All posts in category Walking

Under the Threat of Rain

12 November 2024 – It’s definitely a leaden sky up there, but down here there’s lots to look at. Plus there’s a rain jacket in my backpack. I am equipped.

Colours pop against all that grey.

Bright autumn leaves snagged in a still glowing shrub…

seed pods tawny against yellowing foliage…

seed pods cascading from their vines…

and a small tree, starkly elegant against its stone & brick backdrop…

all of them my companions, as I walk my way north down Scotia Street, flanking the east wall of…

the Brewery Creek Building.

Not its original name! Even “Fell’s Candy Factory,” still visible above the brass lettering, is not the original name.

Built c. 1904 as a storage cellar for Vancouver Brewery Ltd., this building was later (among other things) a candy factory, a creamery, a grease works and a stucco manufacturing plant before the restoration and renovations that, in 1993…

transformed it into a collection of live/work condos in a Class A heritage building.

New-builds are now springing up all around. It more than holds its own.

Though I like some of the sassy newcomers.

Especially ones that prove modest building materials can also hold their own — when deployed with bold colour and strong, clean lines.

And this is the back-alley view!

A bit farther north, I’m still caught up in the old/new mix that is Mount Pleasant these days. Low vintage buildings and early (2017 or so) Vancouver Mural Festival artworks mark East 3rd and the alley just off Main Street..

but behind them to the south rises one of the sleek new eco-conscious work facilities that are now reshaping the area, East 5th in particular.

I’m headed in the opposite direction, north & west to the east end of False Creek. My route takes me past Mountain Equipment now-American-Company-not-Canadian-Coop. I consciously Don’t Go There; I instead enjoy the exterior of this mass timber building. Including the corvine slogan under one pillar’s footing…

and droplets sliding down the water course built into the Quebec Street façade.

You see? It has rained, it will rain, but at the moment, it is not — not quite — raining.

I’m closing in on False Creek…

but it’s not the geodesic dome of Science World that catches my eye. it’s the runaway red balloon down there against the railing.

And then I forget all about the red balloon.

I can hear chimes & gongs & cymbals & whistles, and I know how to interpret them. They tell me that the glass tower by the Science World entrance, sadly silent during a long restoration, is once again in glorious, ridiculous, delightful, full-tilt operation. It has no name that I can find, but if ever any 2024 contraption deserved the name Rube Goldberg Machine — this is it.

Things clank, whiz, fly around, spiral and drop, tip and tilt, climb and do it again. A woman grins at me over her children’s heads. “The kids are the excuse. I could stand here all day.” I nod.

But we eventually move on …

I, past the reclining question-mark outside Science World’s creek-facing west wall that invites us to consider our daily choices, all of which affect the environment.

Question-mark nicely suits what happens next. I find myself in an impromptu focus group of SeaWall pedestrians — diversified in our demographics, but united in our conclusion.

Despite much conjecture among us, we remain puzzled. Goose? Swan? We settle for Very Large Waterfowl. We also agree that he/she is gliding over a sunken boat (the hull gleams greenish-white, the mast protrudes). Pleased with ourselves and each other, we go our various ways.

By the time I reach my Cambie Bridge cross-over point, the threat-of-rain has become really-rain.

I stand under bridge ramparts, exchange forecasts with a guy also pawing his backpack for a jacket, and watch a young woman toss her red umbrella aside so she can kick up her heels on one of the playground swings.

Jacketed & be-hatted, all zippered up, I climb my way up onto the bridge and head out over the water. I am so charmed by this graffito on the railing…

that I stand here until a ferry obligingly comes along, to include in the picture. (The wait gives me time to compile a Glad They Exist list, ferries being just one item. I find it a helpful exercise, very soothing, a counterbalance to all that I wish did not exist.)

And then I put the camera away, because, good grief, this is now serious rain.

And I then I take it out again, one last time.

Here at West 8th & Yukon, a living demonstration of the slogan back there under the MEC pillar.

Crows know! This crow knows he is very wet. And he is telling us all about it.

7 Comments
by icelandpenny on 12 November 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 12 November 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/11/12/under-the-threat-of-rain/

Leaves & No-Leaves (& the Importance of Pockets)

7 November 2024 – I walk along, getting some early-morning daylight into my system. I see that, even this late in the season, some leaves are still putting on a bravura show.

Then I look up. Up a bare tree trunk, all the way up, up & out over the street.

I see what no-leaves can do.

I stare at it in absolute delight. I narrow my eyes. Do an imaginary zoom for tighter focus.

