All posts in category Walking

Land Cruise: 4 September

Somewhere north of Gillam, the sun not yet visible, but the horizon glowing…

and, an hour and a half later, the first glimpse of Churchill, its massive port structure.

We arrive. We scatter, each to our own priorities.

Mine will take me pretty directly from the train station (the dark oblong near the top of that bottom blue loop) straight through town to Hudson Bay.

Not quite directly. First a stop to refuel in the Seaport Hotel’s coffee shop.

It is clean and cheerful, unpretentious, and near the station. A convenient pivot-point. (I have no idea of the dramatic role it will play in my life, later that day.)

Fortified, I take my own boots past a boots mural…

straight-lining it to the water.

And there it is.

There, too, is one of the warning signs I’ve been told about. The polar bear “season” has not yet quite started. But this is the polar bears’ world, and they live by their own instincts, not the schedule of glossy tourist brochures. Every visitor is told to obey all the signs. Yes, I am told, go to the beach area, but no, don’t go to water’s edge, because bears can rise right up out of the sea, and don’t go near the rocks, because that’s where they like to hang out. As the tourism rep in the train station explains to the person in front of me: “You wouldn’t want to step on one.”

Lots of “don’ts.” I take them seriously. You have to respect nature.

So I do something very safe. I climb this convenient, if unorthodox, observation tower…

right to the top level.

Where, first, I view the forbidden rocks to the east …

and then, second, I focus on the beach right in front of me.

I focus, specifically, on the man way down there at water’s edge, walking happily along — man plus small dog, equally happy and unleashed.

This dog.

Not eaten by a polar bear, as you can see. The dog’s owner is a quite elderly Inuk, so I decide if anyone can give me reliable advice, he’s the one. I greet him. I say I watched him enjoying his shoreline walk, and I’d like to do that myself.

He explains he goes there because he likes to pick up stones. “Me too!” I cry. We beam at each other, dig in our respective pockets, and hold out our handfuls of stones for mutual inspection. Much murmured enthusiasm and poking at treasures ensues. After all that, I ask about safety. He says, “You have to watch. I don’t see any bears around right now.” He adds that if I position myself behind the sand bar, I should be fine, since I won’t be next to deep water.

With further compliments about our respective good taste in beach stones, we part company. He toward town, and I straight to the rivulet behind that sand bar.

Where (bottom left)…

I keep the promise I made my toes, that day on the Point Grey beach.

The day is cool — about 9-10C — but sunny and not yet windy. I continue walking the beach, completely happy. I see beluga whales cresting the water surface — just arcs of white, rising and falling, nothing dramatic, but clear enough for me to know they are indeed whales and not waves.

Finally, I walk west toward another line of forbidden rocks…

obediently stop short, and turn inland.

These bright, helpful signposts are all over town. This one is just uphill from the beach, and persuades me to visit the Granary Ponds…

with an initial stop in St. Paul’s Anglican Church, there on the left.

I look at various artefacts, including this 1930s Cree plaque quoting scripture from the Gospel of St. Matthew…

and I read the 2008 Federal Government’s Statement of Apology, signed by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to all those who suffered under the residential school system. Here’s an excerpt:

The road out to the Granary Ponds leads me past riots of wildflowers, still vibrant so late in the season…

and then a closer view of the Port of Churchill…

which, if political promises are kept, will benefit from major expansion in the near future. (An initiative announced by Prime Minister Carney during a European trip — one more move in building stronger and more diversified relations with other parts of the world.)

I backtrack into town. My one goal is to walk. A lot. Though I’ve had only one prior visit to Churchill, in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of that decade going in and out of the Arctic hamlets. I haven’t the foolishness, the arrogance, to think I am any kind of insider, but I do still resonate with all of this. Young self did lots of jumping around. Old self seeks only to put feet on the land, to see and smell and hear the land, and be in this place. So I walk.

And, oh yes, I see very northern sights.

This truck decal, for instance…

and this komatik (sled), waiting for winter…

and this polite request in the doorway of Itsanitaq Museum.

But I also see streetscapes that could be anywhere in Canada.

There are community gardens all over Canada, as well…

though this one takes proper northern measures to protect the crops.

Right next to it, a happy pod of beluga whales, swimming a very different ocean.

And then… and then, no more pictures.

Because then, getting on for 5 pm, my gut announces that it is not pleased with the tasty falafel bowl I had for lunch in a highly recommended local bistro. My gut makes clear that it plans soon to start Throwing Out the Garbage.

