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.

(I know. Sigh.)