2 December 2024 – Fog & sun & withdrawals & advances & teases & full glory.
And a few crows.
Let’s set a benchmark. Let’s pick the view on November 28, when the weather chose to beam her sparkling charm in all directions. At 8:08 am, the rising sun bounced off east-facing towers…
and flooded downtown Vancouver, the North Shore and those Coast Mountains with light.
This morning — and, at 8:26, only minutes later in the day — the view is very different.
Fog. With about a block and a half of visibility. As for mountains… What mountains?
A crow waits it out.
Bit of a breakthrough, at 8:50…
largely withdrawn, by 9:41…
though a new line of light opens up at 9:48…
and tempts this crow (presumably equipped with GPS) to take flight on eastward.
His instincts are good.
By 10:37 the clouds are wispy and the haze is beating a retreat.
At 2:52 pm, it’s full sunshine, everywhere you look.
Look while you can. Sunset is barely an hour away.
12 November 2024 – It’s definitely a leaden sky up there, but down here there’s lots to look at. Plus there’s a rain jacket in my backpack. I am equipped.
Colours pop against all that grey.
Bright autumn leaves snagged in a still glowing shrub…
seed pods tawny against yellowing foliage…
seed pods cascading from their vines…
and a small tree, starkly elegant against its stone & brick backdrop…
all of them my companions, as I walk my way north down Scotia Street, flanking the east wall of…
the Brewery Creek Building.
Not its original name! Even “Fell’s Candy Factory,” still visible above the brass lettering, is not the original name.
Built c. 1904 as a storage cellar for Vancouver Brewery Ltd., this building was later (among other things) a candy factory, a creamery, a grease works and a stucco manufacturing plant before the restoration and renovations that, in 1993…
transformed it into a collection of live/work condos in a Class A heritage building.
New-builds are now springing up all around. It more than holds its own.
Though I like some of the sassy newcomers.
Especially ones that prove modest building materials can also hold their own — when deployed with bold colour and strong, clean lines.
And this is the back-alley view!
A bit farther north, I’m still caught up in the old/new mix that is Mount Pleasant these days. Low vintage buildings and early (2017 or so) Vancouver Mural Festival artworks mark East 3rd and the alley just off Main Street..
but behind them to the south rises one of the sleek new eco-conscious work facilities that are now reshaping the area, East 5th in particular.
I’m headed in the opposite direction, north & west to the east end of False Creek. My route takes me past Mountain Equipment now-American-Company-not-Canadian-Coop. I consciously Don’t Go There; I instead enjoy the exterior of this mass timber building. Including the corvine slogan under one pillar’s footing…
and droplets sliding down the water course built into the Quebec Street façade.
You see? It has rained, it will rain, but at the moment, it is not — not quite — raining.
I’m closing in on False Creek…
but it’s not the geodesic dome of Science World that catches my eye. it’s the runaway red balloon down there against the railing.
And then I forget all about the red balloon.
I can hear chimes & gongs & cymbals & whistles, and I know how to interpret them. They tell me that the glass tower by the Science World entrance, sadly silent during a long restoration, is once again in glorious, ridiculous, delightful, full-tilt operation. It has no name that I can find, but if ever any 2024 contraption deserved the name Rube Goldberg Machine — this is it.
Things clank, whiz, fly around, spiral and drop, tip and tilt, climb and do it again. A woman grins at me over her children’s heads. “The kids are the excuse. I could stand here all day.” I nod.
But we eventually move on …
I, past the reclining question-mark outside Science World’s creek-facing west wall that invites us to consider our daily choices, all of which affect the environment.
Question-mark nicely suits what happens next. I find myself in an impromptu focus group of SeaWall pedestrians — diversified in our demographics, but united in our conclusion.
Despite much conjecture among us, we remain puzzled. Goose? Swan? We settle for Very Large Waterfowl. We also agree that he/she is gliding over a sunken boat (the hull gleams greenish-white, the mast protrudes). Pleased with ourselves and each other, we go our various ways.
By the time I reach my Cambie Bridge cross-over point, the threat-of-rain has become really-rain.
I stand under bridge ramparts, exchange forecasts with a guy also pawing his backpack for a jacket, and watch a young woman toss her red umbrella aside so she can kick up her heels on one of the playground swings.
Jacketed & be-hatted, all zippered up, I climb my way up onto the bridge and head out over the water. I am so charmed by this graffito on the railing…
that I stand here until a ferry obligingly comes along, to include in the picture. (The wait gives me time to compile a Glad They Exist list, ferries being just one item. I find it a helpful exercise, very soothing, a counterbalance to all that I wish did not exist.)
And then I put the camera away, because, good grief, this is now serious rain.
And I then I take it out again, one last time.
Here at West 8th & Yukon, a living demonstration of the slogan back there under the MEC pillar.
Crows know! This crow knows he is very wet. And he is telling us all about it.
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.
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.
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 