22 October 2023 — I’m thinking about light-at-night, as I set out on at dusk on a neighbourhood walk. It’s the after-effect of a visit to David Wilson’s show, The Ground Beneath My Feet, at the Visual Space Gallery. My friends & I fell into his evocations of dark, rainy night-time streets, each a-glow with ambient light.
We all later reported seeing streets a bit differently because of that show and, as a result, seeing more.
And so, as dusk deepens into night, I find myself noticing light. Ambient light, the play of light, the different impact of objects by-day and by-night.
On Quebec Street, I rediscover with delight the fence running between 19th and 20th, hung with artist Corina Hanson‘s gifts to pedestrians: wooden figures, quotes, old CD tapes, silverware … happy mash-ups of materials and inspiration. For the first time, I walk the fence by night.
I see the metallic gleam of the spoon-fork-knife headdress on a wooden figure, picked out by the street lights…
which also spread a soft glow across this row of “townhouses.”
With nightfall, a very ordinary pathway glass-block light set in grubby concrete is transformed into a commanding beacon…
and over at Main & 18th, the angles of the bent-straw sculpture in Sun Hop Park — a bit faded by day — shine and dance in their bath of street-corner lighting.
(The park, tiny as it is, deserves our attention. For three reasons. First, because it transforms an awkward sliver of real estate into something enjoyable; second, because the sculpture pays tribute to the corner’s former life as site of the Palm Dairy Milk Bar, 1952-89; and third, because the park’s name pays tribute to a nearby grocer who was a neighbourhood fixture in the 1920s.)
I think that’s it, for light-at-night, it doesn’t get better than that.
But then I meet this car, parked just a bit farther north on Main.
Which is a whole tap-dance of reflected lights from the busy strip of bars, cafés, bakeries and assorted eateries — including the neon blast for El Camino’s (Latin American Fast Food) — just behind me.
All this ambient light, in the urban night. We pay a price — we no longer see stars in the sky, just one aspect of that price.
27 August 2023 – This title springboards off my comment on Bluebrightly’s In Town post, which moved me to observe: “Not too sure about God, but magic is certainly in the detail.” A recent walk has me looping around my end of False Creek one more time; as usual, I wander to and fro via alleys and, also as usual, I am diverted by what I see.
This time, by the magic of looking beyond each big view, into a detail.
Big view of one of my favourite hydro H-frames, for example — the one so dripping in greenery I think it must employ its own Master Gardener.
Having walked through the arch, I look back and up, and spy the detail…
the potted plant on that window ledge. (Geranium? Not sure. Literally, a detail too far.)
One alley over, still en route False Creek, I enjoy the long view of successive Mural Festival additions to the scenery…
and then fall over laughing at the detail punctuating the north end of the strip.
Gogglesaurus!
I stand there giggling & pointing; the driver lowers his window, also giggling. I compliment him on the gratuitous silliness of the ornament; he regretfully declines credit, explaining the van belongs to his shift supervisor. “She has her own sense of humour, all right…”
Different alley genre now, as I draw closer to False Creek, namely the manicured walkways between pricey condo buildings. Whether built by corporate free choice or coerced by government, I don’t care: they add peace, green space, variety and human scale to the area, while typically at least nodding to heritage.
The walkway leading west from Quebec to Pullman Porter Street, for e.g., with its tribute to the area’s railway work yards history in the form of tracks, old metal wheels, loco motifs and this handcart. (Anybody else remember Buster Keaton, railway buff, and his 1964 silent film for the NFB , The Railroader?)
Again, it’s a detail that fascinates me. Moving parts, visible to the eye, tangible evidence of how the work is done.
Another condo-alley-pathway, this one as I head toward home after my visit to False Creek. Trees, shrubs, giant recliner chairs and, along one side, the playground for children living in the First Avenue Athletes Village Housing Co-op — a reminder that some of the housing around here is not-for-profit.
Having looked ahead toward 2nd Avenue, I now look down at my feet. And see the medallions that dot the pathway, another quiet reminder of heritage, this time of the area’s shipyard history. (Later online search tells me that at one point in WWI, the J. Couglan & Sons Shipyard here on False Creek was the largest in the British Empire.)
