14 May 2024 – Spring is busy admiring herself, everywhere you look.
Horse chestnut candles aflame in all those towering trees…
this lot white, but many red ones as well.
I’m enjoying the day, enjoying this walk in a favourite neighbourhood just south-east of my own — so like my old Hillhurst neighbourhood in Calgary, back in the 1970s. Wooden frame homes, generous front porches, neighbourly architecture creating a comfortable, engaging, neighbourly streetscape.
I am therefore delighted but not surprised to see a tree garlanded with messages.
And the theme…? I ask myself.
The tree tells me.
I circle the tree, reading some of the replies.
Among them, an earnest statement of a basic principle…
an example of that principle in action…
and a sweeping philosophic directive that, unpacked, could fuel much further thought.
It has captured my thought, in any event.
I find myself looking for examples of generous action, right here on the street. Just ordinary… everyday… components of the streetscape that, through this lens, translate as generosity in action.
The table & chairs in this volunteer-tended Green Streets traffic circle, for example..
and the beauty of this long stretch of gardening activity, bordering the sidewalk.
Individual homeowners are doing all this, yet they’re not the ones who see it. We, the passers-by, we’re the ones to enjoy the results.
There’s a felt heart tied around a tree trunk — no reason, just because…
and yet another streetside take-one/leave-one library.
This one, says the little plaque, is Lizzie’s Library…
and I admire not just the neatly stacked books on offer, but the freshly planted marigolds as well.
Farther along, a bench (beside yet another streetside library) for anyone who might like a moment’s rest…
and then a swing, for anyone who’d rather kick up their heels.
Judging by the worn path beneath, there’s been a lot of heel-kicking!
I’m not obsessively “theme-hunting,” mind you, I’m enjoying the whole walk just as it comes.
Heading back north on Sophia, passing Tea Swamp Park (home to “awesome,” remember?), I pay proper attention to the other side of the street. To the new-build, on the corner.
Which would be hard to ignore.
And I wonder idly if design elements like this, the prevalence now of bold graphics on new-builds, is at least in part the result of eight years of Mural Festivals. Powerful visuals now part of our street vocabulary…
Then my mind moves on, the way mind do, and i start to laugh.
Because I’ve just remembered another of the answers to the “Generosity is…” challenge.
6 May 2024 – I’m as far W on Davie Street as you can be, sharing a joke with the A-Maze-ing Laughter sculptures in Morton Park. English Bay can be glimpsed between the statues, and the glory of Stanley Park lies beyond.
I turn my back on all that.
I am heading E, not farther W — east the full length of Davie Street, right from “You are here” in this handy signpost map…
to False Creek, where the street is once again stopped by water.
Just as those waters transform as they go — from the breadth of Strait of Georgia, into English Bay and then into False Creek — so too does Davie Street reflect city transformations.
This 4-km-or-so route is a crosstown slice of Vancouver’s past & evolving future. It leads us from still-vintage West End, through Davie Village (once simply “Gay” & now a more complex family of inclusions), into Downtown with its Entertainment District, and on to Yaletown, western terminus of the railway and the repurposed former hub of railway equipment construction and repair.
Barely underway, I detour onto Bidwell long enough to admire the volunteer garden at the corner of Pantages Lane, with a vintage building opposite.
Well…
I later learn that the vintage building is just a vintage façade. It is, a realtor’s website informs me, “a beautifully restored heritage entrance” to a spiffy new residential tower, “that returns the street frontage to its original character.”
Back out to Davie, where I head eastward on up the street. I do mean “up” — both climbing away from the English Bay basin, and also tilting my head at the towers that increasingly line the street.
A past-&-future moment, here at Davie & Cardero: the district’s future already visible there on the left, and a big blue “rezoning application” notice on the fence of the modest old apartment building on the right.
I see a lot more of these notices as I go, including ones on an apartment building also marked with a “sale by court order” sign.
But there is still lots to enjoy, lots of human activity and human-scale engagement.
Also canine.
He has appropriated this bench outside a barber shop / tattoo parlour, and his confidence is likely well-placed. A bearded man has just walked through that still-open door, his leashed French bulldog by his side. Inside, they are greeted by the statue of a bulldog.
At Broughton, a wonderfully ornate vintage apartment building, its paintwork perhaps a bit scruffy but no sign of any redevelopment activity.
The shops & services around here are not glossy and latest-thing. I like them very much.
