16 December 2022 – It’s barely a kilometer from the east end of False Creek back to Olympic Plaza, but it is chock-full of invitations along the way. We are encouraged to…
Help design a park:
Get involved with East Park, now in its consultation/planning stages.
Watch the changing tides:
Say yes to any or all of multiple invitations in Olympic Plaza:
Salute the site itself, a from-scratch construction project, “North America’s first LEED Platinum community,” completed in time to house athletes for the 2010 Winter Olympics and subsequently converted to more than 1,000 condo units; or…
Enjoy (but not climb!) Myfanwy Macleod’s The Birds art installations; or…
Admire the sleek industrial-functional lines of the 1931 Vancouver Salt Co., built to process unrefined salt shipped in from floodplains near San Francisco; or…
Indulge a thirst for beer not history, and visit the building in its present incarnation as CRAFT False Creek (“where everything is on tap”).
Go for the gold:
This gentleman, in largely legible and fairly grammatical prose, states that the CIA has buried two tons of gold in a secret location beneath the City of Vancouver — and he knows where it is. (Which, he adds, is why the cops shot at him the other day and CSIS is pursuing him.)
Or...
in a final invitation discovered up on West 2nd Avenue…
17 April 2022 – Wisdom courtesy of Eeyore, who was always my favourite in the Hundred Acre Woods cast of characters (and as drawn by E.H. Shepard, thank you, none of that Disney nonsense). Not that Eeyore was even remotely in my mind, on either of the Friday-Saturday walks I’m about to show you.
But later, looking at photos with their various camera angles, two references came to mind. One was that corporate stand-by, the 360 Review: assess from every angle, not just a chosen few. The other reference, which amounts to pretty well the same thing, is the advice Eeyore gave a flustered Piglet and eaves-dropping Christopher Robin, back in 1928:
“Think of all the possibilities, Piglet, before you settle down to enjoy yourselves” (The House at Pooh Corner, chapter 6, by A.A. Milne).
I love it, I’m glad I remembered it. Because … that’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? There it is, in your posts and mine: we bounce around, full of curiosity, we notice all those 360-possibilities, and we enjoy ourselves.
On Friday, heading north-west down an alley, my enjoyment is distinctly vertical. I’m captivated yet again by a line of H-frame hydro poles.
I look up …
and up …
and finally away, as my eyes track those wires off into the sky.
Saturday has me walking north again, but this time veering east not west, down to Great Northern Way by the Emily Carr (University of Art + Design) campus.
Where I look down, not up.
Construction for the Broadway Subway is all around my neighbourhood. This mammoth hole in the ground, nicely framed for sidewalk-superintendent convenience, will eventually become the Great Northern-Emily Carr station on the new line.
From eyes down to eyes up, as I pass Emily Carr. Skateboarders are clacking away on an unseen obstacle course to my left, while Kandis Williams’ Triadic Ballet silently unfolds on the wall screen to the right of a building entrance.
Just east of the university, in front of the Digital Media Centre, I literally do a 360 review. First, I am in front of this striking red heart. Striking, but awkward in its placement.
Then I circle around, and read Ron Simmer’s explanation.
I think it’s wonderful, and I no longer care about the ungainly placement. It’s all part of the vulnerable charm of this survivor (and the dotty determination of the man who rescued it).
On east along Great Northern Way, and then eyes all over the place as I head north on Clark Drive.
Below to my left, protective arched screening over the Millennium Line tracks, beyond that railway tracks with all those colour-block shipping containers rolling past; straight ahead, only slightly upwards, the Expo Line as it crosses Clark; and ‘way beyond that, very up indeed, those Coast Range mountains.
Plus — back to right here in front of me — an old-fashioned street lamp. Charming, and still part of the mix.
Nothing charming about the next bridge I cross, which I meet after exploring northward-then-eastward and finally back south again on Commercial Drive. The best you can say for it is, it’s functional.