I tread lightly, I think I do.
Farther south, farther east, and back to grubbier, non-corporate alleys.
Piles of used tires as I close in on Quebec Street, north of 6th Avenue…
alley-iconic, in a comfy sort of way.
I step in for a closer look at the coils of barbed wire atop the fencing…
and the comfort factor drops sharply. The rust on those barbs makes them all the more vicious.
One H-frame to start this post, another to finish. This is my other favourite in the category, one you have seen before…
the one that spins electric power through an alley intersection with a deft 45-degree pivot.
No Master Gardener here! Naked wooden geometry.
No potted plant, either. Instead, the upward view vibrates with the energy of all that geometry, reflected.
19 August 2023 – Sometimes shadow is your umbrella.
On a still, muggy day, as the heat starts to build, it shelters you on your bench. Also shelters the alley-wolf opposite (artist Ben Tour, VMF 2016) as he guards some parked cars.
Sometimes shadow is a play-thing.
At high noon on a cool, bright-breezy day, it offers trees something to toss at any surface willing to join the game.
8 August 2023 – I’ve never noticed this alley before, let alone known that it has a name. (An ignorance shared by the City.) I am here totally by accident, because — as I wander north on Columbia toward False Creek — I peer down the alley entrance.
A skeleton atop a doorway welcomes my curiosity.
Well, yes! I think — as I take in the longer view — I will definitely find what I’m looking for.
Or, anyway, find what I’m delighted to find, which is whatever this alley chooses to offer.
Only later do I learn I have stumbled on a Vancouver Mural Festival event: a weekend paint-party up and down Astro Alley. So named because, lying as it does between Columbia / Manitoba / 3rd / 4th, it is the back alley for Astro Studio. Which in turn is a collective of 20 artists, including a co-founder of VMF and numerous VMF alums. All of which makes the alley a favoured place to try out ideas.
It’s still morning, the event not yet officially underway. Some artists are already at work and some other bystanders have joined me in strolling through.
Paint pots are in place…
so are chairs in a couple of pop-up shade tents.
Artists paint their own style, in their own way. Turquoise Hat is upright, for example…
already busy while a few colleagues still chat off to the left. Most are standing; one sits on a handy chunk of concrete, and chips in his comments while he strokes his dog’s ears.
Others paint hunkered down…
or on a sturdy refuse bin (while her neighbour, left, takes a water break)…
or up a step-ladder…
or high on a hoist…
or seated in a comfy chair, serenaded by the current selection on the speaker system (left foreground) in the main alley.
Once this mural is complete, the swimmer may have watchful eyes.
There are already watchful eyes on these walls…
in doorways…
and, of course, in the heads of fascinated bystanders like me.
I finally get a good look at a woman who has been painting ‘way high on her hoist. I discover that along with creating art for the alley, she is herself art in the alley.
Her arms and legs are permanent canvas for tattoo art, while her black-clad bum is a temporary canvas for… let’s call it “participatory art.” A companion piece for the mural taking shape on the wall.
I emerge at the east end of the block, take one last fond look back along its length…
and continue my walk to False Creek.
This is the magic of being on foot. Stuff happens!
9 July 2023 – This very Sunday, walking north on Quebec Street from East 6th Avenue on past East 1st to False Creek.
New construction at East 6th…
Old hollyhocks at East 4th…
Life philosophy in the alley just before East 3rd…
the line-up for Earnest (“Seriously Good”) Ice Cream at East 2nd…
and a hovering hand at the Local Blueberries tent down at False Creek.
The stand offers a range of produce; the customer’s hand pauses over the red currants until the farm girl comments”They’re pretty tart.” Her hand then jumps smartly up and away, and selects cherries instead.
13 June 2023 – “The Drive” being Commercial Drive, the traditional East-Van heart of the city’s Little Italy … and “the Dog-Leg” being my eventual route back west from The Drive out to Main Street and home.
