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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
26 July 2024 – It’s a bright, breezy day and my target direction is Strathcona. I’ve just skimmed a newsletter reference to a week-long Eastside Arts Festival in Strathcona Park, and that’s motivation enough. Whatever the festival does or doesn’t deliver, this old residential neighbourhood is always worth another visit.
I set myself the mild challenge of getting there without walking north on Main Street. Main is a diverting parade of small shops farther south, but from here north it becomes a noisy downtown artery. My plan calls for a clever N/E zigzag — but that’s the beauty of feet! They sure can zigzag.
So down Scotia I go, with the now-sewered creek beneath my feet that once fed the now-infilled last stretch of False Creek. Left turn onto East 1st Avenue, with its contribution to new-build grit, part of the neighbourhood transformation…
and a right-turn onto Industrial Avenue.
Confession: this requires a quick ricochet off Main Street, where 1st and Industrial almost meet, but surely I can be forgiven that hairpin turn?
More grit, as I head north among the terminals and warehouses of False Creek Flats. There’s new-build activity here at well, with high-tech moving in, but that’s mostly farther east. This part, close to Main Street, is still yer actual old-fashioned rust & rolling wheels kind of grit.
But I like it, just as it is, and today it delivers me nicely from any more connection with Main Street. All I have to do is backtrack east to Station Street, then north to Terminal and across Terminal to the building that explains why Station and Terminal streets bear these names:
Pacific Central train station.
It’s more than 100 years old and still in use, with today’s power-washing just part of the regular TLC. This highly functional Old Build will soon be joined by that New Build lurking in the background — the new St. Paul’s Hospital complex, now under construction and due to open in 2027.
My avoid-Main-Street route takes me east on National Avenue, currently reduced to a narrow footpath bordering the hospital construction site. I gawk as I walk.
The area swarms with workers…
a reminder that, for all the machinery and high-tech of our age, every work site still depends on human effort and skill.
I have escaped Main Street!
I am now safely east, just in behind the construction site, where I can cut north through Trillium Park and enjoy my first fix of major greenery. There indeed is St. Paul’s, rising in the background, but here in the foreground…
we have green fields. Green fields both sides of this pathway, with kiddies on each side, busy learning the fundamentals of soccer.
This is all fine, but I keep walking because just to the north lies Prior Street, and that will take me into Strathcona neighbourhood. And then Strathcona Park! And then the arts festival!
A vintage wooden Strathcona house sits right smack on the corner at Prior and Jackson. It is much the worse for wear.
That’s also part of the story of this area — home to Coast Salish First Nations for millennia, and then, with the 1865 opening of the Hasting Lumber Mill, increasingly home to waves of working-class immigrants. The whole area prospered, declined, and is now in that tenuous urban mix of restoration, renewal, rebirth and inevitably destruction as well.
I walk east on Prior. Strathcona Park will be just ahead of me, but before I can quite fix on its location, I am diverted by the sight of an elderly couple with an exuberant grandchild emerging from a path in the woods to my right. I exchange grave nods with the couple, finger-wiggles with the child, and step onto the path they have just left.
Well. Look at this.
It’s just one tiny corner of a community garden, bursting with mid-summer proof of its gardeners’ devotion. I weave between beds, find the Garden’s tool shed and step close to read its signage. I’m admiring the trilingualism of it all…
when the door opens and I get to meet one of those gardeners. She has been a Strathcona Community Garden volunteer for ages, she says, and she’s not going to let a little thing like knee replacement surgery (points to the scar) keep her away.
Do I know about the Cottonwood Community Garden? she asks. No, I do not. Most people don’t, she says, because it’s so tucked away, but it’s amazing and you should go look at it. Where is it? I ask.
She leads me back to the edge of the Strathcona Garden and points the way: turn right here, then left there, along that line of trees, then keep looking to the right.
So I do.
As I walk, I realize I am now in one corner of Strathcona Park. Damned if I can see any sign of an arts festival. And damned if I care, because finding Cottonwood seems so much more interesting.
Right; then left; then keep looking right, into the trees. Oh yes. Signs of gardening in there.
And a sign very politely telling me to keep out. It explains this particular section is home to sacred medicinal plants, and asks anybody not involved in their care and rituals please to remain outside the fence.
An adjacent sign welcomes me in.
Even though invited to come on in, I feel shy about intruding. I stick to the external foot paths, and peer over fences as I go.