Until you read both plaques. (“Explore all the possibilities…” Thank you, Eeyore. Got it.)
Plaque on the left announces the civic factoids of this Commercial Drive Bridge. Plaque on the right is a whole other, human story.
One last spin-around when I’m back in my own neighbourhood, as I cut through Guelph (aka Dude Chilling) Park.
To the north, the cherry trees that line East 7th Avenue (Kanzan cultivar, the Blossom Map tells me) …
while to the east, there are members at work in the Brewery Creek Community Garden, children playing on the swings, and over toward the south, a group of seniors just hanging out.
Meanwhile, on his plinth by the southern park edge, the eponymous Dude is also hanging out. Just chilling, right along with the rest of us.
I look back over my shoulder, catch this fresh new baby Kanzan blossom emerging from a mossy old tree trunk …
12 March 2022 – No, no, not Battle of — that event sits several centuries and various oceans distant from my Trafalgar. I’m on a street in the Kitsilano district of Vancouver, not floating around just off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. Mind you, there is water a kilometre or so to the north of us, and by carrying on down Trafalgar, we’ll hit it.
Which is the plan.
We already have a nautical reference point.
Not particularly well made, but so very cheerful. Intriguing, too. Why is this little boat perched on the roof of that front yard lean-to? Surely too high for any resident toddler to see… Ah well, it’s fun for passing adult pedestrians.
More gratuitous fun (always the best kind), another block or so to the north.
Why? But again, why ask? Just enjoy it.
Each little peak shelters its own ornament. In this case, a truck…
but others display everything from shells to toy animals to pretty pebbles to a plastic leprechaun, perhaps specially installed for St. Patrick’s Day.
Sedate good taste comes next: this fine balcony banner with its leaping salmon.
And right after that — side yard of the same Good Taste home, I think — comes another hit of nonsense.
Not that you’d be seriously tempted to ride it, but the draped fairy lights do emphasize that this bicycle is decorative, not functional.
Right at the next intersection, prayer flags and a plaque.
Well-worn flags — just imagine how many thousands of prayers they have fluttered into the breeze by now! And an equally weathered plaque, erected (it says here) in 2013 by “Friends of Siri” — their tribute to long-time resident Siri Kidder Halberg, who “loved to trade books.”
Thus, the little community book exchange these friends have created, right next to the bench.
This resonates for me, in many ways. First, I admire and support take-one/leave-one street libraries. Second, I am a huge fan of author Colin Cotterill‘s novels about the 1970s adventures of another Siri — Dr. Siri Paiboun, “the national and only coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos” — and indeed I am reading one of them right now (The Merry Misogynist). And, third, when I dive into this little library, I discover an unread novel (This Poison Will Remain) by another of my favourite authors, Fred Vargas. I snap it up.
A few more blocks and we’ve walked as far north as we can go, right into Point Grey Park. Trafalgar finally meets the water — in this case, English Bay.
‘Way out there, some freighters waiting their turn to carry on down Burrard Inlet and unload at the port (yay! supply chain at work!); in close, dozens of Barrow’s goldeneye ducks, obeying no schedule but their own.
Like the ducks, we’re on our own schedule. We turn east, curve with the land mass onto Kitsilano Beach, backed by Kits Park. My favourite swimmer is up there, flutter-kicking like mad.
I do mean up there:
Meet Wind Swimmer, and could she be better named? I see basic credits on the plaque — by sculptor Douglas R. Taylor, installed 1996 — but that’s not the half of it. Ohhh, the adventures she has known.
The prototype created in 1993 and installed in Stanley Park, but smashed by a log; the current version created in a collaboration between the sculptor, the Parks Board and donors (the Auerbachs) and installed on Kits Beach in 1996. Then came the wind storms of August 2015. The swimmer literally took a dive, and was again badly damaged and removed.
Three years go by… Repair work (largely by the Parks Board), and safety upgrades. In 2018, she is re-installed, finally back home and swimming again.
"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 