I don’t know it when I hop off my bus at East Broadway, but all 14 blocks north to East Georgia are closed for a street party. I’ve chanced upon “Italian Day on the Drive” — the rebirth of this annual festa after a three-year pause for COVID.
It’s still morning, tents are still being erected, but the party is already strutting its stuff..
A storefront heart, in the red/white/green of the old homeland…
a kiosk sweatshirt, with the cruciform logo of the new neighbourhood…
mannequin attitude, in the street’s landmark Mintage Vintage shop…
street-corner food & people watching down by East 1st…
and one of the Bach cello suites, being played by sensitive fingers beneath the Death Mask gaze of the cellist (and to the utter indifference of a passing dog).
Ten thousand crows shadow the city in this nomadic alternatives mural at The Drive and Venables…
and, early in my Dog-Leg along bike route Adanac Street, a mere two crows fly away south in a mural bordering Woodland Park at McLean Drive.
Only two crows, but look, so much more: three monarch butterflies, one caterpillar & a whole riot of wildflowers. Plus, best of all, that erudite moose, reading his book and ignoring everything else.
and has as its immediate neighbour Le Chou, which identifies itself as an intergenerational garden. (And is not devoted exclusively to cabbage.)
I follow the bike route west.
It offers me the certainties and uncertainties of life and death, debated in few but fervent words on an East Georgia wall just east of Clark…
a maximalist van, on Adanac west of Clark…
a minimalist doorway, after Adanac feeds into Union Street near Glen Drive…
and a stealth gardener at Prior & Hawks.
She is paying tribute to a now-deceased neighbour by continuing their activity in Strathcona Linear Park — which, as its name suggests, is a narrow connector between two other local parks.
“No, I’m not an official City Parks gardening volunteer!” she tells me, as she weeds and plants. “An older neighbour and I — she used to work at the VanDusen Botanical Garden — we’d come here and care for the plants because the City doesn’t look after them well enough.”
Another weed-pull, another shift of knees on the knee pad. “She died of cancer during COVID, so now I do this as my secret garden for her.”
We talk for a while about her strategy of filling the space with common everyday plants, unlikely to be stolen, and then tucking a few beauties among them, kept safe from light fingers by camouflage. “I put in a lovely Bee Balm once? Gone in a day. Now I choose shorter specialty plants, and hide them.”
She grins. “But I know they’re there!”
She shows me a few of the hidden treasures. We share a conspiratorial smile. I go on my way.
You met it last post, when I started scuffing back into visibility a poetic sentence that began in a loop there on the corner, and then straightened out to run north on St. Geroge.
I read/scuffed/read/scuffed this much:
“Listen the buried stream gurgles its longing to return to daylight & moonlight…”
I ended with three dots, convinced there was more to find, north on St. George, but my scuffing foot was getting cranky. I promised to return, and look for the rest.
And I do!
I walk prudently in shade, in today’s oppressive heat, as laser bursts of sunlight break through the trees’ protective cover.
Back at the St. George / East 11th corner, I discover my scuffing foot will have no excuse for crankiness today: wind seems to have cleared all the litter from the stretch of sidewalk I still want to read.
You see? We are picking up where we left off, with that word “moonlight” closest to my feet.
I walk on.
to nourish
ducks
bracken
ferns
salmonberry
& you
The complete sentence:
“Listen the buried stream gurgles its longing to return to daylight & moonlight to nourish ducks bracken ferns salmonberry & you”
I find this hauntingly beautiful, magical. It brings powerfully to mind an equally anonymous artistic impulse I encountered in Toronto — the Stealth Art Collective — whose tributes i used to find out on Leslie Spit. I am sorry to see that their latest post is dated July 2022.Click on the blog anyway; it is worth the visit.
May the Collective return! And, if it never does, my thanks for all that it added, in words and transient art installations, to the Spit over many years.
7 May 2023 – – And now here we are in Nelson, tucked up in a verandah-graced unit in a heritage building just off the busy energy of Baker Street. I’m trying to sort out my memories of Nelson and realize I’m not sure I have any — which is pretty well a sure sign that I don’t. I do remember a visit to the “Hot Rats” (aka Hot Ratulations, aka Ainsworth Hot Springs) back in 1980 or so, when my partner and I visited his sister at her back-to-the-land homestead on the east side of Kootenay Lake. But did we spend time in Nelson?
