Jezz’s Daily Story

vancouver

2006

Imagine now, please, Thor almighty, the great Norse god, helmed and wielding his iron hammer, Mjolnir. Imagine him stepping down into the sea and wading thigh-deep across the Atlantic ocean, pushing aside England and Ireland as if they were so much passing driftwood. He comes to the east coast of Canada and heaves himself up onto the continent, water falling Niagra-like from his stratospheric form. He stalks across the icy tundrae of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, coming to the Rocky and Cascade mountain ranges, which he steps over like two fallen branches. As he reaches the Pacific, Thor straddles the Georgia Straight with one foot on the mainland and the other on Vancouver Island and, with a thunder-clap downward swing, plummets Mjolnir into the mountainous coastline below.

Deep in the crater that remains, amongst the pine splinters and shattered rock, humans slowly begin to take residence. First, sporadic populations of indigenous bands; the Squamish, the Tsawwassen, the Musqueam. Then, tracing Thor’s own path, Europeans arrive, and amongst other outposts, the sawmill settlement of Granville is founded. In 1886 it is renamed Vancouver, after the English explorer who surveyed the area almost a hundred years earlier. Today the city is the third largest in Canada – its glassy skyscrapers and sprawling suburbs are home to two million people.

Although the bowl in which the city is situated is not a true crater, it is easy to imagine it that way. There is something dramatic about the landscape in that part of the Pacific Northwest. When I lived in Vancouver I could see from my balcony Mt. Baker, the piercing mountain, its peak frosted with ice and snow throughout the year. It’s a volcano, and as I gazed at it in the distance, across the hills, the river and the imagined line of the 49^th Parallel, I wondered what it would be like to watch it erupt, its lava spilling into the valley below.

Vancouver is an open city – a naked city. It’s the pizza of cities – every ingredient is laid out to be seen, from the mushrooms of the Fraser Valley, heaped in crates by the sides of the highway, to the hot-dog sausages of Burrard and Robson, hawked from under green umbrellas. Compare it to London, which is not a pizza but some kind of crusty, unmarked pastry – it looks delicious, but if you dive inside you don’t know where you’re going to come out.

Part of the reason for this nakedness is, I believe, Grouse Mountain. The mountain is home to a ski-hill, and its stadium lights twinkle in the night sky like the eyes of a watching deity. These lights are on eternally, and every night of the year Vancouver’s astrology is speckled with its very own constellation. You can see it from almost anywhere. And from its lofty seat, often above the clouds, the skiiers and busloads of tourists can, in return, see the entirety of the city below; from the distant airport at the city’s south, over the modest skyscrapers of Downtown, to North Vancouver, which creeps up onto the lower slopes of Grouse Mountain itself.

If you asked me to draw a map of Vancouver I could do it with much more confidence than I could any other city in the world. Even Sydney, the place in which I was born, grew up within reach of, and currently live, is much more of a tangled mystery to me – there are too many dimensions, too large and twisted a space covered. In Sydney, whole suburbs exist in the hilly recessions along the coast, hidden in the nooks of the harbour. Vancouver, on the other hand, is parcelled up in a flat area wedged between the mountains and the ocean, so its borders are easily marked. From there filling in the gaps is simple.

Of great assistance is the Skytrain, Vancouver’s magnificent and somewhat unique public transit system. Built for the World Expo of 1986, the Skytrain is much like a grimy elder relative of the monorail – lifted above the highways and homes of the city, the train’s concrete tracks slice through Vancouver’s elongated east-west axis. I commuted to work on the Skytrain for months, and it provided a wonderful awareness of the city – hovering as if on a magic carpet, I watched with my head pressed against the glass as the pine trees, shopping malls and industrial areas floated past below. Compare this, again, to London, with its Underground, a complex network of tracks whose subterranean stations somehow have no relationship with the world above. Unlike London, when you step off of the train in Vancouver, you actually know where on Earth you are.

It is more than just the elevated observation points which gave me the impression that Vancouver is a city exposed. One of the first things I noticed when I arrived was the homeless population. Beggars, holding their cardboard signs pathetically, pock-mark every corner in the Downtown area. I will never forget the frequent sight of single-minded men, stooping to pluck with stained fingers the butts of old cigarettes from the dirty ground. Rifling through the garbage for recyclable soft drink cans and bottles was also a common pursuit. My girlfriend always insisted on leaving empty drink containers on the side of the pavement to ensure some fortunate soul would reap their five-cent spoils.

It extends beyond the city itself – well into the outlying suburbs, I’d see dirty-faced kids standing at the traffic lights, wandering up and down between rows of idle cars, tapping at windows in the hope that somebody would flip them a coin. It seemed almost as though the dark corners of the city, the places you might normally expect the huddled groups of outcast and forgotten to congregate, had been pulled inside out, their contents spilt into the city and its suburbs, a tide of desperate humanity.