It’s the dance of the fractals, isn’t it? Right there above my tip-tilted head. Some time does pass, before I lower my gaze.

Only to see a little girl, staring at me with the same intensity I have just given to those tree branches. It is a child’s stare — curious, open, honest, without malice. But still a little unnerving.

“Hello,” I say, “I like the monster on your coat.” (A happy monster in minimalist design, all bright eyes and friendly fangs, if you can picture it.) She giggles. “I like him too.” Her waiting mum leans back against the car, reassured about the way this bit of sidewalk interaction is progressing.

“My coat has pockets,” says the child, patting one for emphasis.

“Mine too!” I cry, patting mine as well. “I like pockets. You can put stuff in them.”

She nods. “And,” she adds — clearly a parting comment, mum is opening the car door — “and, when it’s cold, you can put your hands in your pockets too!”

With that, we go our separate ways, she to day-care and I to Dude Chilling Park, Sahalli Park and points all around.

(Please note: my coat pockets now contain gloves.)

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 November 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 November 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/11/07/leaves-no-leaves-the-importance-of-pockets/

En Route

31 October 2024 – This little theme launches itself early yesterday evening, as I look out my window at a determined crow, en route his Burnaby roost in the driving rain.

It continues today, happily not in rain, as I walk homeward along False Creek. from the foot of Davie Street.

Where I see:

a seagull briefly resting on Jerry Pethick’s Time Top, en route (as wing direction soon suggests) Yaletown or thereabouts…

an Aquabus ferry en route the David Lam dock…

an impatient dog en route the Coopers’ Park off-leash dog park (once his owner stops fiddling with the gates)…

a flurry of leaves next to Coopers’ Park en route nowhere at all, but having themselves a brief moment of airborne excitement…

a young woman en route an even more limber body, at the Seawall in front of Coopers’ Park…

a Zipply courier en route his client, providing said client (per the website) with “a zero-emissions delivery solution,” all this in front of Cirque du Soleil’s production of Echo, en route (but not until February 2025) Houston, Texas…

and finally…

bus-riders, motorists, cyclists & pedestrians, collectively en route…

to everywhere they want their Compass cards, fuel tanks, legs & lungs to take them.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 31 October 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 31 October 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/10/31/en-route/

Time & Place

22 September 2024 – Time & place. Time & places. Places, through time.

Two recent days, that have me noticing the play of time across place.

Friday, I’m walking back along north-shore False Creek after a downtown lunch with a friend. I stop to read one of the railings that mark a stretch of informational glass & metal way-stations near Coopers Park.

“Look across the water,” it says, so I do. Eastward across the smooth, bright water alive with pleasure boats, ferry boats and a couple paddling their kayak.

This is 2024 False Creek, much transformed over the millennia.

Coast Salish people once fished here, in clean waters…

but the 19th c. brought sawmills, small port operations and, after the 1887 arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a booming demand for railway-related services and support. The shoreline and waters were very busy…

with piles of materials and with hand labour…

but the waters were no longer so clean.

Incised words on metal panels remind us of the range of activities, of purposes, of people, across all that time.

Next big transformation: the mid-20th c. shift in industrial patterns and the post-Expo ’86 drive to restore and repurpose False Creek. Today it is recreational, and residential, and the waters are a whole lot healthier than they used to be.

I learn more about all this the very next day. Saturday morning, I am once again on the north shore of False Creek, freshly delivered to the Yaletown Dock by ferry, to join a downtown walking tour run by the AFBC (Architecture Foundation of British Columbia).

We pass the now-repurposed CPR roundhouse and walk through adjacent Yaletown, named for the small BC community where the CPR first had its construction equipment & repair shops, before relocating work to the more convenient Vancouver location.

Spare, functional Victorian industrial architecture still lines several Mainland Street blocks. The buildings now host restaurants, condos, artisan boutiques, and design and other creative small firms — but their Victorian bones still show.

Some of these structures are rightly celebrated by their current owners/tenants — for example, by Engels & Volker, whose website honours the history of this elegant former factory and warehouse at 1152 Mainland, built in 1912.

We walk on, our group weaving its way past other examples of old made new, and also of ghosts-of-old replaced by new. Layers of time, laid upon place.

Late in the tour, we stand under the canopy of Telus Garden which, when it opened in 2015, had brought a whole downtown block into the mixed-use trend then gathering civic strength.

I look up at the glulam curves overhead…

and I’m thrown to another time and place.

