19 September 2025 – You come back home with fresh eyes for your own city.
I wake up yesterday and, just before 7 a.m., stare awe-struck at the grandeur of clouds drifting above and among the mountains, in a still-opalescent sky.
Aand today, just now, I fall into fits of giggles at the decals on this slightly battered car.
First, the grouping as a whole…
and then, the exquisitely perfect placement of the cat claws vis-à-vis the dings in the car body.
After that I stroll the perimeter of Dude Chilling Park, just ’cause it’s my local park and I love the way The Dude watches over us…
from his perch on the south/east corner of this ordinary patch of grass.
“Ordinary” to the eye, that is — not-very-large rectangle of grass, some trees around, some benches around, and that’s it. But people gravitate, in considerate and companionable ways, and they enjoy themselves and they thrive and they make magic.
Today’s magic: what I find at the south/west corner of the park.
A pop-up street sale is underway, one I’m sure no City authorities ever heard about (let alone licensed) and who cares, because it’s only a few tables and lots of good humour. I learn this young woman has clothes on offer because she’s moving to Rome tomorrow and can’t take everything; I learn this other young woman collects stuff and then moves it on, y’know?; and I learn that grizzled guy, the one with the racks of old LPs, is a Rolling Stones fan. I learn this last factoid because, when I tell him it was a thrill to see the name of jazz great Joe Pass once again, he replies, eyes a-gleam, “With the Stones!” I manage to contain my enthusiasm for the Stones, he ditto for Joe Pass — but we agree in our enthusiasm for Dude Chilling Park.
26 August 2025 – I’m not usually right smack at water’s edge. But today, I am offered easy access to wild shoreline — just one of the Tatlow/Volunteer Parks enhancements, along with “daylighting” a long-buried creek. Who could resist?
First I walk down these steps…
where, second, I draw inspiration from that lone woman in white, ‘way out in front of me.
I give thanks for my hiking poles and waterproof boots, and follow her example.
Now. Statement of principle. I firmly believe that each place has its own beauty. You just have to be willing to stop making comparisons, open your eyes and mind to what is right in front of you, and rejoice in it. BC is no more beautiful than anywhere else.
But today I happen to be here, not anywhere else. I am in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Point Grey, on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, looking north across English Bay (with its usual complement of freighters) to the slopes of West Vancouver over there on the North Shore.
And it is just terrific! Bright, fresh, with enough breeze to ease the heat and send wave upon wave rolling in to tap my toes.
I look west…
and then blink, and look more closely, tracking my gaze past that final arrow of gravel to a black squiggle in the water beyond. (Spread the image; follow my example.) See? A Great Blue Heron. For once, life is easy. He just opens his beak in each breaking wave, and swallows what it offers him.
I look east…
and this time my gaze takes in the green sweep of Stanley Park, the final knob of the City of Vancouver this side of the North Shore, and, to its right, the towers of the City’s downtown cluster. I’ll be walking east, from here to Kitsilano Beach Park.
So many shades, so many textures…
and the swooping arc of an eagle, passing by.
I break my water’s-edge fixation long enough to veer inland for a bit, drawn by the red fence, its signage thanking us for our patience, and the weathered-jeans-and-T-shirt guy on the inside of the fence, who meets my smiling curiosity with a smile of his own.
He looks like a navvy, he’s inside the fence, I ask if he’s working on the project. He replies, with no particular inflection, that it’s his project, he’s the homeowner — and points upwards, to the house atop the cliff. Being vaguely aware of real estate prices around here, I realize that these workman’s jeans and hands are attached to serious money.
I ask the basic “What are you doing?” and, seeing I’m genuinely interested, he explains. It’s all about the instability of these Point Grey cliffs, their unconsolidated Quadra Sands laid down during the Fraser Glaciation (29,000 to 11,500 years ago) and eroding ever since.