One shake of the head tells me it doesn’t matter; I am here now. And it is sunny and mild outside, and we are bouncing to explore.
Happy chance lands us in Herridge Lane, running between main-drag Baker and uphill Victoria streets, from roughly where we’re staying until the lane bumps into a mountain and can’t go any farther. Mountains are part of the deal, this is more or less a city terraced up its mountain slopes, and staircases abound. Today, we roam horizontally, not vertically.
Herridge Lane rewards us.
A young man pulls in to park, just as I take a photo of this charming mural wrapping an entire small laneway building, charming because of the way mother & baby animals touch noses at the corners.
Young Man is eyeing us in a friendly but speculative way. We chin-point to the mural. “Love it!!” we say. He beams. “There are lots of murals in this lane, just keep going. And… thanks. This building, this mural, is mine.” We idly ask his business. “Cannabis,” he says. It’s a factual statement, no particular inflection.
He says no more about that, but does tell us about “underground Nelson.” He’s only lived here 7 years, he warns us, he isn’t sure of all this, but… “Apparently the original Nelson is now underground and this Nelson is build on top of it. Dunno… some mud slide, or flood, or something? I heard there used to be underground tours…”
We tuck this away for later investigation. Meanwhile, we stick to what we can see, right here on the surface. This doorway, for example, next to Cannabis Man’s office building, with its evergreens and wildflowers…
and, a block or so farther long, the whole back wall of the Capitol Theatre, with old show ads and additional murals like this one.
Other people chance-met at street crossings encourage us to keep going. “More in the next block!” says one fellow whose pony-tail may be silver-white,but is still thick and shining. He’s more sure of the murals than he is of underground Nelson. “Yeah… heard something like that…”
Ohhh, never mind. What we see right here above ground is plenty, all of it informed by laneway context.
Stickers on a rusty stand pipe…
a duck flying into some gas (hydro?) meters…
leaving behind a whole dancing choreography of artwork, wooden crates & doorway.
Dapper Dan twirls his cane above a pick-up truck…
and Pensive Paul slouches against the wall as he contemplates eternity (or, more likely, the smart phone in his hands).
We veer onto Victoria Street for a while, then rejoin Herridge Lane for the bit we had missed.
It rewards us with this glorious stained-glass greenhouse (built by a man who used to do set-design in Vancouver, we are told by a cheerful fellow clearing brush nearby)…
and then, in Hall St. Plaza where Hall butts into the Lane, with Dancing Woman as happy companion to a couple of Coffee-Break Women (who gave permission to be photographed).
A few blocks checking out Baker Street, where we discover that this 1933 Scandinavian Church is now a dental clinic…
and a smiling young woman climbing the steps tells us, “It almost makes me happy to keep an appointment.”
Across the street, the signboard for AFKO, Association des francophones des Kootenays Ouest…
which is a reminder, as are the diverse skin tones and accents all around us, of the many cultures that call this area home. Prospectors up from the USA in USA in 1886; incorporation in 1897 as Nelson (after a typical fuss about which British Big-Wig name to choose); and more arrivals ever since.
And, of course, before all that, some 10,000 years as home to the Ktunaxa, Saixt and SyiLx indigenous peoples.
A few more murals, an afternoon visit to the #23 streetcar museum on Kootenay Lake…
and a conversation with a life-long Nelson resident, and streetcar museum volunteer. We quiz him about the streetcar, and then about Underground Nelson. He chortles. Some wet patches in the lower reaches of some old buildings, he says; people like to call them underground rivers, but really — dramatic pause — they’re sewers. More laughter.
Ah well. Every city needs an urban myth or two.
We eat splendid thali dishes from a Baker St. South Indian restaurant for dinner, and plan the next day’s GOA. It will take us up-lake to Ainsworth & Kaslo.
"Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
WALKING WOMAN 