To Toronto, and the 2008 transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario by architect Frank Gehry and media magnate (and art collector) Ken Thomson.

It was a project born of love as well as commerce: both men native Torontonians, and both grateful to the AGO because, modest as it was at the time, it introduced each of them to art and helped shape both their lives.

The AGO did a lot for me as well. As a volunteer I spent many hours in its rooms, soaking up the art and learning about things. Like glulam.

(You wondered where I was going with this, didn’t you!)

The soaring Galleria Italia, stretching 450 feet along Dundas Street, is a vaulted dance of glued laminated Douglas fir and glass.

I always loved doing a shift out on the Galleria Italia, seeing — and hearing — visitors’ reactions when they first stepped into the space. Adults politely gasped. Schoolchildren on tour, especially when coached by their guide, agreed it looked like an overturned canoe. (Though one little girl was having none of that. “It’s an armadillo,” she announced firmly.)

My favourite reaction? The little boy who barrelled through the doors well ahead of his mother. He screeched to a halt, swivelled his head in stunned amazement and then, just as his mother caught up with him, leapt in the air, arms flung high. “WOW!” he yelled, his fists punching the air.

Time & place. Places in time. Memory.

8 Comments
by icelandpenny on 22 September 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, Toronto, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 22 September 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/22/time-place/

3 Plans, 3 Surprises

16 September 2024 – Two of the surprises were bonus additions to the plan; the other was a subtraction, that turned out not to matter.

Plan # 1

A friend and I meet at the VanDusen Botanical Garden where, in addition to a walk in the Garden, we plan to take advantage of a bonus activity — free admission for Garden visitors to an unrelated fundraiser event in one of the facility’s meeting rooms.

Surprise. The event is a separate ticket and, as befits a fundraiser, at a hefty price. We decide we are not that fascinated by the event’s focus, and settle for the Garden walk, all on its own.

And it is plenty! Despite heavy skies and intermittent rain…

the air is luminous, and the grounds pop with colour and texture.

The mossy curve of a tree branch, weeping over a brook…

the colour patterns of a Birch tree, bold against its backdrop…

colour intensities along a pathway, so green, so purple, with the glistening silver of rain drops…

and the tonal palette of freshly raked gravel…

in the newly restored Stone Garden.

Plan # 2

The next day, my only plan is to put myself in the hands of my companion, out there in Surrey, who has curated a trio of walks for us to explore. I know about the three walks; unbeknownst to me, he has a surprise in mind for one of them.

BC is chock-full of soaring trees, and sometimes all you have to do is tilt back your head to be wowed all over again.

This head-tilt has me in the middle of Redwood Park, an 80-acre park that contains “the largest collection of Redwood trees north of the 49th parallel” (which is Canada-speak for this stretch of the Canada/US border).

It contains more than 30 other species of European, Asian and North American trees as well, testimony to the park’s backstory. In 1881, on the occasion of their 21st birthday, a settler gave his twin deaf sons a land grant each of 40 adjoining acres. Instead of simply farming the land, the reclusive brothers began re-timbering it, starting with Redwoods and expanding their activities over the years.

I love the history and I’m enjoying the trails, all per plan. Then my companion leads me to the secret.

A sort-of clearing, with lots of fallen logs and stumps, and… And what is all this?

It is the park’s “Farie forest,” per this child’s plaque, aka “faerie village,” per Atlas Obscura language, or just plain old Fairy Forest. It is the designated place in the park where children who have been encouraged/helped to build tiny farie/faerie/fairy homes elsewhere come to tuck them into their own ever-expanding community.

Lots of them.

Lots and lots of them!

All of them obeying the signposted rule: “Do not nail or screw them into a tree and do not remove bark.” So, for example, this tiny house with its fresh-moss décor…

is simply looped into place.

While we’re there, a birthday-party’s-worth of young children arrive and are guided to search out the little gift globes that adults have hidden among the fairy houses. Soon small hands are waving large turquoise globes, and laughter fills the forest.

Two more park visits after that, per the Surrey plan, and I have had a splendid day.

Plan # 3

So the only remaining plan, come late afternoon, is to ride SkyTrain and bus back home to Vancouver and my own neighbourhood.

A simple plan that, as I step down from the bus, offers me one final surprise.

It is Main Street’s turn to host one of this year’s Car Free Days, here in the Lower Mainland! Twenty blocks with no cars, but lots of feet, dog paws, kiosks and tents and tables and things to buy, watch, eat and do.