Just before Bute, I see this slivered opening between buildings, complete with mural…
and I follow it to the laneway beyond.
Where I turn left, and then left again back to Davie Street, through the Event Zone of Jim Deva Plaza.
The plaza honours the man’s lifelong courage and advocacy. Deva, one of the co-founders of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium, challenged Canada’s censorship laws in the Supreme Court, and also — with greater success — worked with Civic authorities to promote safety and quality in Vancouver’s parks and public spaces.
I don’t know all this about him at the time. While in the plaza itself, I notice more trivial things. Such as…
Corner of Davie & Bute, and we’re well into Davie Village by now. Here, for example, with a mural tribute to jazz greats behind the intersection rainbows.
I cross, check the mural, and decide I’m personally more taken with the four-legged acrobat and the skate-boarding raccoons on the utility box.
But to each their own!
I pass a nude unimpressed by Happy Hour offerings…
and a greengrocer laying out yet more spring plants on his sidewalk shelving…
and then stop at the hot-pink bus shelter at Davie & Burrard.
The colour echoes the Village, as does the long-established Davie Village Community Garden visible through the mesh.
By now I’m used to rezoning/redevelopment notices, but I am sad to see them posted on this mesh fence as well. I’d love this Garden to continue, but…
what I see right across the street may be its future as well.
At Granville Street, I’m into the city’s Entertainment District (per its tourism maps), where I once again nod happy recognition at the neon signage for Two Parrots Bar & Grill.
Scotiabank Dance Centre is a restoration/new-build complex on the far corner, and other towers abound. So far, the Two Parrots still perch on their accustomed corner, no redevelopment notice anywhere in sight.
The lane immediately behind the building pays tribute to their longevity.
Well, sort of! (Upper left.)
More visual tribute at Seymour Street, where Jill Anholt’s 2005 sculpture, Moving Pictures, honours Vancity Theatre (home of VIFF), which stretches on down the block.
Downhill toward False Creek.
I cross Seymour, pause to again enjoy the long slice of water tumbling through Emery Barnes Park…
and here I am at Hamilton Street, in Yaletown. Once home to railway equipment construction and repair workshops, the district is now repurposed into food, drink, entertainment, & residential delights.
I sidetrack myself along Hamilton for a bit, enjoy reminders of a mid-pandemic “I ❤️ Yaletown” mural festival…
then return to Davie and cross Pacific Blvd.
Roundhouse Community Centre is right here, an architectural link to the past — and nowhere more powerfully than in its CPR Engine 374 Pavilion.
Where, after long service, that steam-era pioneer is on display.
Engine 371 beat her from eastern Canada to Port Moody but, on May 23, 1887, Engine 374 pulled the first transcontinental train into the City of Vancouver. She continued to do just that, until 1945. Restored and gleaming, she now rests and accepts our homage. (Squealing kiddies all around me, especially the ones taking turns in the driver’s seat.) A volunteer urges me to return for the May 19 Anniversary Celebration, when she’ll make her yearly trip outside and be the centre of attention on the Roundhouse Turntable.
Now for the last few steps on Davie, on to the bit of track and sculpture in the traffic circle, with Yaletown Dock to mark water’s edge and my arrival at False Creek
I loop along the waterfront for a bit, then turn left into and through Steamboat Mews…
back to Pacific Blvd., where I hop a bus for home.
18 April 2024 – A bright, gusty day and, I swear, you can practically see the sun’s rays bounce around in the breeze.
So I play that game, as I walk my Cambie Loop around the east end of False Creek. I watch the bounce of the sun, as it…
ripples across this disused West 1st Ave. workshop…
triangulates Science World’s geodesic dome…
transforms a boring building (L) into a darkly magic reflection (R)…
warms the backs of a newbie dragon boat team, intent on their coach’s mid-stream lecture…
sparkles a V-trail of diverging wakes, ferry eastbound but another dragon boat now veering west toward Cambie Bridge…
rolls across the spring-tidied plots of John McBridge Community Garden, beside the bridge…
and shoots silver into the sky from the fingers atop the Neighbourhood Energy Utility, also beside the bridge (where waste heat from sewers is recycled into heat & hot water for local use).
I drop down from the bridge and nod to the Community Garden on my way by. It’s a nod of fellow-feeling: my next stop is a garden centre.
