Vancouver, BC 1 September 2015

Oh, Canada!

Our tenth day in Canada. Tomorrow morning we return 'down below.'

As 'furrin kuntrees' go, the distinction, and sense of dislocation, here in BC, is scarcely noticeable. A stray 'oot' and occasional funny spellings (harbour) and words (parkade, poutine) but the differences are subtle. Kilometers and degrees Celsius, but still pounds of apples. A dollar is worth $1.33US. More ethnicity here in Vancouver, and therefore more cuisine options than, say, Seattle. Just as many cars. The old joke, 'How do you make Canadians get out of the swimming pool?'* isn't as true as it once was, at least not here on the west coast ...but Canadians still queue better than USers.

Three major political parties have fragmented the electorate sufficiently to keep a Premier who is cordially hated by more than half the people in office for a decade of 'conservative' damage. Our Vancouver host (who remains nameless for strategic reasons having to do with Air BnB) is horrified when we say the same thing is happening in the US with only two parties, because so many isolationist, fundamentalist, greed-heads vote against their own self-interest. 'Oh, that won't happen in Canada, no way. Harper's oot.'

'We'll see,' we say. 

'No, no. Canadians are too intelligent to do that.' And it's true; Canadians are much better (more rigorously as well as classically) educated. That's where the politeness comes from.

The effects of Global Weirding are sharper the farther north you go, and the heavier, earlier storms (as we saw two days ago) and multi-year drought have deeply impressed Canadians, says our host, with the need to follow the European lead on carbon emissions, rather than the USer climate change denial pattern its national government has favored for the last decade. 'At least I desperately hope so,' he adds.

* You say, 'Please get out of the pool.'

After a breakfast of Okanagan blueberries and peaches, we took a lovely stroll along the breakwater. A dozen big ships in the outer harbor, awaiting the tides and clearance to travel up Burrard Inlet, many many walkers, joggers, and bikers, nicely separated on walkways and bikeways, far from the speeding cars. A break for a civilized lunch at the Tearoom, thence across the park, a mature urban forest with towering firs, cedars, and broadleafs, on Lovers and Tatlow Walks. Out the other side at Coal Bay, beside its yachts and skyscrapers, and back along busy Denman Street to our own high-rise. Weather grey and gently drizzly.

( Okay! That worked. I had the idea for a background in a text panel while walking the trail. My dumb little text editor doesn't like it, but modern browsers appear to. Safari on a mini-iPad does it right; sorry, Android pad users... It looks cool on Chrome. )

The coast here is very rocky, very wet, and very old. This means that the mosses that have grown on the rocks for a few million years have had time to build a thin layer of something that trees like to think of as soil ... but it's very shallow, and trees are only able to manage a certain height before they peel off. Most trees have sinescence built in -- they climax after a given number of years, whereupon they start retracting their roots so they can fall and return their biomass to the limited reservoir. Because the growing things themselves, plus water, constitute nearly all of the growing medium, this is sometimes called a hydroponic forest.

This Fir tree couldn't have been more than 80 years old, and its flat, shallow root mass is 8 meters across and less than half a meter deep at the deepest.

Back out of the forest and into the human reality of 'boater's paradise' on the inland waterway that stretches from the very bottom of the map at the top of this page, the Hood Canal at Olympia, to Haida Gwaii and beyond at the top, a distance of at least 500 miles, with dozens of islands, passes, long inlets, and places to explore. Oh to be a boatie here! And Oh! for a boat!

Vancouver's skyline has sprung up like weeds since last we were here (with Chad for Christmas, was it 1995?). The Hong Kong influx around the change-over in 1999 that has some calling this 'Hongcouver' brought a huge wave of money, the need for lots of luxury housing, and, hence, all those residential skyscrapers.

Vancouver is cursed with too many cars. We dodged 'em going back across the isthmus to our English Bay apartment, stopping to buy fresh Pacific Scallops, BC Crab cakes, and a cupcake for tea. A dozy, quiet afternoon ... and tomorrow, back to the US.

Canadian Money is prettier than ours. This is the last, enough for breakfast. It's plastic, partially transparent and partially metallic silver colored. Impossible to photograph, even harder to counterfeit. Canada made the robotic arm on the (defunct) space shuttle, and honors its ex-Prime Ministers the way we honor our Presidents; this worthy is John Macdonald, PM from 1867 until 1873, a sort of Licolnesque character in their history.

The one and two dollar coins are Loonies (because they have a Loon on them) and Twonies. No bills smaller than fives, and while pennies exist, nobody uses them. One rounds.