This bit of surface remediation is just the current example of his on-going battle — financed by him, but every step City-approved and with City authorities — to protect the environment and in the process protect his home. An early step was to excavate on the land side of his property behind the cliff face, and stabilize the cliff, invisibly, with I-forget-how-many-zillion tons of concrete. More recently, again with City approval and monitoring, he paid to have several mounds of large local rock arranged in natural patterns on this section of the beach, their job being to break up wave action and mitigate impact on the cliffs. “Last week,” he says, his eyes crinkling with delight, “a Fisheries inspector told me that two different species of mussel are now colonizing the rocks!”
I express my admiration with a tease: “You could’ve taken your great gobs of money and lived large in all the casinos of Europe. Instead… what do you do? You bury your money, literally, in the ground.” He grins, then shrugs a kind of “Yeah-but” shrug. “You have to do what you can. To help. This is what I can do.”
I walk back down to the water impressed, a happy day made even happier.
Bands of colour, look at them: all the greys of the gravel at my feet, green seaweed just beyond, butterscotch sand beyond that, then blue water, white curls of wave, red among those distant freighters…
and, closer to shore here on the right, red also in the Kitsilano Yacht Club dinghies (or whatever they are) — a whole line of them, each full of kiddies being taught boating skills, whose excited voices carry on the wind.
A mysterious imprint in a rock, surely that can’t be natural?
and a blaze of colours, certainly not natural but also not mysterious, on the stones that line the entrance to a path up from the beach.
The stone wall is official; the colours, anonymous and unauthorized. I sidestep both the path and the bronzing bodies beneath it, and return to water’s edge.
But eventually, though water’s edge continues, there’s no longer any way to follow it.
I’ve reached the Kitsilano Yacht Club, just this side of Kitsilano Beach Park. My choice now is to swim around, or scramble up.
Blue Shorts Guy is about to scramble up his section of rock mound; I then scramble up mine. (Less elegantly than BSG, who does it all upright. My scramble involves hands and knees. But it works!)
Suddenly, I’m back in the urban world.
With its fences and notices and CCTV. It is discombobulating.
So much so that, as I walk south on Arbutus Street, this notice tacked to an old wooden pole seems no stranger than anything else.
I too am waiting for coffee — but, unlike Z, the remedy is in my own hands.
22 August 2025 – I mean to walk right through Dude Chilling Park, en route farther east. Instead, I stop to admire a brand-new hopscotch chalked into the park’s northern pathway.
Squares a bit on the mingy side, true, but lots of them. And so carefully executed. With European cross-strokes for the 1s and 7s. And the flourish of two colours, not one.
Instead of walking on, I settle myself on the bench just beyond…
curious to see if anyone yields to the temptation, and starts to hop.
First up, a very young toddler and her mum. The child is clearly new to the act of walking, let alone leaping around. She does not attempt to hop. She stops, frowns slightly at this unknown design, and then, intuitively, gets the idea.
Very slowly, very carefully, she obeys the visual clues: just one foot here, but both feet there. And then one, and then two… Until she loses patience, that is, and a laughing mother carries her off.
Next up, by complete contrast, a geezer. (Being one myself, I can say that.) He also stops, contemplates. Then, with a grin, he tucks his cane under one arm and starts to hop.
Hippity-hop! And again!
Until… whoops. A wobble corrected, a tumble averted, and his cane is prudently back in use.
He grins at me, amused. “Maybe I’m a little old for this.”
My mind flashes to a particular cartoon in Searle’s Cats (Ronald Searle, Dobson Books Ltd., 1967)…
and its caption: “Acrobatic cat discovering quite unexpectedly that it is too old for the game.”
I grin right back at him.
We are complicit, he and I — fellow adventurers in this demanding but rewarding late stage of life.
18 August 2025 – I’m just off a False Creek ferry and walking uphill toward home, still full of Flat White and café chatter with a good friend, when I stop to admire another good friend. (Albeit in a different category of friendship: painted, not human.)
There she is, high a-top her alley home, her quizzical smile floating out across the neighbourhood.