9 April 2024 – A post title borrowed from a specific sculpture (you’ll see), but broadly applicable to pretty well everything else (as you’ll also see).
First, and more precisely: Eyes on the chain link. Two days ago I’m looping south-east of home, my attention caught by the bold line of graphics visible through chain link fence on East Broadway near Fraser.
Curiosity pulls me around the corner, into the lane, and onto that big rectangle of gravel. Bright graphics all right, but otherwise? One park bench, one dog bowl, no dogs, and one crow, who promptly flies away. That’s it. Yet a neat sign on the gate has the gall to declare this the Broadway & Fraser Dog Garden.
Please! I curl my lip. Later, online, I visit the Dog Garden website, discover a group called Community Garden Builders “transform vacant properties into temporary dog parks” … and uncurl my lip. I invite you to do the same.
Tail end (!!! unintended pun, but I’m gonna leave it) of that walk, I’m passing the mesh fence that keeps Guelph Park tennis balls inside the City courts, where they belong. A player has just stooped to retrieve one, but that’s not what I notice.
See? Our local yarn bomber has branched out. Not just crochet hearts…
but tassel hearts as well.
And now, my friends, the magic of the Historical Present Tense swoops us past yesterday’s rain into today’s bright sunshine. More streets to be walked. More places for my feet to lead my eyes.
Starting in a near-by alley at East 5th, where a whole passel of City workers are clustered around that venerable H-frame hydro pole.
I am relieved to learn that (A) while it is terminally non-functioning, (B) it will be replaced by another H-frame, not by some sleek 21st-c. interloper.
I’m still gleeful with that bit of news as I turn down another alley en route False Creek, and try for a more interesting way to look at Alex Stewart’s 2023 VMF mural, Vibrance Overgrown.
It dominates the alley side of a snazzy new eco-conscious build on East 4th and, viewed straight on… ummm…. I find it boring. Well-executed and bright, but no better than decorative.
Then I stop being cranky, lean into the wall, and look straight up.
Well, that’s more fun, and I resolve to spend more time looking for odd angles.
Next opportunity arises quickly in yet another alley — more properly, in the developer-groomed pathway between condo complexes close to the south-east end of False Creek. We’re in the area’s old industrial/railway footprint, so visual/verbal references abound. For example, in the street name just before me: Pullman Porter Street.
Right here, next to the water feature signposted as private property, I once again enjoy Eyes on the Street. The plaque tells me that the two forms in this 2018 installation by Marie Khouri & Charlotte Wall “mirror themselves & their surroundings,” and inspire us to think of our neighbours, ourselves and our surroundings, and to “consider the beauty of their interconnectedness.”
I go close. The form before me does mirror its surroundings…
and I find that I do then spend a moment considering the interconnectedness of all things.
False Creek at last, where I hook around to the north side, and head west. On past my usual turning point at the Cambie Bridge. Water on my left and, up above me along Marinaside Crescent to my right, one of the three shelter + chairs installations that comprise Lookout.
Created by Christos Dikeakos & Noel Best in 1999, the works feature carved & frosted words to remind us of the Creek’s heritage. I’m not often here, but when I am, I always pause long enough to read some of the words.
Yet farther west, foot of Davie Street, with boats anchored in Quayside Marina on my left and, at water’s edge, the six bronze I-beams of Street Light, by Alex Tregebov & Noel Best. According to the City’s online public art brochure for Yaletown-False Creek, the perforated panels atop these pillars align historic events with actual dates in fancy visual ways. Alas, I’ve never been here at the right moment to see any of that wizardry.
So instead, and as usual, I simply tilt my head up to enjoy some of the superstructure…
tilt my head down to read a few words on the plinth about False Creek Shacks in 1934, and…
level my head to look out across this bit of False Creek, on this very day in 2024.
Focus your eyes a bit above the railing near the cobblestones, and you’ll spot the Canada Goose enjoying the moment right along with me.
By the time i’m passing David Lam Park, my avian companion is a cormorant, not a goose.
There he is, posing atop Buster Simpson’s 1998 work, Brush With Illumination.
I have a very-much-favourite art installation in this park and — with apologies to Simpson (and the cormorant) — Brush isn’t it.
This is it.
Marking High Tide, like its companion pavillion Waiting for Low Tide, is the 1996 creation of sculptor and retired landscape architect Don Vaughan. The latter work is a contemplative circle of large stones in the Creek bed; this one honours the tides with an overhead 360° tribute of words: “As the moon circles the earth the oceans respond with the rhythm of the tides.”