This will be merely unpleasant, not dangerous, but also highly inconvenient. The train station is not yet open and I am not registered in any hotel. I’m again near the Seaport Hotel, so I walk in. What else can I do? They look after me. I am safe and sheltered. My gut can briskly go about its housekeeping detail in privacy. When I finally totter off to the train station, a fellow passenger, the station staff and VIA Rail staff are all equally practical and kind. Soon I am whooshed aboard the train, tucked up in my own sleeper-cabin. After a few more rounds of garbage-removal, I sleep. When I wake again, I am completely well. It’s all over.

So is the day in Churchill. Our train is now in motion.

I lie there, think about all that helpful kindness — and decide that my little bout of food poisoning was in fact the final heart-warming event in a thoroughly wonderful day.

8 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Travel, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/07/land-cruise-4-september/

Land Cruise: 1 September

1 September – I’ll be one day and a bit, in Winnipeg. On the land, and on the water too.

The theme of land and rivers, the two great pathways of our country, keeps gaining strength. Not because I intellectually seek it out. Because it is imposing itself on me.

A tear-off map at my hotel inspires my walk: down to the Red River, there behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and then along the walking trails up into Stephen Juba Park, back down and around the curve of The Forks (where the Assiniboine River joins the Red), onto the water in a 30-minute tour, and more river-side walking, both rivers.

The Red River. The cereal of my childhood, even my very own Red River coat, as a child.

The river, of course, is more important for reasons other than cereal and coats.

My path along the Red up into Stephen Juba Park leads me past old pilings, last remnants of the glory days of this port (before the Panama Canal opened, and offered shipping an easier, quicker route through the Americas).

This is also when I first tap my boots in the water.

Literal next step in a whimsical project I hope I can complete: having tapped toes in the Pacific (Burrard Inlet, cf. my post of 25 August), I want now to tap them in the Red River, Hudson Bay and Lake Ontario.

Did you notice the trestle bridge, in the distance of that last photo? Used for military purposes, I’m told, and now the train bridge. I’m drawn to it. I admire the utility of these bridges, their visible geometry and, once I draw near, the majesty (albeit scruffy) of the near end of this particular example.

After I turn, after I follow the riverwalk bend around the point of land, I am now beside the Assiniboine River. I tap toes in its waters as well — a bonus not part of the original plan — and, as I do so, I notice a yellow Waterways tour boat mid-stream.

There is a dock, there is a boat about to depart, I climb aboard.

Only one fellow passenger, this early in the day: a Montreal film-maker, in town to work on a production here. Our guide has an impeccably Spanish name and an impeccably Canadian accent: his family moved here when he was two years old.

Kayak going one way, we’re going the other. Miguel is powering ahead, having now explained those three lines on the bridge pillar. Each is a water level: blue for normal spring levels, yellow for the danger of rising waters, red for floods. (I think of my brother’s years in Winnipeg, and the spring he helped sandbag against that year’s inundation.)

Back on land, toes duly tapped in not one but two mighty rivers, I head for the markets within The Forks complex. While you can buy food aboard the Winnipeg-Churchill run, it’s the like of microwaved subs, I’ve been told — the same person then suggesting I lay in some supplies.

So I do. Bison Snack Sticks (Canadian), Thunderbird “real food” bars (American), oat cakes (Isle of Mull) and Gemini apples (very very very local). Tomorrow morning, I’ll snag myself a few hard-boiled eggs from the hotel’s breakfast bar as well.

Feeling sufficiently prepared, I leave The Forks. But not before I admire Caboose 76602, a permanent installation on the grounds.

Built in Montreal in the 1930s, retired from service in Winnipeg in 1988, it is now “dedicated to the thousands of CN train crews who travelled through Winnipeg and the ‘East Yard’ that is now The Forks.”

Tomorrow, 12:05 pm Central time, I’ll be back on board one of today’s trains.

The one that will take me to Churchill.

7 Comments
by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Travel, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/01/land-cruise-1-september/

Toes to the Waves

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.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 25 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 25 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/25/toes-to-the-waves/

That Smile

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 Breeze mural 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.”

But, ohhhh… Cheshire Cat will be gone.

Her Smile will have to float in our memories.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 18 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 18 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/18/that-smile/

Rail Yard. And Other Invisibles. (And Visibles.)