Is she our Mona Lisa, 21st-c. alley-girl version?
No. Given the pace of local redevelopment, and the building that is her home, she is our Cheshire Cat. Soon she will be gone, with only her smile lingering behind, and only in memory.
I”m standing at 3rd Avenue & Ontario Street, the intersection at the north-east corner of that L-shaped site, outlined in red. This is the huge redevelopment site purchased by the PCI Group in 2021, whose redevelopment proposal finally received City approval in May of this year. Cheshire Cat Smile is mid-way down lot 5, on the south side of the alley.
I head down the alley. Not for the first time, but it’s different every time, isn’t it? (No need to repeat the Heraclitus discussion…)
Crow in a convex mirror! I’ve never noticed him before, so already the alley is different.
The actual crow, opposite…
which causes me, for the first time, to pay attention to the mural as a whole — signed R. Tetrault and, as I later learn, called Flight Path.
Murals both side of an alley and a whole line-up of hydro H-frame poles in between! Sigh. Life is perfect.
I tip my head, pay homage to the Cheshire Cat Smile…
knowing it’s tagged Lil Top but also knowing I’ve never been able to find any info about that tag. So Cheshire Cat she has become.
The woman I’d noticed under the nearest H-frame, as I photographed Flight Path, is now standing next to me, also enjoying the art.
“It’s people expressing themselves,” she says. “And we get to look at it for free! It makes us happy.”
She points: “Like that flower, that butterfly.”
I point to the message next to it, which sets us both laughing.
And then we go our separate ways, each dawdling where we each prefer to dawdle, walking the line of Ciele Beau murals opposite Flight Path.
I pause at a doorway, its notice as outdated as the reminder to “call your mum.”
Nobody, employee or otherwise, will be entering by this door ever again, I tell myself. Or by any other door, on this doomed brick building.
Ghosts of Eras Past to the north of me as well — torn fencing frames the Cosmic Breezemural on 3rd Avenue, painted by Olivia di Liberto for the 2019 Vancouver Mural Festival. RIP, VMF.
I leave the alley, turn the corner onto W 4th. I’m now looking at the block-long southern length of the site, Ontario to Manitoba. All boarded up, waiting for What Happens Next.
This artist’s rendering shows What Will Happen Next.
“Innovative industrial and commercial uses,” says the corporate website, “heritage retention and refurbishment, office, daycare and ground-floor food and beverage… centred around a new public plaza.”
Now that I’m home, and learning all this… I have to do a little rethinking, don’t I? And so do you.
Employees will once again go in and out of doors in the corner brick building, which is not doomed after all. And Flight Path may fly again. On his website, Tetrault explains he painted it “on plywood for removal and reinstallation on a new commercial development.”
There’s the Very Big Picture, literally picture, of the River streaming across western North America…
and the Local Big Picture, with its Rainfall Warning & stats…
and its 6-day forecast.
But there’s also the Local Small Picture.
It consists of the literal pictures right here on your balcony, the ones that translate stats & science into nature’s own response, in your personal here-and now.
The horizontal/vertical interplay between your gleaming balcony deck and the appearance of that deck though your rain-splattered glass door…
and the vertical-beyond-vertical of the mist-shrouded city block immediately north of your balcony, further blurred by your glass balcony wall.
There is also — as you step into the rain, to explore — the Balcony Small Picture.
Literally at your feet.
Your Autumn Fern, side view, each frond hung with droplets…
that same Autumn Fern, top view, every shade now moisture-rich…
and the neighbouring Heuchera, always its showy best when droplets glitter on those big fat leaves.
There’s even the Red-winged blackbird and the Dragonfly.
Eastern transplants like yourself, they are forever resident on the vintage garden screen that first looked out across the Bay of Quinte to Prince Edward County in south-eastern Ontario, and now stands guard over East Vancouver, looking north across Burrard Inlet to the mountains.
Fronds arch; droplets gleam; clouds explore the shifting dimensions of grey.