This string of garden plots lies in quite a narrow ribbon of land between Strathcona Park to the north and Malkin Avenue to the south. Looking south, I can see the tops of buildings, one of them marked Discovery Organics and, right here in front of me, the top of a mural marked Produce Row.
Framed by a gaudy arbutus tree on the right and a discreet birch tree on the left, my pathway disappears back into the woods…
and then, soon after, leads me out onto more open ground. Here the garden beds lie right next to the Strathcona Park playing fields.
I meet another gardener — this one a relative newbie, someone who comes from West Vancouver for the pleasure of digging in her very own patch of soil. She offers me a bag of lettuce. I explain I have so much fresh produce right now it would probably spoil. “Me too,” she sighs.
I wave good-bye and then stop at a park map, to get my bearings. Since I am dog-free as well as lettuce-free, the map’s primary purpose is irrelevant, but its coordinates interest me a lot.
Later online research tells me even more, makes these two gardens even more impressive — and suggests thy are under threat.
According to the Strathcona Community Gardens Society, which manages them, both Strathcona and Cottonwood gardens began through local activism: Strathcona on an unofficial dump site in 1985, winning a 25-year lease from the Park Department in 2005; and Cottonwood on an industrial waste site in 1991, still apparently without any legal status. Depending on what happens next to Malkin Avenue — perhaps expansion, to compensate for planned viaduct demolition — both Produce Row (the string of fresh food wholesalers on Malkin) and the adjacent garden might be bulldozed. (I can’t find dated, documented, recent data on this, hence my careful language.)
I don’t yet know all this, as I again walk north.
I am still kinda-sorta wondering about the arts festival, but I am easily distracted — and more distraction is soon on offer.
Who could resist Strathcona Linear Park? It leads me alongside Hawks Avenue, and splashes mid-summer foliage all over me, including this magnificent Mimosa grandiflora (thank you Pooker, for the ID).
Right under that pink splendour, some turquoise chalk on the sidewalk. “Free…” it begins, and I wonder which political cause is about to claim my attention.
Ahhh! I look around hopefully.
No cupcakes in sight. And still no arts festival, either. By now I totally don’t care.
I stick with the Linear Park, admire the False Creek mosaic as we cross the bike path at Union Street…
and walk one more block that now borders MacLean Park. It takes me right to where I next want to be: on the N/W corner of Keefer and Hawks, tucked up with some lunch…
in the Wilder Snail café, with its giant snail as a ceiling ornament.
It is finally time to head west, to start looping toward home.
Past the MacLean Park notice board at Keefer & Heatley, promoting everything from World Hepatitis Day (“free testing”) to evenings at the Dream Punk Piano Lounge, and then a quick detour across the street.
To view an entire residential community, right there on a single massive tree stump.
(Well, what would you call it?)
On west along Keefer to Princess, where I pause for another of the City’s sidewalk mosaics.
Nobody could accuse this mural of being happy-face PR! Look at that power shovel, knocking the end home to smithereens.
Happily, as I carry on west, I pass still-standing vintage homes. Including this one near Princess Avenue…
protected by its hedge of giant guardian Gunnera.
Once i cross Gore Street, I have changed worlds. I have passed from Strathcona into Chinatown.
I walk with that world for a while, then hop onto a Main Street bus, and go home.
Where, finally, I read the Eastside Arts Festival promotion more carefully.
And discover that (a) it consists of pop-up events at scattered times in scattered locations and, (b), this particular day, the only event is an evening urban-drawing workshop being hosted in a local brewery.
4 July 2024 – I am again approaching False Creek. Again. Yet again. For the umpty-third time.
Even so, I expect not to be bored. I am reassured by the wisdom of Heraclitus and, some 700 or so years later, Proust, who observed (respectively, in translation): “No man ever steps in the same river twice” and “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new lands but in having new eyes.”
My eyes, and my feet and everything in between, we all step off West 1st Avenue near Columbia Street to head north into Hinge Park. It is a wetland park adjacent to False Creek, named for the sharp kink, the “hinge,” in the traffic grid right about here.
The park features a run of train track and buffer stops close to its West-1st edge, which is both a tribute to the area’s railway heritage and a handsome installation in its own right.
(If you like rust and industrial artefacts.)
Still morning, but already very warm. It is summer! I am hinged & heated indeed. The bullrushes and other greenery have erupted all along the tiny rivulet that runs through Hinge Park, almost completely obscuring the thread of water below.
It’s only when I reach the little mid-point bridge that I can look back and see the channel.
I also see the distant figures (left side of the walkway) whose animated conversation briefly filled my ears as I walked by.