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.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 31 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 31 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/31/rail-yard-and-other-invisibles-and-visibles/

That Nice Mr. H

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.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 21 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 21 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/21/that-nice-mr-h/

A Tree

13 July 2025 – I stand there on the sidewalk, having myself a Joyce Kilmer moment.

If you now find yourself chanting “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” then you may be of my generation — someone who also grew up somewhere in North America and learned that poem in elementary school.

The 1913 language may now strike us as a bit over-heated. We’re more likely to respond to the approach taken by UBC Professor of Forest Ecology, Dr. Suzanne Simard. Her 2021 seminal work, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (now published in 21 languages), has propelled us right to the frontier of work being done in the field of plant communication and intelligence.

Kilmer or Simard, it’s about respect for trees, each pursuing that respect with their own language and skills.

My respect today is visual — for the sheer beauty & majesty of this tree. The textures of the bark, the play of colours.

Wonderful details, up close.

Tiny golden leaves, caught in bark crevasses at the base of the trunk…

a sprig of new leaves, erupting mid-trunk…

spider webs! …

and the bark itself, needing no adornment.

Yet, there is one final adornment.

Of nature, but added by human hands.

9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 13 July 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by icelandpenny on 13 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/13/a-tree/

St. George & the ‘Hood

19 June 2025 – Forget the dragon. That is so 10 centuries ago! These days, St. George — or, anyway, our St. George — is all about urban/eco sustainability and livability.

I’m first bounced onto this theme by a graffito on a waste bin. One that I initially think disrespectful of the human origins of the slogan…

but then reconsider, as I look smack across the street.

I’m on East 7th, heading farther east, and I’m staring into the busy abundance of this community garden stretching on north to East 6th. All lives matter, yes? We humans and plants are woven into the same eco-system.

This little local garden is very much of this neighbourhood, with its neighbourly values. A place with low-rise homes, many of them vintage wooden structures; a place where a kicked-off toddler’s shoe…

is carefully displayed at sidewalk’s edge by some later passer-by, in the hopes it may yet be retrieved.

I drop down to East 6th, look north as I cross Guelph, think how much I like this human scale — but have no illusions it will last much longer. Let your eye travel down the row of modest bright-painted houses…

to that equally bright-painted construction crane down below. That’s the future, and increasingly the present.

But!

St. George is at work.

Well, the St. George Rainway. It’s been a long time coming, but now here it is, nearing completion — with its (and I quote} “green rainwater infrastructure features like rain gardens that incorporate plants, trees and soil to manage rainwater…”

I step up to the mini-plaza with its rock, its signage mounted on a plinth…

adorned with a Wood Sorrel cut-out…

and lots of information.

Go ahead — spread the image, track its elements; I’ll wait.

Together, we learn that the Rainway along St. George celebrates a Lost Creek, a tributary to False Creek that has long since been buried underground. (For that matter, this final eastern end of False Creek, into which the lost creek ran, no longer exists either.)

While you’re exploring that handy map, please note not just the Lost Creek, left-above “You are here,” but also China Creek on the far right, and E. Broadway (East Broadway), three streets to the south.

I admire the rain garden that parallels the sidewalk immediately to the south …

then cross East 6th to admire this sign in the rain garden running on north…

and feel more vindicated than ever in making my peace with the “Plant lives matter” graffito. “Thriving in diverse communities” sounds like the prescription for healthy life, period, whatever form of life we happen to be.

You’ll understand why, with that thought fresh in mind, I fall over laughing at the dumpster graffito I see immediately afterwards.

On I go, on to China Creek North Park. (See? That’s why I wanted you to locate it on the map.)

I am heartened, as I approach the edge of this large park, to see fresh new vine fencing woven into the woodlands periphery. (It had become very scruffy.)

At first, looking down the slope, the basin of the park appears generic and banal. Old fashioned, even.

All that mown grass. And baseball diamonds.

But then, as always, I reconsider. The top of the slope is lined with benches, and they are well used, in diverse ways. At the moment, for example, the bench on the left hosts Headset Guy, who in fact is reading a real, physical book…

while the bench on the right hosts Music Man, who strums his acoustic guitar so softly it is almost subliminal. A woman just out of frame is hunkered down, motionless & meditative, and the woman you can see walking past the benches is about to start down the winding path that snakes its way to the playground at the lower level.

And I am about to join her.

This park is another “Lost Creek” — or, more precisely, a Lost Watershed. Before this last bit of False Creek was filled in, a whole network of creeks tumbled through here to feed its waters. Once filled in, the area at one point became a garbage dump, but was subsequently rescued and turned into parkland.

The slope is now naturalized, and it is wonderfully, exuberantly, messy.