Finally, I leave the water and take myself up to Pacific Blvd where, all along the block stretching east from Homer Street, my eyes are literally on the street.
Well no, make that: literally on the sidewalk.
Which, in this block, is dotted with Gwen Boyle’s 1994 selection of words to reflect the area’s long history.
Once, just once, she offers more than a word or two.
The exception is a longer excerpt from the poem I first noted in my 28 March post “The Beating Sea.”
“… the manstruck forest ..”
I stand there, stunned by the power of his imagery.
So thank you yet again, Earle Birney. You live with us still, in your words and, through the artists you inspire, on our streets.
18 March 2024 – I’m in Stanley Park, along with half of all Vancouver it seems, ready to enjoy this weekend burst of double-digit sunshine.
More precisely, I’m off the bus, through the underpass, and poised at the south-west curve of Lost Lagoon…
about to walk counter-clockwise and follow the trail east along the lagoon’s north shore.
Everything trembles on the edge of spring, unfurling new growth. Trees overhead, trees weeping downward to the water.
And, down there in the water, in the rich muck of the wetland, most wonderfully of all…
the fluorescent glow of the Western Skunk Cabbage. My first of the season. Now I know it’s spring!
The eastern variety is a more modest creature, it seems, so I forgive myself for being entirely ignorant of this plant until I moved west and was smacked in the eye by all that gold. (And also educated by You-Know-Who-You-Are.) Now I look for it each year, and give a little wriggle of joy at the first sighting.
On across Lost Lagoon, and on and on and then, though still in Stanley Park, I’m in entirely another world. I’m in all the noisy facilities-rich hoop-la of Second Beach.
Right where this red button says I am:
I turn right, head up the Seawall toward Third Beach. (Thank you, I murmur to the universe. I am so lucky, to be right here, right now, in all this.)
Here we all are, in all this.
Runners…
and cyclists/loungers/kiddies/adults/impromptu tents/storm-thrown stumps on Third Beach…
and rocks and freighters just off Ferguson Point…
and a tree with a heart…
and a patch of Seawall with its very own Cat-Angel…
and — after I’ve walked myself back south out of Stanley Park and into Morton Park — four Vancouver icons. All on view without turning my head.
Background, the renovated Berkeley Tower with its Douglas Coupland mosaics; mid-ground, Yue Minjun’s Ah-Mazeing-Laughter sculpture installation; right mid-ground, a cluster of Windmill Palms; and, tucked in their foreground shadow, some Canada Geese.
The day has me in sensory overload.
Yet, with all that wealth of input, one image keeps coming back to mind.
The north shore wetland of Lost Lagoon, the dabbling duck above the mossy rock on the left, the Skunk Cabbage on the right, and all that tender new greenery shooting up everywhere in-between.
8 March 2024 – As I walk back east along False Creek, I do not have a single Life Philosophy thought in my mind. Not a single abstract noun. I am just picking my feet up and putting them down again, enjoying the sunshine.
Then I see this neon glow in the water, just off a curve of seawall between Stamp’s Landing Dock and Spyglass Place Dock farther east.
Still no Important Thoughts in mind, just curiosity.
It’s not until I’m up close, and can identify the shape as a boat, that I think about vulnerability. There that little boat used to be, afloat and riding the currents — and there it now is, submerged and inert.
Vulnerability, consequences, responses. The dynamic is now lodged in my mind, and I see it all over the place as I walk on home.
In environmental and political vulnerabilities, for example, here at Spyglass Place Dock, where blue bands circle Cambie Bridge pilings and a quiet black tribute pillar stands at water’s edge.
The top blue tier in this 2012 art installation, A False Creek, is 5 metres above current sea levels — which is mid-way between the 4 to 6 metre rise that, it is predicted, could be triggered by climate change. The pillar honours Husain Rahim (1865-1937). He was an activist at the time of the 1914 SS Komagata Maru incident that barred a boatload of South Asian passengers from disembarking, and one of the first South Asians to challenge the disenfranchisement then taking place. While the ferry dock is still Spyglass Place, I learn that this space is now called Husain Rahim Plaza.
I’m about to walk on — and discover that I can’t.
