16 October 2024 – There’s “boring old Clock Time,” as I observed in my post of 13 July, and then there’s Crow Time — an infinitely more enjoyable way to measure the changing length of day. This means I can determine dawn-to-dusk by looking up the stats, or by simply looking out my window.
Crows leave their Burnaby roost for Vancouver roughly at dawn, and return from Vancouver to their roost roughly at dusk.
When I wrote about all this in mid-July, the afternoon commute passed my window at around 9:30 pm.
14 October 2024 – The second Monday in October and here we are: it is Thanksgiving.
Indigenous peoples have long honoured nature’s bounty; in 1578 Sir Martin Frobisher and crew celebrated their safe arrival in eastern Arctic waters (now Nunavut) with salt beef, biscuits & mushy peas; in 1606 Samuel de Champlain founded the Ordre de Bon Temps (Order of Good Cheer) to encourage settlers in New France (feasting and musketry volleys); in the 1750s what we now view as the traditional fare — turkey, squash, pumpkin — became common in Nova Scotia. Our Thanksgiving celebrations have gone on from there — finally, officially, settling on the second Monday in October by a 1957 Act of Parliament.
Back to 2024. Yesterday was the last Farmers’ Market of the season in Dude Chilling Park. By the time I arrive, late in the day, a lot of the produce has been snapped up. My own purchases are non-trad: a bag of pierogis and a jar of Malvani simmering sauce, both made by descendants of immigrants who brought these recipes with them. Traditional fare is still available as well, albeit in depleted quantities.
Tomatoes, for example…
squash…
and even squash that needs an explanation.
This Thanksgiving morning I visit our wonderful rooftop garden. I’m eager to see how much the pumpkins have grown since I photographed one of them during our Garden Party up there on 9 September.
Here’s what I saw then.
Here’s what I see this morning.
What did I expect?
Of course everything has been harvested, clipped, tidied away!
5 October 2024 – A theme that has unexpectedly imposed itself, and yes in places it’s a bit of a stretch, but you’ll work with me on this, won’t you?
First up, a photo from a few days ago, taken not with any tribute in mind, but simply as a cityscape moment: the dome of a heritage building against a lowering sky, framed by tram wires and traffic lights.
But I can pull it into the tribute theme. It is a tribute (A) to the Carnegie Foundation capital grants that sparked the creation of public libraries all over the world, including, in 1903, this one at Main & East Hastings in Vancouver; and, (B) to the City of Vancouver that restored and revived the building and reopened it in 1980 as the Carnegie Community Centre, a new name and new breadth of services for the same core purpose — respect, support and more opportunities for people who need them.
Today’s outing had no theme in mind. Well, none beyond visiting two parks on the eastern edge of the city — one for the first time — and then walking residential streets back home.
And if I must, I’ll defend this bucolic shot of Trout Lake in John Hendry Park…
by saying, “Yah, well, it’s my tribute to a weeping willow doing what weeping willows do best, plus look at the fancy trick it plays with its trunk!”
(You are, however, allowed to roll your eyes.)
It’s en route the next park — Clark Park (second-oldest in the city and, official blurbs point out, “the only one that rhymes”) — that, still unbeknownst to me, the tribute theme starts to gain traction.
I’m on East 14th, moving right along because I’m eager to cross Commercial Drive and set foot in the Park-That-Rhymes for the very first time.
And I stop.
This is odd. Where some previous tree trunks have twee little “fairy houses” as adornments, this one has two mugs.
Deliberately there, pushed into place.
I lean in.
I don’t know if this is a tribute from Mike & Ella, or to Mike & Ella, but tribute it surely is. I am ridiculously pleased that, on July 23, 2022, such a good time was had by all.
Next tribute, the other side of the Park-That-Rhymes, and the other side of its other street boundary at that, on East 15th.
It is a tribute to graffiti. By a developer. Really.
Conceptually, I am totally in favour. Aesthetically, I wish the resulting murals were more interesting.
And then I run into busy Knight St., and it’s horrible and crowded and there’s no near-by traffic light to get me to the other side and suddenly trying to continue west seems like a bad idea. So I stomp north on Knight for a bit, and catch a bus to take me even farther north, where I’ll jump off and go walk through Strathcona for a while.
Off a bus at Clark & William, and I wander north-westish for a while and suddenly know where I am.
I’m on the edge of freight train tracks and if I follow them, I’ll slide in behind Parker Street Studios, a wonderfully delapidated collection of buildings that manage to stay upright and house lots of creative studios.
Yes, look! A mannequin at the door, and train tracks beyond.
These buildings and everything in/on/around them — all a tribute to creativity. (And survival.)