And bird/dragonfly/bullrushes — though made of metal — oh yes, they also dance the rhythms of this great River.
10 August 2025 – Seven moments, over the past few days, that snagged my attention. If these images snag you as well, I’m glad, and thank you. But here’s the rabbit hole: what now snags my attention is the phenomenon of attention-snagging. Of engagement. And the fact that your reason for lingering with any one of these images will be different from my own, and equally valid.
For the image is just the starting point, isn’t it? Each of us makes our own journey, after that. (And never the same journey twice.)
Saying this already has me on a journey.
Memory of Harold Town, at a reception for a 1960s display of his art in the Glendon College Junior Common Room, being asked the meaning of one of his paintings. “I just paint it,” he shrugged. “The meaning is up to you.”
Memory of Will Gompertz’ observation, in his 2013 book about 150 years of modern art (What Are You Looking At?), that one of the many factors comprising “art” is the engagement between the object and the viewer.
Memories of my own frequent observation, back in the day, when addressing a J-school class or mentoring a neophyte writer, that topic and focus are two separate things. (“Banff National Park,” for example, is a topic; “wildlife corridors” is one possible focus within that topic.)
Enough! On with the images. And on with our journeys, mine and yours.
Downtown construction (Main & East Broadway)
I’m snagged by one detail: the muddy power shovel. I remember my dad, during a family 1950s drive holiday in Cape Breton, stopping the car to photograph a steam shovel (as they still were) being used to widen and stabilize the road. His company made that shovel! I was a very little girl, properly in awe both of her daddy and of that huge piece of machinery.
Urban playground (Emery Barnes Park)
When I was a kid, we had concrete underfoot. Now little feet (and my own) bounce gently on a more forgiving surface. Finally! A use for all those discarded car tires.
Evening reflections (Burrard St. south of West Pender)
The snag is less visual than aural — the echo of baroque music. Christ Church Cathedral is just up the hill, a regular venue for Early Music Vancouver concerts. My post-concert walk is back down the hill, with this sparkling visual one more sensory delight, along with everything else I have just experienced.
Urban park contrasts (a Stanley Park pond, looking out to West Georgia)
The bull rushes flip me back to Grenadier Pond in Toronto’s High Park; the larger dance of nature and city reminds me of ravine walks in that city, with nature Down Here and urban life visible Up Above.
Waterfront (Devonian Harbour Park)
I could see heat-parched grass, or bobbing boats, or mountains beyond, or even (admittedly just out of frame) the helpful tourist-info kiosk. Instead, I fixate on the split-rail fence — “snake fence,” we called it, an everyday staple of rural Ontario-Quebec landscapes in my childhood, not the conscious design choice that it has now become.
Memorial name-walls (Komagata Maru memorial, Harbour Green Park)
The wall honours the 376 British citizens aboard this Japanese vessel, which was denied entry in a 1914 stand-off that lasted two months (the people being fed solely by private initiative) before the ship, under duress, returned to its Kolkata (“Calcutta”) starting point. The problem, you understand, was not that the people were British citizens; the problem was that they were also South Asian.
I honour the memorial, but my own engagement is elsewhere. I remember the 1982 unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, which arguably established the tradition of naming names as the most powerful way to acknowledge the importance of every individual. My memories include AIDS walls, Toronto & Vancouver; Ireland Park, waterfront Toronto, with its few known names of the 38,000 famine refugees who arrived during the summer of 1847 (when the city’s population was only 20,000); and the 2013 presentation at the AGO of Ai Wei Wei’s powerful memorial to the victims of the Sichuan earthquake, with members of Toronto’s Chinese community reading aloud, in groups of ten, every single name.
All those memories come later. As I stand at the Komagata Maru wall, I flash to the wall in Humber Bay Park East in Toronto. It honours the 329 people who, in 1985, boarded Air India flight 182 in Toronto but never reached Delhi. Over Ireland, a terrorist bomb hidden in the luggage blew the plane apart.
