When
Will the West Be One: Fragmenting Vancouver
Kristen Keerma
English Bay Beach felt like the last
place on Earth. By some lucky accident, I walked right into it with the
glib unawareness that so often afflicts tourists posing as locals.
Unbeknownst to me, I had approached the city from the right direction – a
presumably safe first walk along the seawall from where I was staying on
False Creek. I lost a pen there in a scramble to capture the way the light
draped over the downtown Westside of Vancouver. Trying to remain
innocuous, I frantically dug for that pen as I felt the force of the
moment slipping. A scruffy guitar player up to his knees in West Coast
paraphernalia and quite at home on the patch of grass that divided the
city from the sea caught my eye briefly as if to say: don’t bother. I was
standing right where you are and I couldn’t catch it either.
It’s the brink of Stanley Park and a
flame eater stands on a box for a crowd threatening cartoon violence in
the absence of small change and burning half his humours to a crisp. Dusk
is taking its sweet time, riding in on the tide. So this is the West: the
last frontier. Vancouver is its monument. It stands between the purple
haze of the mountains and the evanescent Pacific, never ebbing and forever
stating: I was here.
The skyline unfolds like a rare oriental
blossom – a lotus that has transcended the mighty Pacific and found a
reluctant seat of peace. Just like you’ve got to stand outside an urban
hive to see the paths its workers follow, you’ve got to stand outside a
city to really see the patterns it fills.
English Bay Beach: the last place on
Earth. Vancouver has been herded to the fringes of civilization by
elements well beyond its control: all those egocentric East Coast folk,
those nefarious mountains, pragmatic politics in the form of funding and
that blasted center of the universe, radiating the word “Toronto” across
the nation. Or has it stumbled to the edges of the world and found
itself without direction still?
Vancouver, an outside kind of place (see:
obsessive sea kayaking, mountain climbing, running, biking, skiing, etc.)
has surprised a great many institutions and built its own civilization.
What else is there but certain obliteration? And so it is new and fresh
and courageous. From within the disaffected varnish that coats the
hardened centre of ultra-trendy, über-yuppie Yaletown (verging on the
Olympic village: oh yes, heroic) and the tired cruise ship carnival cum
t-shirt utopia of Gastown emanates a hint of the intangible. Robson (and
not for want of trying) might as well rename itself the emperor for all
the new clothes it wears, but can’t disguise that grain of "not quite –
maybe" that lies at its conceptual centre. What of the downtown’s westerly
parts: the throbbing lights that rise from the pavement of Davie Street
like UFOs and ricochet off the tangle of wires that lead to Planet
Starbucks? Splashing gleefully in the rain or basking in that unearthly
West Coast sunshine, the surfer chic sushi sacks and unassuming coffee
franchises in waiting linger long after the first thrill of Vancouver has
subsided. After spending a day in this town’s light, the waterlogged
matchstick sun that glowers over the Atlantic is a mere, mythical memory.
Rooftop gardens are trendy. Perhaps
"forest" is a more accurate description. On the double take of the
shimmering streets and sleek glass towers, you catch a glimpse of trees
sprouting from all the artifacts of man that have been left to clutter.
It’s as though in a sly metamorphosis, Vancouver is dissolving back into
that from which it came. If left to the second skin of decay that grows
over urban areas, fresh Vancouver would disappear completely into the lush
old growth West Coast that it sprang from.
Despite the optimism that’s lurking
beneath paint and plaster and Plexiglas, there is an unspeakably tragic
vibe to Vancouver. People flow into it like tributaries into Eden. They
are ghosts or epitaphs waiting out an elegiac existence in the timeless
twi-life that has crawled from the Pacific and collapsed beneath palms at
the base of megalithic mountains. In this sense, Vancouver is Ithaca,
leaning to the West: the city by the sea where every odyssey ends and the
people drawn to it are pilgrims – drawn to a home they never set eyes on
in their life. It seems as though the people who live in Vancouver and
even the city itself are eternally misplaced. The aura of transition,
reluctance and missing direction is suffocating. The city does not know
itself and neither do the people in it.