Lots of art up and down the outside walls, as I walk along the tracks-side of Parker Street Studios, but this free-standing tripod creation is my favourite:
Finally across the tracks and a bit farther north & west, and I’m in Strathcona. I zig and I zag and I stop for some lunch and much-needed glasses of water at the Wilder Snail café, and then I straight-line it across Keefer Street, heading for Main and a bus uphill to home.
I’m deep into Chinatown, practically at Main, when my eye is snagged by one more mural, in the alley just before the intersection.
Yucho Chow, yes.
I remember watching a documentary about his life and work, the city’s first professional Chinese photographer who, from 1906 to 1949, documented not just the lives of Chinese immigrants but of many other ethnicities as well — people who weren’t comfortable going to white photographers, given the power structures of the day. This link takes you to a portal page about Yucho Chow, because the page includes lots of video options as well as text websites, and shows his importance to our records of life in this city.
I keep reading the alley wall, and realize that one tribute leads to another.
Bottom left corner of the photo above, you’ll see the words “Time for changes” and a name, the name of the artist who painted this mural. The name is in black, hard to read: Smokey D.
I take a few steps farther into the alley, just past that wooden utility pole, and find the next tribute.
By Smokey D. to the city. (I later learn online that the City, in return, paid tribute to him by proclaiming March 11, 2023, his birthday, as Smokey D Day, honouring his artistry and activism on behalf of the Downtown East Side community.)
There’s one final tribute in all this, don’t you think?
30 September 2024 – I expect lots of water, given my general plan for the day, but I do not expect a torrent of words. Yet, late in my walk, there it is: “a slow wet meander…” of words, albeit one closely allied with yet more water.
You’ll see.
It all starts when I hop off the westbound #19 bus, right there at the Georgia St. entrance to Stanley Park, with the waters of Coal Harbour visible on my right, and my immediate target, Lost Lagoon, not yet visible at all.
What is visible, is the 2010 sculpture by Rodney Graham, Aerodynamic Forms in Space, that marks this park boundary. Truth is, I like disaggregated bits of it better than the sculpture as a whole. This bit, for example.
I salute it, and then slide on by, down the steps, under the underpass, and onto the city-side path around the Lagoon. The path soon winds close to the water…
and offers Park and distant mountain views northward across the Lagoon…
close-ups of exotic ducks (un-exotically named Wood Duck)…
some Lost Rivulets, off-set from the Lagoon…
and a definitely Lost Footbridge…
which is even more drowned and inaccessible on the far side than it is right there.
Pretty soon I am exactly where the “You are here” bubble says I am…
namely, just steps from the Seawall at Second Beach.
The tide is wonderfully low.
Like many others, I leave the Seawall and walk right out to water’s edge. In places it is rock-strewn…
and, elsewhere, it offers long stretches of firm, wet sand.
Out there, orange-hulled freighters awaiting their turn to carry on down to the Port; here on shore, orange-shirted girls running into the waves.
The scene is happy, and there is an important message of hope and optimism in these shirts, but they commemorate something dreadful and dark: the abuses of the Indian [sic] Residential School System. These abuses battered the children physically and emotionally and, in more than 4,000 documented cases (2021 stats), caused their death. In 2015 the non-profit Orange Shirt Society was formed in Williams Lake, B.C., and began marketing tees that proclaim “the enduring truth that EVERY CHILD MATTERS, every day and everywhere.”
The inclusivity of the slogan invited, and has won, widespread acceptance. You now see the shirts on people of every ethnicity, of every age, and as every-day apparel. Today the shirts are especially appropriate. Today, 30 September, is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day to honour “the children who never returned home and survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities.”
All of that is now part of all of us, as it should be. I take it with me as I continue my walk.
On toward English Bay, past more sand and rocks and squealing children and tail-wagging dogs and, up there on separate Seawall tracks, cyclists and pedestrians. Finally, I head for the Seawall myself. I am ready for a city component to this walk and, I realize, more than ready for something to eat.
Out to Beach Avenue, with the A-Maze-ing Laughter sculptures in Morton Park in the middle distance, and Doug Coupland’s soaring mural on a refurbished vintage apartment tower just beyond to the right, and, closer than all that and of more immediate interest to me…
the red & white striped awnings of a hot dog stand.
Hot dog or Bavarian Smokie, it’s all 100% Alberta beef, says the hand-lettered signage, and the Calgary Girl in me nods approval. I eat my Smokie on the beach, and then…
turn down Denman St. for a latte in Delaney’s Coffee House. My front-window seat gives me the inspiring view of this pigtailed cyclist, surely damn near my own age, who is not even breathing hard as she locks up her bicycle.