I remember standing there, some time in the early 2010s, aware of the intensity of the man standing next to me. His finger hovered mid-air as his eyes scanned the lines of names. Then his finger landed on the name that his eyes had sought. He patted the name, sighed. He turned to me. He just had to say it aloud, to someone. “We worked together. Such a great guy. He didn’t really want to go, but it was a big family wedding, you know? His wife and daughters, they were so excited…”
Windsock (Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, Coal Harbour)
Oh my, all those years. From CUSO volunteer in the Peruvian high jungle through Oxfam & other NGO travels and then time among our own northern hamlets. All those sturdy little aircraft, all those airstrips, all that varied terrain. All those people. All that they taught me.
31 July 2025 – I’m on the N/E corner of Quebec St. and East 2nd Ave., and I read the little plaque at my feet.
Really??? I say — but very quietly, to myself. (No point startling others.)
Look up & I’ll see a rail yard? Or an elk? or a forest? or a convoy of Canada geese?
Pfft!!! (My genteel raspberry is also very quietly expressed, to myself.)
Rail yard is historic fact right here at False Creek, not current reality. The first CPR railway station opened in Vancouver in 1887, but the railway-related industrial era boomed after the World War I project to fill in the tidal flats of False Creek, from Main St. on east to Clark Drive, to provide a site for two new railway terminals and associated rail yards. Various changes along False Creek since then, most recently the transformation to parkland, Seawall and residential/knowledge industry occupation, triggered first by Expo 86 and then the 2010 Winter Olympics.
So, no, I am not going to see a rail yard from this street corner, no matter where I look. But I don’t care! I am all for looking, while I walk, not for stomping along in a trance. I am perfectly happy to be reminded to swivel my head and pay attention.
I start swivelling.
Look Up, East: the MEC building, a 2020 arrival in this historic neighbourhood…
and once again (spring 2025) back in Canadian ownership, though no longer a cooperative.
Look Up, West: an even newer new-build.
Look Sideways, East: the eco-conscious alley behind MEC, with watercourse and plantings to attract insects and bees.
Look Sideways, West: the alley behind that new-build, with an historic reference right there at the corner.
Namely, one of the City’s remaining H-frame hydro poles.
Look Down-Along, North: this block’s stretch of bioswale…
which “collects and cleans the rainwater that fall on Quebec Street.”
Look Straight-Across, West: tail end of a straggly crocodile of kiddies (yellow T-shirts) plus their volunteer monitors (green T-shirts)…
crossing Quebec and hurrying to catch up with the croc’s main body, all those children already walking on north along Quebec’s west side.
I have to wait for the next light. After that I’m following in their somewhat distant footsteps, not sure where they’re headed but with my own Best Guess in mind. (Science World, I think to myself.)
Sure enough!
Like them, I turn west on Switchmen St. — a necessary detour while the end bit of Seawall is under repairs — and, from my vantage point at Pullman Porter, watch all those yellow & green T’s double ’round the parking lot & veer back east toward the geodesic dome of Science World. (An aside to you: you have noted these further railway tributes? Of course you have.)
I am charmed by the sight — by my knowledge of how much fun the children will have, and by my respect for all the organizations and all the volunteer support that collectively make these vacation-time excursions both possible and safe. (Flashback memory: the impish YMCA volunteer in Toronto, who explained that when they took 10 kids out, they were expected to bring 10 kids back. “Preferably,” she solemnly added, “the same ten.”)
I head on west. Bye-bye, kiddies.
I am still sufficiently Paying Attention to my surroundings, to notice the fresh-fruit stand near Olympic Village Plaza. I buy strawberries, my fingers guided by the young attendant to the boxes just trucked in this very morning from a farm in the Abbotsford area.
The day is warming up.
I find a shady bench in Hinge Park, and allow myself one strawberry. Just one.
It was…
really, really good! I hustle back home with the rest.