I join in. I could buy anything from earrings to hand-embroidered T-shirts to goat’s milk hand-milled soaps; I could check I’m registered for the upcoming provincial election or sign up as the newest volunteer at a neighbourhood community centre; I could buy Japanese or Thai or Sri Lankan or Mexican street food (or a cone of old-fashioned day-glo candy floss); I could hold out my hand for a henna-dye pattern or bare some other bit of anatomy for an ink-&-needle permanent tattoo; I could even try my skills at skateboarding in what is surely the world’s tiniest skateboard arena.

But I don’t.

Instead, I watch a judo demonstration, and a juggler, and next join the crowd watching this performer not swallow his sword after all.

Then, finally, I turn around and go home.

Per plan.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 16 September 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 16 September 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/16/3-plans-3-surprises/

Nothing, Everything

7 September 2024 – It’s suddenly hot — so much for the pivot to autumn! — and I decide to go chill with the Dude, in Dude Chilling Park. As you probably know, I’ve done it before. Today, I want to do it again, and for the same reason.

Half an hour, I tell myself: half an hour on a bench, to share once again the pulse of this little neighbourhood park with no amenities but so much community.

One amenity: the Michael Dennis bronze statue…

whose appearance gave rise to the nickname for both the statue (officially, Reclining Figure) and the park itself (officially, Guelph Park).

I find a bench in the shade, with the street to my back, a breeze in my face and a clear view across the little square of grass that constitutes the park.

I sit. I watch all the quiet ways that this park, and this community, engage.

  • Tattoo Sleeve, hurling a frisbee again and again for her wildly happy little dog
  • Book Lady, cross-legged on her blanket in the sun, her spine admirably straight
  • Vape & the Baseball Cap, lugging their basket to the one table on the grass, setting out their picnic while their dog nudges hopefully for some ball-throwing
  • Stroller Mum, in the shade on the far side of the park, over by the Dude’s feet, spending time with both her baby and her book
  • Gossip Guys, laughing & fist-bumping over whatever stories they’re telling each other close to the Dude’s shoulder
  • Labrador Man, whose arrival with a Golden Lab sets off a whole round of dog dynamics: dogs of varying sizes & loyalties inspecting each other, inspecting each other’s frisbees, checking if perhaps any other dog wants to play Run In Crazy Circles (and some do)

It’s a whole lot of nothing, isn’t it? It’s just nothing.

It’s also everything, I think. Quiet pleasure in simple actions, simple interactions.

{Later, I will cross paths with a neighbour, who tells me his very small, and very old & frail, dog likes this park: “The dogs are always friendly.”)

I rise from my bench. I only then notice the plaque…

and realize that I have not been sitting here alone.

2 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 September 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 September 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/07/nothing-everything/

We Pivot

3 September 2024 – Yesterday, Monday, was the pivot.

Holiday Monday, Labour Day, and good-bye to summer. One season ends; a new one begins — kiddies go back to school, organizations launch fall schedules, our clothing is suddenly no longer / once again appropriate.

I do myself a Monday loop down around my end of False Creek. Me plus half the city. We are at play!

Cyclists stop to buy yerba mate from a tricycle-based vendor…

a lone kayaker veers toward the Creekside Paddling Centre…

a busker sets up shop outside Science World…

but, oh, not everybody has a holiday.

These two are hard at work…

turning the white railing white again.

Over at Plaza of Nations, Batch (a pop-up shipping container bar) is closed for the day…

but right opposite, on the other side of the Seawall pathway, Alien E-Bike Rentals is open for business.

Locals may depend on their own bikes, or their own two feet, but visitors like what the six-language website tells them: rent a bike for two, or three, or even five hours, and loop your way around the whole Seawall.

Any day, the basketball courts in Coopers’ Park resound with the thunk of bouncing balls.

Sometimes — as in, a moment from now — they also ring with yelps of triumph, when someone sinks his shot. Look slightly above & to the left of the net. See? That ball is on its way.

It’s not just humans, pivoting from one season to another. We only do it because nature leads the way.

As I climb the incline ramp at the north end of Cambie Bridge, I look between the levels, and there it is…

colour! Our very own Trooping of the Colour.

It’s not yet officially fall, here in Canada. That arrives with the Fall Equinox, this year at 8:43 a.m. on Sunday, 22 September.

So: officially, no. But viscerally, in our bones, in our blood, in the quickened rhythm of our day? Oh yes.

Fall is here.