Due to “the deteriorating condition of the structure supporting the seawall,” the path has been closed between the Cambie Bridge, right here, and Hinge Park to the east. Detour along West 1st, we are told, while authorities address this weakness.
Heading for 1st Avenue, I walk under the bridge, where I stop long enough to read this extraordinary beer-themed love letter chalked onto one of the pillars.
The message is fresh and wonderful, but street art by definition is ephemeral. Vulnerable. Just look above the top line for proof — the “Simply Jay” message has been effaced.
Eastward on West 1st Avenue now, and more vulnerability call-and-response.
The building in the foreground is one of the City’s Temporary Modular Housing facilities, created in response to what the City itself calls a crisis situation: “over 2,000 people are experiencing homelessness.” The rusty building farther along is an old, disused workshop from the area’s industrial past. It will surely fall down, or be knocked down, sometime soon.
Lying between those two buildings, and in behind the housing as well: an urban farm.
Sole Food Street Farms, founded in 2009, is now one of North America’s largest urban farms. This location trains & employs people from the Vancouver Downtown East Side, who grow the produce that is then sold & given away.
At Hinge Park, I can drop back to the waterfront. The railway tracks and buffers here at the south edge honour the past; the park itself is part of the pre-2010 Winter Olympics response to what had become a derelict and polluted wasteland.
Even my classy latte in an Olympic Village Square café reminds me of vulnerability! I have left it to sit just a little too long, and, look, the frothy design is beginning to deflate. (The taste, I promise you, is unaffected.)
Back outside, I admire TheBirds (Myfanwy MacLeod, 2010), gleaming in the sunshine.
The gleam is thanks to their fairly recent repatination; the repatination was the response to the vulnerability of their surface to all those climbing feet. Signage now politely reminds people that these sculptures are art, not a climbing wall, and asks us to keep our feet on the ground.
Heading south on Ontario Street, I detour half a block west into an alley, for a closer look at a face.
This face.
L’il Top is the signature, and if this bit of street art is vulnerable to time and the elements, so are those H-frame hydro poles. I, and countless Vancouver artists, love the look of them, but they are seriously outmoded, and systematically being replaced.
Back onto Ontario, farther south to West 6th, and my vulnerability theme now presents itself in a real-estate trio. The first thing I notice is that wavy reflection in the windows of the blocky new-build on the corner.
Then I play with the story, the trio of stories, the development dynamic of this bit of Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. Behind the new-build, a century-plus brick veteran, its status secure; in these windows, the reflection of the scruffy building across the street, wrapped in chain-link fencing, its status unclear.
Once the Teachers Centre for the Vancouver School Board (1972-1990s), it sits within the footprint of the T3 Mount Pleasant site now under construction — “T3” as in timber/transit/technology, with a planned 190,000 square feet of mass timber construction to attract environmentally responsible companies and workers. If the developer’s web page is any guide, at least part of this old building will be restored and repurposed as a heritage element in the mix.
Response to environmental threat is the theme of this part of Mount Pleasant. Along with the T3 building, it is also home to the emerging Main Alley Campus, which promises to provide “Canada’s first completely net-zero work environment for the creative economy.”
These two projects won’t save the planet, but it is heartening to see major development corporations put their weight behind new, more environmentally responsible, approaches.
I swing onto East 7th, and salute a building that has long known how to respond to changing threats — and here it still is, 112 years later.
Behold Quebec Manor, in all its diamond-patterned, bi-coloured brick glory. (Complete with metal balconies and nude maidens to welcome you home…) Built in 1912 as a luxury apartment hotel, probably for train passengers at the near-by terminals, it became rental units in the 1920s, and in the 1980s achieved new, secure status when its tenants bought the building and turned it into a housing co-op.
So that’s my walk, and how discouraging it could have been, with such a theme. But it wasn’t. So many vulnerabilities, yes — and so many responses, as well.
21 February 2024 – Move over, Pussy-Cat. The owl has a new companion.
I’m at the corner of West 10th & Columbia, heading east, and I am stopped in my tracks by an owl.
A real owl would seriously stop me in my tracks; this one is not real, but still unexpected and worth some attention. He is dangling from a traffic sign that promises you death & dismemberment if you even think about parking here.
It’s only after I move closer to contemplate the macramé shades-of-the-70s owl, that I really take in the heritage house in the background.
Which certainly deserves my attention.
The Owl and the Painted Lady! I murmur to myself.
