms are somehow not what we expect to see in Canada…
loiter under the next cluster of friendly palms to watch a mother finally tear her toddler away from these lifeboats and lead the child on down to the water…
and then buy myself a rum & raisin waffle cone at the Sunset Beach concession stand…
and find yet more shade in which to enjoy it.
I even manage to eat it all without dribbling any down my arm. (Live long enough, and you acquire a few Life Skills.)
Enough blazing sunshine. I forsake the Seawall to climb uphill to Beach Ave. and the shade offered by its trees. It gives me a distant view of Squamish artist Chrystal Sparrow’s mural on the Sunset Beach sport court, currently being repainted…
and a close-up of the mossy walls of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre as I carry on east.
But then, somewhere between George Wainborn Park and David Lam Park — bottom-centre of that first Walking Map image, if you care to scroll back up — I return to the Seawall and False Creek.
Where I am first amused by this tiny, very unofficial, birdhouse hanging from an official Seawall tree…
and soon afterwards hopeful of a ferry ride home from the David Lam Dock.
Look at this: two ferries converging on the dock (left & right, the rival Aquabus and False Creek lines respectively), eager to pick me up.
But, no, we are at cross-purposes. I want east; they are both headed west to Granville Island.
They assure me an east-bound boat will come by soon. One does. It then steers a slow zigzag route, meeting rider needs — which gives me time to think about “heritage.”
What counts, what doesn’t? In today’s walk, did only the very official and historically designated Barclay Heritage Square count? Or all of it?
The online Cambridge Dictionary gives me the answer I realize I want: heritage consists of “features belonging to the culture of a particular society.”
Yes. With that kind of latitude, it all counts.
From the designated Edwardian homes to the Fortes mural to “hi” on a sidewalk and a Pet Food Pantry; from ice cream and real-estate trends and Biennale art to lifeboats and palm trees and a silly little birdhouse and rival ferry lines.
All of it.
Posted by icelandpenny on 17 August 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/08/17/heritage-and-heritage/
11 August 2024 – I’m in behind City Centre Artist Lodge, once again epicentre for the Vancouver Mural Festival, now in its final day.
Much to my surprise, I’m not much engaged with VMF official activities this year, but the hoop-la does have me noticing things with a sharper eye — colours, shapes, energy, juxtapositions — as i weave through the adjacent alleys.
I don’t yet know it, but I am curating my very own collection of white bunnies.
Starting with reflections + fence + signage + curb stones in the north/south alley right behind the Artist Lodge…
followed by resting man + dog + red-X motif + pop-up art display in the east/west alley between Main/Quebec/5th/4th…
which brings the white-bunny concept into my life.
It’s the framed quote, bottom-right in the line-up: “Art is a white bunny in a scrap metal yard.”
I like this! Deliberate bunnies, and “found” bunnies as well — whatever adds scamper & bounce to the streetscape.
Right opposite, same alley: four chairs lined up in a deliberate and carefully positioned tribute to the looming chair in the gigantic wall mural behind them…
one detail in Andy Dixon’s 2017 VMF mural Red Studio (After Matisse), his 90-foot-high portrayal of his own Vancouver studio.
After that, my white bunnies are whatever & wherever delights me, whether day-glo construction guidelines on the sidewalk before me at Quebec & East 4th…
or white communications discs high on a roof beyond me, punctuating the tower to their left…
or an eye-level fluorescent X just south of Quebec & East 2nd. (Only later, at home, do I notice the red-X motif in the alley with the pop-up gallery, and realize there must be a connection.)
One final white bunny, down by False Creek.
A multi-coloured white bunny, mind you — art is inclusive! — painted by Nature, and proclaiming a message that seems hard to believe, this hot mid-August day.
Fall is on its way.
Posted by icelandpenny on 12 August 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/08/12/white-bunnies/
WALKING WOMAN 