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 3 September 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 3 September 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/09/03/we-pivot/

“Heritage”… and Heritage

17 August 2024 – Nothing as grand as the slippery nature of abstract nouns is on my mind. Not even the nature of heritage, within that slippery world.

I’ve simply decided to go look at the very specific, very tangible, very proper-noun Barclay Heritage Square that I’ve just noticed to the right of the caption WEST END on my Downtown Vancouver Walking Map. My route develops from there. I continue down Nicola to English Bay and along the Seawall to (bottom-centre of map) the David Lam Dock on False Creek.

It’s only after all that, that I have my moment of linguistic/philosophical fuss about the meaning of words.

Back to the beginning.

I’m at Broughton & Haro, north-east corner of Barclay Heritage Square, an enclave designated under the National Trust for Canada that preserves 12 Edwardian-era homes and woods in combination with an adjacent City park.

The houses are lived in…

and the woodland now contains a children’s playground, used by residents…

as well as families from the modern condo towers you can see in the background — the kind of towers now increasingly dominant in the West End environment.

For no particular reason, I make Nicola my route on south to the water. It rewards me immediately. I’m already a fan of Little Free Library kiosks & their unofficial equivalents, so I gurgle happily at the sight of this Pet Food Pantry, just past Barclay.

Wet & tinned dog & cat food are welcome donations, ditto dog & cat toys and accessories, but please nothing large and nothing for other small animals: “We don’t have the space.”

One more block, and here’s the Vancouver Mural Festival 2020 tribute (by Annie Chen & Carson Ting) to Joe Fortes, the City’s first official lifeguard.

In 1986 he was also named Vancouver’s Citizen of the Century by the Vancouver Historical Society, and for good cause — a Trinidadian immigrant, Fortes spent years unofficially guarding the beach and rescuing people before receiving the official appointment.

The Nelson-to-Comox block down Nicola is friendly underfoot…

and bright with flowers on vintage apartment balconies overhead.

The day grows steadily warmer. I am ever more appreciative of the shade offered by street-side trees, sometimes combined with lush ferns, as in this display near Pendrell…

and sometimes high over bare earth, as in this half-block interruption of Nicola’s vehicular status between Pendrell and See-em-ia Lane.

Yet even barren like this, it is a welcome space, a little spot just for people, very neighbourhood. The lane title is part of the charm: like other area lanes, it honours area history, in this case Mary See-em-ia, granddaughter of Chief Joe Capilano and a Squamish Nation matriarch.

A reminder as I cross Davie Street of real-estate trends…

and later a reminder, down at Harwood, of developer/cultural handshakes, here in the form of this Beyond the Mountains mural commissioned by the builder from Heiltsuk artist KC Hall.

On downhill to the water. I’m now at the foot of Nicola, about to emerge onto Beach Avenue, bordering Second Beach.

Apartments of various eras face the water, dozing in the afternoon sun…

and “open-air museum” installations, courtesy of the Vancouver Biennale, are as much part of the beach scenery as flowers, palm trees and sand.

I first pass Dennis Oppenheim’s Engagement…

and then, as I walk east along the Seawall…

I come to my all-time favourite, Bernar Venet’s 217.5 Arc X 13.

Not much shade, here on the Seawall.

I pause under handy palm trees to cool off, agree with a bemused pair of Austrian tourists that outdoor palms are somehow not what we expect to see in Canada…

loiter under the next cluster of friendly palms to watch a mother finally tear her toddler away from these lifeboats and lead the child on down to the water…

and then buy myself a rum & raisin waffle cone at the Sunset Beach concession stand…

and find yet more shade in which to enjoy it.

I even manage to eat it all without dribbling any down my arm. (Live long enough, and you acquire a few Life Skills.)

Enough blazing sunshine. I forsake the Seawall to climb uphill to Beach Ave. and the shade offered by its trees. It gives me a distant view of Squamish artist Chrystal Sparrow’s mural on the Sunset Beach sport court, currently being repainted…

and a close-up of the mossy walls of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre as I carry on east.

But then, somewhere between George Wainborn Park and David Lam Park — bottom-centre of that first Walking Map image, if you care to scroll back up — I return to the Seawall and False Creek.

Where I am first amused by this tiny, very unofficial, birdhouse hanging from an official Seawall tree…

and soon afterwards hopeful of a ferry ride home from the David Lam Dock.

Look at this: two ferries converging on the dock (left & right, the rival Aquabus and False Creek lines respectively), eager to pick me up.

But, no, we are at cross-purposes. I want east; they are both headed west to Granville Island.