A lanky pedestrian, a keen birder, is chatting with two Park staffers, who pause in their clean-up duties long enough to talk wildlife with him. “Yes,” says the vivacious young female staffer, “yesterday I see the heron, also this morning, and yesterday I see the dogs but not today.” “The dogs?” repeats the birder, puzzled. “In the water?” The woman laughs, waves her hands. “No, no! I must be so careful to pronounce! I mean ducks.” She repeats it, heavy on the final consonants. “DucKKSS.” Turns out she is from Mexico, and still getting her mouth around the physical shape of English words.
A quick look forward, from this handy little bridge, tracing the channel on north into False Creek…
and soon after here I am, on the SeaWall at False Creek.
Hinge Park is behind me, Habitat Island is before me and a horde of excited kiddies are in the causeway between the two, being sorted into teams for whatever adventure is next on the schedule.
I right-turn myself eastward, surprised by the lowest tide I’ve ever seen between the park and this island.
Traffic in the Creek to entertain me, as I walk along: a trim False Creek Ferry heading west with canoeists and a paddle-boarder in the background for company…
and then a bright red Japadog food truck to lure me onward to Olympic Village Square.
I resist, but I am tempted. I thoroughly enjoy this Vancouver A to the Q: “What happens when Japanese sensibilities meet North American fast food?”
A chattering group of friends relax in the sunshine in the Square — and, look, they are obeying the sign. They are not climbing on the artwork! (The Birds, 2010, Myfanwy MacLeod.)
A necessary sign, I have to add: attempting to scale the birds had become A Thing To Do, and as a result both installations needed extensive restoration.
One last False Creek image, a bright Aquabus ferry loading passengers at the Olympic Village dock…
and I finally turn away from the water, to zigzag back home.
6 June 2024 – After a very long stretch of drizzle days, we have sunshine. Given the state of both wildfire season and our water table, I react to the sunshine with mixed emotions. To draw on one of Susan Sperling’s “lost words” that deserve to live again, I am feeling “merry-go-sorry.”
(And isn’t that more fun than mere “mixed emotions”? Go find Poplollies and Bellibones if you can, Sperling’s glorious 1979 celebration of lost words. It will also, for e.g., teach you the perfect epithet for a lascivious priest. He is a “smellsmock.”
(But I digress. Back to the sunshine.)
Yes, sunshine! So I walk myself down to the Olympic Village dock, to wait for the next False Creek ferry. My vague plan is to ride it west to Granville Island, and then walk my way back east to home.
Warmth + sunshine = other people also waiting for a ferry, several with toddlers and strollers.
One child, surely age four at most, turns into Boy Busker: he reinvents the popular children’s song as “The ferry on the creek goes round and round…” and then spins off into his own sing-song about up-and-down tides and repair boats and how you have to be quick-quick when the ferry arrives.
We applaud. He tells us sternly that he hasn’t finished. Abashed, we still our hands and wait for more. But then the ferry does arrive…
and everybody (including Boy Busker, turquoise helmet) climbs on board.
Not so very quick-quick. There are strollers to off-load first, and then three strollers to on-load, plus an unwieldy skateboard, and many questions for the patient ferry operator to answer. But it all happens, and away we go.
A lone canoeist skims by, just off Coopers’ Park…
and I admire yet again the multiple and largely smooth and peaceful uses of this public waterway.
We approach the Granville Island dock, welcomed as always by the Giants mural, spray-painted across the six silos of Ocean Concrete for the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale. They begin to show their age, but I am cheered by the little banner announcing their upcoming “renewal.”
We climb up the long zig-zag ramp used at low tide, and pass by another inevitable welcome to the island: crows!
I’m almost tempted to tour market shops, but don’t. I’m here to start a walk.
So instead I turn south-east-ish into Sutcliffe Park, which wraps this side of the island, and head for the Seawall. My route takes me past an imposing piece of industrial-heritage equipment that I cannot explain, because there is no explanatory sign to be found.
But it is indeed imposing, is it not? Complete with raised scrollings that were either intrinsic to the original industrial purpose or are recent artistic additions, and I can’t explain them either.
But then… Something that explains itself. Lots of signage.
I’m at the Granville Island pavilion, here on Alder Bay, of the Trans-Canada Trail. It is just one dot on a Trail that runs 28,000 km coast to coast to coast throughout the country, and is, if this website claim is still true, “the longest network of multi-use recreational trails in the world.”
Off I go, happy with sunshine and a trail beneath my feet. As I pass the point where Alder Bay merges with False Creek, I am also happy with an official “view corridor.”