The most explicit example of this is the intersection of Main and East Hasting streets, christened by some locals as “Pain and Wastings”. The area itself is known to be the worst ghetto in Canada, but it’s only a few blocks away from the main commercial and financial districts, and an important route for cross-city travel. I remember passing through it frequently – I’d wind my windows up, laughing about it nervously, over a genuine fear. The area is a bit like the infected track-mark of the city – swollen with wasted, hungry masses who won’t all fit into the churches and community centres that offer food and shelter. According to The Georgia Straight, a local newspaper, the Downtown Eastside has the highest HIV infection rate in the Western world; looking at the scarred faces as I occasionally drove through, I could easily believe that.

T-Paul Ste Marie is a spoken-word poet who performs frequently in Vancouver, a poet who I was fortunate enough to see on several occasions. He is somewhat Thor-like, in both activity and appearance; towering, dark hair moulded to perfectly mimic Elvis or Joe Strummer, he hosts “The Thundering Word Heard”, an open mic night in the candle-lit Café Montmatré. When he speaks he passionately sketches the lives of the downtrodden characters of the city. I remember him reciting a poem, red-faced, spit flying, about the tragedy of a beaten prostitute, whose name nobody knew. It was such a sad tale, but during that brief period spent with my eyes closed, those thundering words heard, I knew that the girl’s death did not go ignored, as it may have done in any other city.

It’s just because the city wears its sleeves rolled up that people like T-Paul exist in Vancouver. There is always an outpouring of community support – the problems that the city faces are acknowledged, because nothing goes unseen. It is both the city’s horror and its charm. It’s a characteristic I could easily wish upon cities like Sydney, or London – but a characteristic so integrally related to Vancouver’s own unique physicality and social organization, that it would be impossible to replicate.

Stanely Park is over four square kilometres of protected parkland, jutting out into the Burrard Inlet, like an island of pines which had collided into the stubby peninsula of the
Downtown area. To look at it from the mountains, the park itself seems small and limited – like an uninhabited punnet of land left to stagnate, strangled from the rest of the natural world by the shipping channels and the high-rise buildings which surround it.

 I was amazed when I actually visited the park for the first time. I had a morning spare, and with my Converse All-Stars laced up and my camera’s cord wrapped around my wrist I walked along Georgia Street towards the park, keeping pace with the heavy rows of traffic. The mirror-faced skyscrapers tapered down into gatherings of shorter apartment blocks; the apartment blocks then diminished into low-roofed gas stations, restaurants and cafés. Eventually the buildings stopped altogether, and beyond the grassy lawns and curving road which remained, was Stanley Park.

It took four hours to circumnavigate the park, walking quickly along the seawall. What I had seen previously as an overgrown parkland became a neat series of divided little worlds. Wedges of shorn grass were sliced up by the pedestrian tracks and bike paths – black squirrels played coyly as they darted up and down the towering pine trees. From here, one path trailed off into the midst of the forest; for simplicity’s sake, I continued to follow the park’s outer edge.

Stanley Park was bursting with different worlds that morning. I found a series of beaches inhabited by literary types reading under their sun parasols; a concrete water park, overrun with children wearing swimwear as they darted in and out of the fountains, the whole area rich with the smell of chlorine; rocky corners, inhabited by fishermen who looked genuinely surprised to see me walk by; spots by the water which gathered tourists as if they had landed there from above, and weren’t sure how to leave; lighthouses with cracking white paint; a working cannon from the 19^th century.

Of all these worlds the most exciting came when I rounded a corner to find a series of well maintained cricket-pitches, spreading out from the stone boundary of the seawall towards the interior of the park. All of the pitches were being used; dozens of figures wearing white outfits and turbans were deeply focused on the game at hand. At the time I had been listening to Australia’s matches against England over the internet – the Ashes – and was quite depressed about the fact I couldn’t actually watch a game, couldn’t see the satisfying clash of leather on willow. To stumble upon a game of cricket that morning, in a country whose primary concern is for alien sports like lacrosse and curling, was revolutionary. Here, in this place I had always imagined as a dense cluster of fir trees and overrun walking trails, there was the potential for anything to exist.

And so, the things you think you know are never really as they seem. Perhaps the fact that I thought I knew Vancouver made my discoveries that much more exciting, as they were always unexpected. Yet I do still think I know the city well, and I still feel connected to it, maybe more than any other place I’ve lived. I can always imagine looking over it, as if I’m standing on the edge of that crater, the city gleaming below like a watery reflection. Everything about the city feels within reach to me, even now that I’m an Ocean away, with another view from my balcony entirely.