With signage to justify the mess.

At the bottom of the path, I peer down the final bit of slope, the bit with a slide and (here) a mesh climbing ladder…

and, down there at the very bottom-bottom, swings and a pirate’s ship and other kiddy delights.

All this diversity! Social plants, social humans, thriving in diversity.

Walking homeward, more happy plant/human interaction…

in this volunteer-managed street corner garden, part of the City’s Green Streets Program.

And then… a reminder that not everything is happy-happy.

That some current trends are jarring and disruptive, and will damage both humans and nature.

Taped to a tree on quiet, residential East 10th just west of St. George — with its fellow trees all around — a warning about the effects of the redevelopment now being pursued under the City’s Broadway Plan.

I may know more about the correct use of apostrophes (i.e., not to form noun plurals) than the author of this plea, but these tenants, in the adjoining notice…

teach me a new word. “Demoviction.” As in, the eviction of tenants from a building, so that it may be demolished, usually for redevelopment. A phenomenon integral to the Broadway Plan. And gaining pace.

I read a testimonial, also taped to the tree, the words of a woman who has been a tenant here for 22 years: “This affordable home allowed me to continue to raise my daughter here after my husband passed away. It provided a safe community and a stable, comfortable home.”

Right next door, the specific redevelopment being proposed: Rezone from Residential to Comprehensive Development category, and, on this street of two-storey homes, put up a 17-storey tower.

Hmm. Used to be, dragons breathed fire and wore scales. Now they may instead breathe rezoning, and clad themselves in 17 storeys.

9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 19 June 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 19 June 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/06/19/st-george-the-hood/

13 for 13

13 June 2025 – It is all very tidy — you’ll see 13 photos, and this is June 13th — but it is not at all what I thought I was going to do. I had a theme, and then I had another theme, and then it all got away from me.

As tends to happen.

(Not that it matters.)

The first theme announces itself as I walk down Quebec St. toward False Creek, and look eastward into the alley.

Perfect! One photo, a cutesy post title — something like “X’s and Oh!” perhaps? — and I’m done.

Then I see this.

OK! Two images, street theme, call the post “On the Street” — and I’m done.

Then, crossing the Science World parking lot just off the end of False Creek, I see this tired but happy paddle-boarder telling a friend her adventure before packing up.

Three images. But still OK, the Street theme holds.

Ah, but next, heading west along False Creek, I am seduced (not for the first time) by the magic transformation of an ordinary apartment building when it bounces off the mirrored, textured surface of Parq Casino.

My theme promptly morphs from “street” to “surface.” Any thing or any living creature, I decide, on any surface, horizontal or vertical. Suddenly, everything that interest me… qualifies.

One dragon boat and two Aquabus ferries, out there on the surface of the water.

Mussel shells on the Seawall cobblestones, just past Cambie Bridge. (What’s left after a crow hurls a mussel from a great height onto a hard surface, then swoops down to eat the contents exposed to him when the shell splits upon impact.)

Up on Cambie Bridge, the fourth annual Missing and Murdered Indigenous Men, Boys and Two Spirit People Memorial March.

Back under Cambie Bridge, blue rings on the surface of bridge pillars, marking what a 5-metre rise in sea levels will look like, plus paddlers on the water. Plus a crow, swooping through on the surface of the air.

A generous message painted on the back surface of this bench facing Habitat Island: “I love the strange people I don’t know.”

Vivid new growth, on the trunk of this conifer.

Two mutilated crow posters on an Ontario-Street utility box which, between them, almost add up to one complete crow.

My favourite enigmatic Street-Art Girl, a little battered by now (and aren’t we all), but still visible on the wall of that building overlooking the parking lot just off Ontario and 3rd Avenue.

And finally… my favourite birds nest, perched on the surface of this alley fence post, again just off Ontario Street but by this time between East 6th & 7th, as I head for home.

I am still planning a post title to fit my “surface” theme.

Until I count how many photos I’ve chosen, and see they total thirteen. On the 13th of June.

I know an act of force majeure when I meet one. I obey.

8 Comments
by icelandpenny on 13 June 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 13 June 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/06/13/13-for-13/

Riprap! (and other discoveries)

7 June 2025 – Having walked down Heather Street, right to the False Creek Seawall, I am — not surprisingly — at the Heather Civic Marina. Which — also not surprisingly — is full of gently rocking boats.

