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.