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.

Just as soon as the bus drops me back home.