Back in 1989, City Council voted to protect specific public views and view corridors, to ensure that despite city growth, at designated spots we would still have a clear view through to the North Shore mountains.
See them? Back there through the towers toward the right?
There are lots of closer and unofficial views as well. This clump of Common Foxglove, for example, that has established itself in handy crevices in the Creek’s riprapping.
Every part of this plant is toxic, I later read. I knew anyway: it was the favourite poisoning device of all those Golden Era murder mysteries I used to read. (It is beautiful, though!)
Signage at Spruce Harbour Marina includes old photos of the Creek in its dirty, polluting, industrial heyday, when great booms of logs (here, 1912)…
covered the waters, waiting to be milled.
Look around now, and the waters are covered with boats.
But a more interesting collection of boats than I originally thought, for this marina is home to the Greater Vancouver Floating Home Co-operative. Most of these boats are permanent homes, though the marina also welcomes visitors.
Farther east, down by Charleson Park, I stare at the pond…
and contrast all this water with the dried-up mud flats I remember horrifying me, one year when we were in the middle of a category 5 drought. Look at it, the result of all our recent rain.
The signage patiently reminds us this is a seasonal wetland, and it is supposed to dry up periodically, that’s how it works. Got it?
Yah-but, I mutter to myself, meanwhile I’m happy to see all that water.
Finally I’m back to where I set off, Olympic Village. Or, to Millennium Water Olympic Village, in the official words of the plaque by this commemorative installation.
This immediate cluster of buildings, which initially served as the athletes’ village for the 2010 Winter Olympics & Paralympics, was North America’s first LEED Platinum community, and a catalyst for the reinvention/rejuvenation of the larger area.
The reinvention continues, and features considerable development of new residential complexes.
Like all these.
But notice also all that green space.
In the rear, a Pollinator Meadow, with species introduced for that purpose, and here in the forefront, a bioswale. ??? Fortunately, a bright blue sign tells me it is not just a ditch, it is a deliberate creation that collects one-third of all the rainwater falling on public spaces in Olympic Village, thus diverting it from the sewer system and mitigating any pollutants before the water empties into False Creek. (And if that makes you want to know more about the City’s rainwater strategy, click here.)
I’m about to weave between towers and head for city streets, but stop at one more bit of stubborn wild greenery. The City may be busy with planned & managed pollinator meadows and bioswales and all — and hurray for that — but nature keeps plonking herself where she wants to go.
Even smack in front of the next planned burst of exclusive waterfront residences.
20 May 2024 – Three days of a holiday weekend; three outings; three images for each.
Friday, Sunset Beach, English Bay Seawall
We’re walking the Seawall along English Bay toward Stanley Park and stop — as always! — to admire Berard Venet’s Vancouver Biennale sculpture” 217.5 Arc X 13.
Thirteen arcs of unpainted corten steel, each curved, as the title explains, to 217.5 degrees. Entirely static, endlessly dynamic, always welcoming.
We watch this little girl explore the sculpture…
and then follow her lead, offering those 217.5° arcs our own 360° tribute.
By now the sculpture, acquired in 2007, fully illustrates artist Venet’s point re his choice of material:
unpainted, the steel “facilitates an interaction with the natural elements.”
At their centre, the arcs form an embrace. At their tips…
a continuing dance of call and response.
Sunday, outside Engine 374 Pavilion, Roundhouse Community Centre
I learned about this event during my recent crosstown walk on Davie Street, and here I am, happy to join the anniversary celebrations. On 23 May, 1887, steam engine 374 pulled the first scheduled transcontinental train past Port Moody, following the new track extension all the way to Vancouver. “Ocean to ocean,” at last.
The rest of the year, CPR Engine 374 sits inside her protective pavilion. But! Once a year! Once a year, on the anniversary of that first arrival, she struts her stuff outdoors.
Oh, she gleams.
All black and white and powerful moving parts…
and shining brass and dates and tiny details…
and lots and lots and lots of live steam.
Monday, Waterfront Esplanade, New Westminster
A wonderful long walk along this stretch of the Fraser River, at very low tide.
The intricate world of mud flats, plus the occasional tree trunk…
and old pier stumps and scavenging crows…
and… and…
a reminder that trains are still part of this country’s lifeblood.
Leaving the Esplanade for downtown New West takes only a moment — only the moment needed to cross one street. But that moment becomes many, many moments when we all have to wait while a thumping great tri-continental freight train (from Mexico on up) claims its right of way.
"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 