Next comes a zig-zag through West End Vancouver: I’ve had water & nature, now for pavement & city. A few blocks on Denman, then right turn onto Comox and I stomp right along — until I get to Broughton.
I’ve walked Comox before, I’ve passed this building before and I’ve noticed the thumping great sculpture at the street corner before: Triumph of the Technocrat (Reece Terris). What I’ve never noticed is the curling channel of water along Comox that connects with the sculpture…
and, especially, the words incised into the channel wall.
Thanks to an article and overhead photo in The Source (issue 27 Jan – 10 Feb 2015), I can not only show you the entire channel with its pool at one end and Terris sculpture at the other…
I can also tell you the channel is the work of Vancouver landscape architects Durante Kreuk, and the text is by Vancouver artist Greg Snider.
Snider’s creation is a whole bravura torrent of words, and I want it! So I inch my way along the channel, taking pictures as I go, just in case the text is not available online.
And it is not. Or, not that I can find. So here we go, I am about to put it online — all but the bits I couldn’t catch because they are obscured by particularly vigorous lavender bushes. You’re not word-crazy? Skip the next paragraph. You are word-crazy? Settle in for the ride.
“A slow wet meander along stoned plaza of frenetic urban structure toward the demiurge of public art, the fiscal trace of exacting development moving with pythagorean acuity the eart [lavender bush…] objects of our collective culture through the bureau of civic demand, the spirit of heavenly smoke spirals from the burnt wood of transcendent aspiration over the long marsh of pantheistic decor as the seemly secular rises around us and art sluices down a crafty pipe — sleepy second [more lavender bush…] arch, techtonic upscaled for perpetuity’s long view (fifty years max) in a device for reflection called triumph of the technocrat.”
My own slow, not-wet meander now complete, I walk on. I pause one last moment on Comox, just before I turn onto Bute, for a cheerful and timely bit of sidewalk art.
Buoyed by that, I carry on — north & east, east & north — to Burrard & West Pender, where I catch a # 19 bus, and ride on home.
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.
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.
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.
31 August 2024 – Post-COVID yay! we can travel again. But, whoa, what’s going on? World-wide, attitudes to tourists have changed. Some locations are now actively hostile and others are imposing stiff restrictions.
British Columbia still puts out the welcome mat. However, as signage next to the Information kiosk on Bowen Island demonstrates…
the province now expects more from its visitors than money.
Want to be a better lover? Click for info about impacts and solutions that are relevant well beyond BC boundaries.
26 August 2024 – A full-colour day that starts in monochrome. With A Monochrome Journey. Italicized like that because it is the short form of a long exhibition title at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and that’s where I start my day.
I haven’t come to the VAG specifically for this exhibition. I plan to look at some of whatever is on at the moment… and then… see what happens next.
What catches my attention, right there on the ground floor, is the dramatic entrance to this dramatic Monochrome show: +100 works by +50 artists, all from the permanent collection, exploring “the enduring appeal” of black and white and everything in between.
In the room devoted to black…
I am struck, not just by the works, but also by the way ambient lighting can throw shadows that play with the image — here adding dimensions and tones to Untitled (Black Books), by Rachel Whiteread (1996-96).
More shadows in the room devoted to white…
but this time intentional, the result of precise lighting for the acrylic installation Untitled, by Robert Irwin (c. 1965-67).
It is only an hour or so later, as I finally turn to leave the show, that I realize the impact of my immersion in monochrome. I look through the doorway, and I don’t read it as pragmatic way-finding…
instead, I see an art installation. I see myself about to enter an immersive greyscale experience.
But then I walk out the door into Robson Square, and I return to the full-colour world. I am walloped by it!
Colour in the acrylic letters of art overhead…
colour all around, in the vivid Marché signage and the foodstuffs and crafts that fill the participants’ booths…
and emotional colour also, let’s call it — the laughter and energy of people enjoying the possibilities of a late-summer afternoon.
There are free hugs on offer, here in the Marché area…
and an impromptu exercise class just beyond, tucked into one corner of the lowest level of Robson Square…
all safe and sound thanks to the gigantic red Spring (Alan Chung Hung, 1981) that apparently holds the upper level in place.
Thank you, monochrome.
The calm austerity of that earlier focus has me hyper-alert to everything that surrounds me now: colour, shapes, sounds.
The verticality of Hornby Street, as i start my way back cross-town…
the horizontality of False Creek, once I’ve reached its Seawall…
and the pop-up exuberance of this grand finale in David Lam Park.
It is the end of the two-day Cascade RSVP 2024 bike race — as in Ride Seattle Vancouver Party; as in ride from Seattle to Vancouver and then party. They’ve had the RSV; P is imminent.
I stick with the Seawall for a while longer, then cut up through this mews…
"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 