I am not interested in the boats. I look left, where my feet will next take me…

and my mind bounces off most of what I see. Bounces off the low tide, the prow of a boat, the Seawall pathway, the bench in the bend of that pathway, and the collection of blue café umbrellas in Leg in Boot Square just ahead. My mind lands squarely on all that rock.

That sloping expanse of rock.

Riprap!

I grin at the rocks, mouthing the word.

I am surely influenced by Ana’s recent posts in her Anvica’s Gallery blog, in which she pays tribute to Wonderful Words. Most recently, to “ababol” — local slang, in her part of Spain, for “poppy.” She knows the correct Spanish for “poppy” is “amapola,” but she prefers “ababol.” Why? “It’s more fun.”

That’s my attitude to “riprap.” The fun you can have, with those two short syllables! Roll the r’s (Rrrrip-rrrap). Or pop the p’s (Rippp! Rappp)!

For me, though, it’s more than the fun of word games. It’s time travel.

Like Colonel Aurelio Buendía, remembering the day his father took him to discover ice, so I stand here on the Seawall, remembering the day I learned the word “riprap.” I was typing up some handwritten notes for a friend, and dissolved in giggles at a word I couldn’t read but deciphered as something like… “riprap.” Well, it couldn’t be that, could it, that’s not a word. So I said rude things about his horrible handwriting. And he patiently explained the word and its application — loose rock placed so to prevent erosion and preserve structural integrity.

For example… along the maritime edge of the False Creek Seawall.

Though Aurelio Buendía got to discover ice, the memory only surfaced as he faced a firing squad. Now, in much happier circumstances, my memory & I set out to discover riprap as I continue my walk toward Granville Island.

Vegetation has already discovered the riprap. All those crevices, just waiting to host whatever might be blowing in the wind.

From tiny, tenacious growth I can’t identify…

to shrubs and tall spikes of aconite, escapees from planted gardens.

A crow forages, for whatever he might find…

and I, initially taking in yet another sweep of vegetation, suddenly notice a tiny turquoise medallion, set in the Seawall ledge.

Which leads me to other discoveries, this bright breezy day.

It is one more marker in the provincial Control Survey system, a database of coordinates, elevations & related information archived for public access & use. The word “survey” flips me into more time travel. Almost 100 years ago, my dad spent two university summers as part of a survey team paddling the rivers & lakes of northern Saskatchewan.

The Seawall itself invites time travel. At the appropriate spot, signage shows us the unobstructed 2017 view across the water and through the city, right up to The Lions (two iconic mountain peaks, now more often called The Twin Sisters). It is, the signage announces, a protected view.

And yes, today in 2025, there it still is.

Right at the eastern edge of Charleson Park, more signage. This one a warning.

I am bemused. Warning? Are the elderly armed & dangerous? As I play with this very entertaining possibility, I hear the sound of approaching cyclists and a happy voice cries, “Well! That looks good!” The voice belongs to the man pedalling a trishaw, with two elderly passengers on the seat in front of him. A second trishaw follows. Laughter all ’round.

No wonder they approve of the sign — Cycling Without Age is a Canadian charity whose volunteers take local seniors (and their families and friends) out for a spin.

From elderly to young, from sturdy trishaw to tiny bicycle: Polkadot Helmet Missy & I pause halfway through Charleson Park…

to watch a City maintenance man wait for his colleagues before attempting to yoick that heavy fence section out of the way.

More walking, more discoveries. Including the Charleson Park sign that reminds us the pretty pond behind it is a seasonal pond, and it is meant to dry up in summer, and that’s okay. (Got it?)

And then I’m right under the Granville Street bridge, looking yet again at boats bobbing in the water, and yet again I am not focused on the boats.

I’m looking beyond, at that bright blue horizontal line of signage that placards the False Creek Fishermen’s Wharf, with its moorings and facilities for independent commercial fishers, and a wharf where the public can buy their catch.

More precisely, I’m focused on the pale blue rectangle, there on the left, just off all that bright blue.

That’s the old shipping container that now houses Go Fish — the fish purchased right there on the wharf, served up with chips and other delights, both trad & less so. They take no reservations, offer no indoors seating, and there is always a line-up.

Later, with my grilled wild salmon & salad, I plonk myself in one of those green bucket chairs, and enjoy my fish. And the view. And a bit of a rest.

And then… I walk back east.

The high route, this time, not the Seawall. It climbs me into the upper elevations of Charleson Park, all forest and dappled bark-chip trails…

and nary a chunk of riprap in sight.

That’s fine. I’ve had my moment.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 June 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 June 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/06/07/riprap-and-other-discoveries/

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