Home

The Westcoast of Canada is more beautiful than I remembered!  After nearly three decades in Quebec, and Ontario, coming home to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, was a gift to my heart and soul.  The photograph above, was taken atop Burnaby Mountain, about a mile and a half from where I grew up, and near the terminus of the controversial oil pipeline expansion. The mountains and sea are part of me...an eternal part of me. 

I arrived in mid-July, long before the smoke from wildfires blanketed the coast.  What I noticed immediately, was the air.  The air is fresh.  It has a lightness of being, even on a hot Summer day.  Walking along the seashore, or standing on a pier, the smell of the salt air and creosote-soaked timbers, brings back memories of my youth and childhood.  'Twas as if I'd never been away.

But, I had been.  I hugged old friends I hadn't seen in thirty, thirty-five, even forty-five years:  soulful, deep hugs, to make up for the lost decades.  Lifetimes have passed.  New generations have grown up to have children of their own.  Yet, we picked up our conversations as if we had just seen each other the day before.  It felt so good to be with each of them once more: women I went to highschool with, co-workers from my days in broadcasting, old friends and new friends.  Sometimes we'd talk late into the night, and other times, just enjoyed the quiet.  It's great to be around someone you can just sit with, without having to say anything.  I already miss them all so much, and can't wait to return...home.

The Westcoast is often referred to as the, "wet coast", due to the abundance of rain throughout the year.  During my three weeks there, there were blue skies and sunshine almost every day, so I had a clear view of the mountains.  The Sleeping Giant, is the Indigenous name for the mountain formation created by the outline of Grouse Mountain, Mount Seymour, and other mountains on the North Shore.  She really does look like a giant, on her back, in a deep sleep. I say, "she" because she's also known as the Sleeping Princess, and Sleeping Beauty.

Sailboats and freighters have long shared the waters of English Bay...even making way for kayaks.  The vessel in the foreground carries a bright red sign, protesting the expansion of the oil pipeline, and tanker traffic that will pass through these waters, en route to the Salish Sea.   These beaches are ground zero for environmental activism...Greenpeace was born here.  

Everyone told me that the city - indeed, the whole Lower Mainland - had dramatically changed in thirty years.  I didn't recognize my old neighbourhood!  Everything was new to me.  Yet, I felt at home everywhere I went. 

Whole communities of sparkling highrise condos, and office towers, have emerged along the Skytrain light rapid transit routes.  Everyone wants to live in Vancouver!  Housing is a serious issue, and one which everyone talks about.  Vancouver is an expensive city inwhich to live, due in large measure to housing prices.  Many have sold their homes, and moved outside the Lower Mainland.  As a result, housing prices elsewhere in the Province, have also climbed significantly over the years.    

My Great Grandfather was a ship's Captain and Pilot in Portrush, Northern Ireland.  His seafaring youngest son, "abandoned ship", and headed for the gold fields of Northern Ontario, and later took his pregnant bride to the Pacific coast city of Vancouver, British Columbia, where my Dad was born.  Our family roots in Vancouver go back to the early 1920's - which is nothing, compared with the ten thousand year history of  Indigenous people on the Westcoast.

I am Quebecois, and Irish, yet the art of the Westcoast Haida, Nootka, and Coast Salish is part of my culture.  An adopted part of my culture.  I've missed the presence of totems, and carvings.  They are a proud part of the artistic and cultural landscape of British Columbia.  The grand works of art are displayed for all the world to see, in parks, airports, and ferry terminals...where this fellow mirrored a pre-caffinated me, waiting for the really, really, really early morning ferry to Nanaimo's Departure Bay, on Vancouver Island.

Strangely, I've become enamoured with another kind of totem, carved from BC timbers:  the iconic telephone pole!  Though I once considered them industrial eyesores, I've grown to love them.  They're everywhere in Vancouver:  leaning in back alleys (another uniquely Vancouver feature), and along the streets of older neighbourhoods.  My heart leapt when I saw them again!

Blackberries!  I'd forgotten about the wild blackberries growing around those telephone poles, and along roadside ditches and rural fences.  There's nothing as deliciously Summer, as sun-sweetened blackberries...except, maybe crab and prawns fresh off the fishing boats of Steveston!

   

 

The Salish Sea splashes the shores of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, as well as Vancouver on the Mainland of British Columbia.  Fishing trawlers, tugboats, freighters, ferries and sailboats ply its salt waters, anchoring in the open waters, or tying up dockside at a marina.  The vessels are beautiful to photograph, with both graphic angles and sweeping curves - much like the lines in Coast Salish, Nootka and Haida art of the Westcoast.   

If you're thinking of Pete Seeger's '60s folksong, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?... this is after all, a floral photography blog (flowers and photography being my endorphins) - I'm getting there...eventually.   When I wasn't pointing my camera at the sea and mountains, I did take photos of flowers, which I'll share in upcoming blogposts...the Westcoast is the home of Flower Power!

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.