And, with that, I forget Edward Lear and think about Painted Ladies. Painted Ladies in heritage neighbourhoods.
The best-known reference, especially outside Canada, would be to San Francisco and its line of brightly painted Victorian homes along the eastern side of Alamo Square Park. Former Torontonian that I am, I think instead of the Painted Ladies of Cabbagetown.
Of one in particular. Rather, the story of one in particular, told to me by the friend who lived next door and whose teenage daughter played (literally) a starring role. Picture the scene. We are in a Victorian home, among others of that vintage, on this street, in this comfortable neighbourhood.
The daughter is practising Bach on the piano in the bay window alcove, with the windows wide open in the summer heat. Next door, a painter is climbing up and down the ladder as he works on that home’s wooden fish-scale façade. The girl pays him no mind, not until she looks up to find him standing right outside her window. She is surprised at the sight; even more surprised when he — politely but firmly — describes very specific ways for her to improve her technique. Who the hell does he think he is? is her first sulky teenage thought. She stifles it. Because, damn it, he does sound like he knows a lot about music.
Turns out, he does. The woman next door tells her mum that the painter, in his previous career, had been a member of the original Orford String Quartet (1965-1991, reborn in 2009 as the New Orford String Quartet with different members). In his new career, he is now creating visual rather than aural music, shimmering cascades of colour rather than sound.
I sink into this memory for a bit, think about my friend’s home, and my admiration for the eventual beauty of that house next door. Then I snap myself back to the here-and-now. I am about to walk on, when I notice a sign on the street-corner lamp post. Always a sucker for signage, I trot across the street to read it.
The Vancouver Park Board seems only to have run the contest those two years — main criterion “community spirit… as demonstrated through block beautification” — and this block of West 10th won both times.
I’m afraid I short-change you for the rest of the block; I take no more photos. But back in 2009, somebody walked the block with delight, and posted the results to his public Flickr stream.
So enjoy the photos, chase up some Orford (original and New) performances online, and then rejoice in all the ways we humans can create beauty.
2 February 2024 – The predicted torrents of rain didn’t take place, but it has been very drizzly. And very, very grey. Not the luminous grey that I so often celebrate, but a flat-matte grey that sucks contrast and depth from the scene.
Since it is double-digit mild as well as merely-moist-not-wet, I opt for a walk all along the Seawall from Devonian Harbour Park, at the edge of Stanley Park, to Canada Place downtown.
I am indeed “here,” right where it says I am, there at the lower left, and I set off.
But… how shall I put this… it is not very uplifting. Just a whole world of flat grey, merge-purging itself in blurry confusion out to the horizon. Our grand panoramic views are not at all grand, at the moment.
Well, sod the panoramic views. I shall instead look for details. Small, very bright details. In the red family, by preference.
And so I notice a bright orange bumper ring tucked around this boat in Bayshore West Marina…
a pair of red & mustard houseboats, punching through the polite blue & white of the Coal Harbour Marina…
a brazen life ring, admiring itself in the waters off Coal Harbour Quay…
a red & white seaplane, growling itself to life for its next run from the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre out to the Gulf Islands…
a long view from the Convention Centre, on east past Canada Place to orange cranes in the Port beyond, poised over a cargo freighter…
and Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca, right here at the edge of Jack Poole Plaza, dancing the pixillated dance that has been its signature since 2009.
2 January 2024 – The challenge is: how many icons can I jam into my first post of the new year? Icons that say, “Vancouver in winter,” but also speak to my own obsessions.
Off I go.
Start with: alley + street art + H-frame hydro poles + distant mountains fading into the misty drizzle.
Add: False Creek + Science World dome + Aquabus ferry + orange Port of Vancouver “giraffes” + (audio only, take my word for it) the 12-noon Gastown Steam Clock rendition of O Canada.
Add: a dance of lines & spaces.
Add: a surprise. If your eyes are open, there is always a surprise. (Though not always as dramatic, or unfortunate, as this one east of the Cambie bridge.)
Add: the gleam of rust in the rain. (Here, the sewer-pipe “train engine” over a Hinge Park creek.)
Add: winter tree trunk moss, garnished with fernlets.
As I walk back south on Ontario Street, I think: It lacks only a crow.
And then, just north of East 5th, there he is!
Yes, yes, I know. He is white, and painted, and riding a skateboard. But I say he is a crow, and it’s my blog.
"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 