21 July 2025 – Busy morning, the day is clipping along, but surely there’s time for a short afternoon walk? I think False Creek (yet again), and then try to freshen the idea with a new combination of component parts.
Cranky Self objects: “I’ve already done all that!” Philosophic Self saves the day, quotes that nice Mr. Heraclitus: “You cannot step in the same river twice.”
Albeit by attribution, and much translated and much paraphrased, but the idea is clear. Everything (you included) is always all new, so go get it.
I haul out my much-creased False Creek map, and make a sort-of plan.
Walk down to The Village ferry dock (south-east end of False Creek, by Olympic Village Square); ferry to David Lam Park dock; walk on west along this portion of Vancouver’s Seawall, on past George Wainborn Park; then up-over the Granville Street bridge; down-around Granville Loop Park… and whatever.
The day is so mid-summer!
Music festival in the City Centre Artist Lodge forecourt as I walk past; patio umbrellas shading crowds on down Quebec & Ontario streets; and here in Olympic Village Square as well…
keeping all these customers cool, as well as one lop-eared dog (front & centre).
Onto an Aquabus, which is surprisingly empty until we stop at Yaletown Dock and pick up an extended family of Brazilian tourists. As we pull away, the driver, for fee-setting purposes, turns his head to quiz them on destination and demographics.
“Round-trip to Granville Island, six adults, two seniors and one child,” says the matriarch. She’s prompt with the data, but loses the credit-card quick-draw contest with one of her sons. She plays to her audience with a “What-can-I-do?” gesture, and is rewarded with amused laughter.
I hop off at David Lam; they carry on to the tourist (& resident) attraction that we call an “island,” even though it isn’t, not quite.
I’m always amazed at the diversity of traffic on and in the water — everything from whopping private vessels in the marinas to ferries to kayaks/dragon boats/paddle-boards to wildlife — and nobody seems to hit anybody else.
Even when they’re a couple moving very slowly on an isolated little paddle-board.
I turn my attention landward.
Thistles old & new, backed by ripening blackberries…
which cause a passing teen to tell her boyfriend about the berry patch behind her house, when she was growing up. “They’re awfully bitter until they’re really ripe,” she warns him.
The Seawall, like False Creek, has a mixed-use culture. Pedestrians here; cyclists there. In between David Lam & George Wainborn parks, I also get a good look at the Granville Street bridge, up ahead.
Closer still, almost opposite Granville Island, a good look at Giants — the six concrete silos painted for the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale by the Brazilian twins known as OSGEMEOS, and now a lasting icon in the Biennale’s Open Air Museum.
This north-facing façade in shadows, mid-afternoon, but compelling even so.
Once I’m almost beneath the bridge, my next challenge is to find my way onto it.
Please, you’re thinking, how hard can that be? Not impossible, I grant you, but it does involve discovering that the west-side pedestrian path is closed for repairs, and orienteering my way up-along Weedland…
aka Waiting-For-Development-Land, to find the east-side path.
Which I do.
So here I am, heading toward centre bridge. With an overhead view of Creek traffic and a different angle on Giant.
Almost directly overhead, a reminder that this is a working concrete facility, not just a mural backdrop.
Starting down the bridge’s southern slope, I look back. Now I can enjoy the Giant‘s sunny faces and the long eastern view of False Creek behind them.
Over land now, over the Granville Island Kids Market and playground, backing onto Alder Bay.
More orienteering required, to get myself off this bridge!
I place my faith in this zebra crossing over these lanes, then this path and down these steps, and yes! it works.
I’m in Granville Loop Park, with a waterfall sculpture that reminds us yet again that, all those centuries ago, Heraclitus got it right. An ever-constant “V” of water, created by ever-changing water molecules, in ever-flowing cascades from the two upper corners.
Across the kiddy play area, with the yellow Coyotes in Area sign to my right and tennis players straight ahead…
and down and around and out to the West 2nd bus stop…
where, from a shady bench, I look up at the bridge I have just crossed.
"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 