What so many condemn about Vancouver and
about the people who find themselves there is the divide that darkens the
doorstep of Cambie Street and creeps eastward, blackening its path. The
phantom that prowls the underbelly of all of Vancouver, which is so
impossible to snatch a glimpse of, is really a failed ideology: you cannot
separate east from west.
Vancouver is host to a number of demons
(some peddle drugs or necklaces from Mexico – others trundle up and down
alleys and streets with shopping carts peddling souls) but the very entity
that haunts it is commonly known as Canada’s Poorest Postal Code.
Vancouver’s downtown eastside is terrifying at first sight because when
you stumble into it you cannot put your finger on when, or how or where
the transition happened. One moment is captivated by bright white shopping
and the next you are standing outside a mission full of hungry ghosts
trespassing not only on each other but the idealistic, free spirit vibe of
the West Coast.
It is trite to call the grime, the
abandoned graffiti and their resident artists tragic. It is almost
shameful to enjoy seedy Granville Street with its fetish mentality and
retro decorum when a few blocks to the east, seedy becomes needy becomes
desperate. If there is any contrast in all of Canada that embodies the
voracity of the struggle between east and west, old and new, then it is
the line that you are warned not to cross in Vancouver. The eastside is
dangerous, but it won’t bother you. The tent camps, themselves
miraculous expressions of cities within cities, speckle East Hastings
Street and people who decided drugs were safer than sobriety moan and love
and compose for they live a life beyond the bars on unbroken windows and
trash strewn streets devoid of cars.
Vancouver is a wandering city. The only
transit needed is feet. What I found on the downtown Eastside did more
than satiate my curiosity over the scandal and dejection of municipal
defenders: it introduced me to the most defiant, albeit shockingly rundown
community in the city. So what if the buildings are the terrain of
squatters and a drug mart really is a drug mart? While having lunch
at the so called last point of civilization in touristy Gastown, I watched
two men and woman – verging on their early twenties and lost in a parallel
world where pharmaceuticals rule not only the street, but the spirit –
approach a payphone on Carrall Street and embark on a bizarre ritual
involving a carton of milk, the receiver of a pay phone and a bottle of
peroxide. After thoroughly destroying the phone, one of the instigators
pulled out a cell phone and proceeded to have a conversation. It was a
grotesque, real time evolution of technology, facilitated by the
indifferent anarchy of people purposefully destroying themselves in an
address to devolution.
On Davie, Burrard and Thurlow, all the
guitar cases were empty, but on the corner of Carrall and Hastings in
front of a painting of an eagle, a woman was having a supremely bad trip.
Another woman approached a man and asked him what was wrong with her
friend. There was a piercing note of compassion under her slur and for the
rest of my life, I will associate that sound with the abject poverty of
pocket, and the strangely unfailing wealth of spirit that afflicts all the
landmarks of the east and echoes in the west.
But stepping away from discrimination,
from the rampant, quickly deteriorating drug culture that soon may fuse
all the memories and intelligence in Canada’s metropolis west, one thing
rang true about Vancouver in the form of its residents. The voyagers won’t
find what they’re looking for; they aren’t meant to and they know it. That
is the essence of Vancouver. People talk to ringing cell phones in broad
daylight (alien signals) or try and beat some authenticity back into the
bohemian Granville Island. They dream of the Kitsilano of their youth and
domesticate the fringe civilization over Lion’s Gate Bridge in their
middle age. A new generation of misdirected dreamers stumbles from
alleyways disheveled and screaming; they pour 2% milk into pay phones and
walk away with one more thirst quenched.
While in Vancouver, its districts,
vacancies and rampant indiscretions fade in and out of consciousness –
the past and present, but once you leave the fringe the return to the
centre seems a little too intense, cataclysmically on course, and trapped
by its own direction. Vancouver, a memory in the living, gives of itself
one thing to every traveler: the very present desire to go back.
Kristen Keerma is a writer and student
living in Montreal.