It could be a native Haida myth that Vancouver burst from a pine cone, so quickly did it sprout from a rowdy logger's village into the city that Condé Nast Traveler ranked the third most liveable on the planet. This socially progressive, gay-friendly, green-minded port city of 600,000 souls—known as “Hollywood North” in the U.S. film industry—zipped through its urban evolution at warp speed, morphing its lumber and shipping-based economy into one celebrating tourism, food, filmmaking, fashions, and quirky, trendy what-nots.
Eight weeks after it was incorporated on April 6, 1886, Vancouver burned to the ground then quickly shot up again, fueled by its lumber trade, the Canadian Pacific Railway, post WWII immigrants from Britain, and Hong Kong investors and Asian immigrants. Now this good-mood city it feels more linked in spirit and enterprise to the Pacific Rim than to the rest of Canada.
Vancouver isn't exactly Venice, but with its temperate climate and seascapes, fjords, beaches, and marinas practically downtown, Vancouverites thrive as much on water as on land—swimming, kayaking, yachting, hopping water taxis to North Vancouver and over to B.C.'s provincial capital of Victoria on Vancouver Island.
Vancouver's virile vertical skyline
Vancouver's virile vertical skyline is doubly reflected in its waters. There is an eerie resonance between the giant red cedars and towering Douglas firs, the Pacific Northwest totem poles and the glittering high-rises. Although the glass totems to commerce may loom higher than the magnificent trees whose lumber birthed Canada's third largest city, you feel the same awe that inspired the Salish, Haida and other Pacific Coast native peoples to think UP, erecting their gorgeous and frightening totem poles. In Vancouver's jaw-dropping natural splendor of ocean, mountains and forest, it's impossible not to feel it.
Emily Carr felt it. The spirit of it all seemed to flow through her veins and onto her canvas. This eccentric British Columbian painter and writer who lived from 1871 to 1945, dedicated her artistic life to capturing the breathtaking energy of the natural world around her. She bushwhacked with a fierce determination and penetrating eye—clear through the thick, mysterious wilderness—to document the decaying totem villages of the Northwest coast. Her work was as raw as it was vivid; her post-impressionist paintings of totem poles, hanging proudly in the “VAG” Vancouver Art Gallery, have haunted my thoughts for days. It is thanks to her early documentary work, much of it done between 1908 and 1912, that I and so many others don’t have to brave stinging nettles and vampire mosquitoes, grizzly bears and ocean gales, and hazard tippy dugout canoes to discover some of British Columbia's most incredible totem poles. I have only to roll out of my grand bed in the historic Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, stroll down Robson Street to the Coal Harbour Seawalk and then to over the Seawall Promenade ringing Stanley Park. Vancouver Art Gallery
Stanley Park
Magnificent Stanley Park lies just across the harbor, yet it feels so distant from Vancouver's hip espresso bars, its hemp emporiums, sushi bars, creperies, movie studios, boutique hotels, beaches, and marinas—a wilderness in stark contrast to this modern urban jungle. This ancient, thousand-acre seacoast rainforest was the home and sacred center of the Salish and other Pacific Coast native peoples when the Eagle reigned supreme over the Kingdom of the Air, and the Whale was the revered Lord of the Sea. The spirits of these mighty creatures still seem to roam through the towering cedars and ferns near the water's edge and rest below the wide skies above.
On these shores, hemmed in by the expansive waters of English Bay, the Strait of Georgia, and the Burrard Inlet, Captain George Vancouver met with native peoples of the Whoi-Whoi village in 1792. Two small shoreline villages recorded that encounter and remained until the mid-20th century. Today, the surviving totem poles herald the entrance to Stanley Park, corralled into a tight group at Brockton Point. Their fierce carved animals, spirits, and ancestors gaze toward the swelling, tidal waters of Burrard Inlet.
Emily Carr painter
Near that spot are the fierce boldly-painted totems like those that impassioned Emily Carr. And I can tell you that even on a luminous May day with azure views of Vancouver's vitreous skyline, the black wooden gaze of Dzunukwa the Giantess rips right through me. Her cedar-carved eyes seem to transmit a life force. I imagine then, with slight horror, Carr's rain-drenched primal encounter with D'Sonoqua, wild woman of the woods.
Alone at dusk in a remote and desolate village, Carr unearthed D'Sonoqua's grotesque stare and eagle-beaked breasts. “I could scarcely wrench my eyes away from the clutch of those empty sockets,” Carr wrote. “The power that I felt was not in the thing itself, but in some tremendous force behind it, that the carver had believed in.”
All this spiritual intensity makes my leisurely shopping, dining, wine-bibbing and latté sipping dawdle around Granville Island Public Market, Kool Kitsilano and the old bricked streets of Gastown feel frivolous. Leaving the force field of Red Cedar Bark Man and and Chief Skedan's Mortuary Pole, I continue my freshening walk north along the Seawall Promenade with a happy brigade of bike and roller-bladers, all the way to Siwash Rock.
Nitobe Memorial Garden Lashed by the waters of the Gulf of Georgia, this curious basalt stack topped with a hairy tuft of Douglas fir, a famous Vancouver landmark, does perhaps look like the young Squamish brave frozen in stone it's said to be. Here would be a dramatic spot to erect a totem to the diverse tribes of Vancouverites: Coast Salish, Squamish, Musqueum, Sechelts, Old Empire Brits, post WWII emigrés from Australia to Zimbabwe, the Asian influx and sub-tribal foodies and filmbuffs, hikers, bird-watchers and bear-watchers, yogis, playwrights, nudists, et.al. The First Nations aboriginal peoples, here for 10,000 years, would crowd the bottom and crown the top.
But how to portray Captain James Cook who first charted this coast, and Cook's young lieutenant George Vancouver who returned to claim Vancouver Island —and this mild weathered port for the British against the claims of Spain.... and Scotland's pioneer botanist David Douglas for whom B.C.'s Douglas firs are named. William Van Horne could be puffing on a Canadian Pacific Railway car over a team of carousing lumberjacks, and Klondikers of 1898 would be still digging for gold and “Crazy old Millie Carr” would be brandishing her powerful paintbrush.
And as for Vancouver's endless attractions? At the Vancouver Aquarium dreamy white Belugas float past you like phantoms, and the killer whales revered by the Salish are ferociously awesome. The fragrant shock of the Botanical Garden and the Nitobe Memorial Garden at the University of British Columbia campus just can't be carved. And the native artifacts at the Museum of Anthropology are startling in their expressions. Ah but I'll have to stop. A totem pole erected in the traveler's mind, like the city of Vancouver and its awesome Douglas firs, keeps on growing.
If You Go…
I love hotels with a sense of local history and atmosphere, and in Vancouver that means the grand old Fairmont Hotel Vancouver and The Sylvia. The Fairmont, built in 1939 to attract Canadian Pacific Railway tourists, is right across from the Vancouver Art Gallery and Robson Square. A heritage landmark built in 1912, the Sylvia Downtown Vancouver Hotel on English Bay beside Stanley Park, exudes an Old World charm and boasts the city's first cocktail bar.
Anything you crave to eat, you can find in Vancouver. See the in Georgia Straight, Vancouver's free alternative newsweekly for arts and events, restaurant and entertainment listings
Vancouver’s Totemic Attractions
Vancouver's virile vertical skyline mirrors its towering Douglas firs and the Pacific Northwest totem poles.