They assure me an east-bound boat will come by soon. One does. It then steers a slow zigzag route, meeting rider needs — which gives me time to think about “heritage.”

What counts, what doesn’t? In today’s walk, did only the very official and historically designated Barclay Heritage Square count? Or all of it?

The online Cambridge Dictionary gives me the answer I realize I want: heritage consists of “features belonging to the culture of a particular society.”

Yes. With that kind of latitude, it all counts.

From the designated Edwardian homes to the Fortes mural to “hi” on a sidewalk and a Pet Food Pantry; from ice cream and real-estate trends and Biennale art to lifeboats and palm trees and a silly little birdhouse and rival ferry lines.

All of it.

1 Comment
by icelandpenny on 17 August 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by icelandpenny on 17 August 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/08/17/heritage-and-heritage/

White Bunnies

11 August 2024 – I’m in behind City Centre Artist Lodge, once again epicentre for the Vancouver Mural Festival, now in its final day.

Much to my surprise, I’m not much engaged with VMF official activities this year, but the hoop-la does have me noticing things with a sharper eye — colours, shapes, energy, juxtapositions — as i weave through the adjacent alleys.

I don’t yet know it, but I am curating my very own collection of white bunnies.

Starting with reflections + fence + signage + curb stones in the north/south alley right behind the Artist Lodge…

followed by resting man + dog + red-X motif + pop-up art display in the east/west alley between Main/Quebec/5th/4th…

which brings the white-bunny concept into my life.

It’s the framed quote, bottom-right in the line-up: “Art is a white bunny in a scrap metal yard.”

I like this! Deliberate bunnies, and “found” bunnies as well — whatever adds scamper & bounce to the streetscape.

Right opposite, same alley: four chairs lined up in a deliberate and carefully positioned tribute to the looming chair in the gigantic wall mural behind them…

one detail in Andy Dixon’s 2017 VMF mural Red Studio (After Matisse), his 90-foot-high portrayal of his own Vancouver studio.

After that, my white bunnies are whatever & wherever delights me, whether day-glo construction guidelines on the sidewalk before me at Quebec & East 4th…

or white communications discs high on a roof beyond me, punctuating the tower to their left…

or an eye-level fluorescent X just south of Quebec & East 2nd. (Only later, at home, do I notice the red-X motif in the alley with the pop-up gallery, and realize there must be a connection.)

One final white bunny, down by False Creek.

A multi-coloured white bunny, mind you — art is inclusive! — painted by Nature, and proclaiming a message that seems hard to believe, this hot mid-August day.


Fall is on its way.

2 Comments
by icelandpenny on 12 August 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 12 August 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/08/12/white-bunnies/

Crisp to Calm

6 August 2024 — One day all crisp shadows down a local alley…

and the next, off to the “green calming atmosphere” promised in this sign welcoming visitors to Camosun Bog.

The bog is a tiny, boardwalked ecosystem at one north-east knob of sprawling Pacific Spirit Regional Park. I always choose the same entry point: south from West 16th Ave., down one final residential block of Camosun Street.

And here I am. I set foot on that entry stretch of boardwalk, and I am already calm.

Slower of pace, quieter of thought, I duck under an arch of Mountain Ash and walk around the bend beyond…

to pause at what I think of as “The Sentry” — a nurse stump adorned each season with whatever that season and its weather have to offer.

I next pause at the bog itself, now diminishing in the heat of mid-summer from its abundance of early spring.

Then, I follow the boardwalk.

The sphagnum mosses are beginning to bleach, responding to the same heat that shrinks the bog, but there are still bursts of vivid greenery.

Sometimes I need to peer over the inner railing of the boardwalk perimeter…

but any old time, I can just look over the outer railing at the forest beyond.

Loop complete, side trips complete, I retrace my steps to walk back under the arch of Mountain Ash. This time toward sidewalks, pavement, cars and traffic. Lots of grey awaits me. Lots of noise.

I’m not yet ready for West 16th! I walk eastward on quiet residential streets instead.

And I find myself at another tiny enclave of calm.

Right there, across that intersection, under those street-side trees: some Muskoka chairs grouped companionably around a little table.

I cross. I check it out. I discover that, just like the entry sign for Camosun Bog, the table welcomes visitors.

Though with an admonition.

I obey.

I take a seat. And when I depart, I leave the furniture where I found it.

2 Comments
by icelandpenny on 5 August 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 5 August 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/08/05/crisp-to-calm/

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