West coast field notes, volume I
Bits and pieces from my first month in Vancouver
Hi!! I haven’t been here long enough to pretend I understand Vancouver, that I have a theory of this place and its people. What I do have is the start of a collection of moments and sensations—the first things I’ve noticed, and the things I think will come back to me when I try to remember this first month—listed in no particular order for your reading pleasure:
The streets in my neighbourhood are wide but not too wide, the houses set a comfortable distance apart, the trees mature but not imposing.1 It goes street, laneway, street, laneway, street, like an orderly field of crops, only more hilly. I’ve lived in grid cities all my life, but the numbered streets here (mine is 16th, which I’m pleased with) makes the grid-ness of it feel more pronounced. The architecture is inoffensive and uninspiring, and though each house and garden has its own character, the aesthetic is cohesive, block after block. The occasional bright blue- or yellow-painted house makes me smile like a little kid, and I love seeing the vegetable gardens in the front yards, but I miss bricks and I miss old buildings. When I’m in a good mood, the neighbourhood calms me; otherwise, it’s too nice. There’s no friction or texture, no sense of time, there’s nothing to hold onto.
Crows! Everywhere! Slightly unsettling but also cool.
Mostly I feel like the same person I was before. It doesn’t feel like Vancouver is working on the inside parts of me yet, though I think it’s definitely working on the outside parts, because suddenly I have this strong impulse to drink kombucha and to dress like I’m going hiking when really I’m just walking to Safeway to spend $7 on avocados.2 Fun fact: Vancouver was voted 3rd worst-dressed city in the world in 2011! Personally I feel like it’s not so bad… just sort of laid back, sort of crunchy. I wonder who defines “worst-dressed,” and where they get their authority from.
I see why people here are in such good shape, because there really are so many hills (no actual hiking required)! I have to remember to stretch my calves. I was talking to an American who spent the last four years at U of T, and the first thing they said in their (highly uncalled for) anti-Toronto polemic was that it’s “so flat.” I admit I didn’t fully grasp Toronto’s flatness until now. I guess sometimes you only really know a place once you leave it.
The trees are incredibly beautiful, huge and red and all draped in moss. The giant ferns make the forest feel otherworldly, like I’ve stepped onto another planet or back into prehistory, but the smell of cedar takes me home. Bohmee said the forest here is heavy, and I think that’s the perfect way to describe it.
I was with Bohmee the first time I swam in the ocean, and this was also perfect. Being able to walk out of class and onto the beach is a miracle I hope I never start taking for granted. We took a wrong turn trying to find the path and ran into another slightly lost beach-seeker, who was wearing colourful sunglasses and a muscle shirt with the word PUSSY emblazoned across the front. (Okay, maybe whoever compiles the worst-dressed cities list had a point.) There was the unexpected pleasure of having our lives overlap with a stranger’s for a few minutes, and then there was hot sand and open sky and so much blue. And many nudists, because Wreck Beach is clothing optional. Everything was right the second the water closed over my head, and later, standing in the shower and washing the Pacific out of my hair, I was really, perfectly happy.
I own a rain jacket now! I learned that actual waterproof rain jackets are very expensive, but I’m sure we’ll get at least $300 worth of rain this winter…
The transit to UBC is just awful. Every morning I want to cry. But I tell myself it’s worth it because the campus is so beautiful, set apart from the city on its little green peninsula, and also I’m trying to romanticize commuting.
The basement apartment where I’m living feels like a box, completely white and grey with no marks left behind by previous tenants. 90 Arkell was a spongy sort of house, warm and undeniably lived-in, moulded by each life that passed through it. There was life in all the unwanted or forgotten objects left behind, the names signed in the closet upstairs, the stains we could never quite get out of the kitchen cabinets, and—of course—the blue handprint on the garage wall with BRIAN scrawled sort of threateningly above it.3 This apartment is not spongy. My room now has postcards on the walls, colourful sheets on the bed, and little trinkets sitting on the desk to remind me of my friends, but all this evidence of my life seems to sit on the apartment’s surface. Nothing is absorbed. I wouldn’t dream of writing on the walls. Still, I love our green front door and the slanted light that shines through the blinds, and sometimes I even love the sound of our landlords upstairs, the parents going Thump. Thump. Thump. and the little kid going patpatpatpatpatpatpatpat as he races around.
There are always new sounds to learn when you move somewhere new. Each of the appliances here sings a different little song when it needs attention (the microwave is my favourite). I like hearing Cordelia shuffle through the kitchen in her slippers. I’m getting used to the constant rush of traffic from the street, which sounds almost like waves if you don’t focus on it too closely. You’d think that after living most of my life with the hum of downtown Toronto seeping in through the windows and a freight train running practically through my backyard, I’d have adjusted to the sound of traffic, but I guess everything takes getting used to.
Last week, I could taste fall’s first breath, and it made me homesick for fall in Ontario. I can’t imagine not seeing that blaze of colours when the leaves change, but I know there will be other good things.
The people here seem to move slower than they do back home, or maybe I’m just seeing what I expect to see. I met a boy named after a tree (or possibly an American president), and when I told him this, he said the people in Vancouver are just like the people everywhere. He sketched me while I read, and we talked, slowly, smiling and squinting into the sun. I love the way everyone here pours outside as soon as the sun comes out. I guess the upside of the winter grey will be that I’ll learn to appreciate the sun even more.
That’s it for now! Oh, also school is good. I hope you’re all doing so well. :-)
I just found out there’s a database of EVERY SINGLE TREE on every street in Vancouver (the “public trees” owned by the city, not “private trees”—which is a hilarious distinction)
Reminiscing about Niva ribbing me for dressing “like a Nordic skier” in undergrad… how you’d laugh now
One thing that makes me really happy is that the name Brian is also carved into the brick on the back wall of my house in Toronto! I wonder if a Brian ever lived in my current apartment, but felt as I do that these walls aren’t for writing on.
this is so pretty saskia!!