Mapping the path

NORTHWEST BASEBALL

Vancouver, BC

We spend our first off day touring Vancouver, beginning with a circuit around Stanley Park. Then it’s a drive through downtown for lunch at Momo Sushi before visiting the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. We finish it off with a scenic dinner on Granville Island.

We drove down to the shore of Vancouver Harbour, getting a good look at the city as we passed the yacht club, a great blue heron, and a statue of Harry Jerome, a sprinter who competed in three Olympics in the 1960s and was named British Columbia’s Athlete of the Century.

Jerome set seven world records in the course of his track and field career, including setting the prized 100-yard dash mark three times.

We continued along the seawall drive to Brockton Point to see the park’s collection of nine totem poles, the most heavily visited site in British Columbia. They are replicas of original totem poles gathered from across the province between 1920 and the 1980s, when they were sent to museums for preservation.

A plaque nearby states:

The totem was the British Columbia Indian's “coat of arms.” Totem poles are unique to the north west coast of BC and lower Alaska. They were carved from western red cedar, and each carving tells of a real or mythical event. They were not idols nor were they worshipped. Each carving on each pole has a meaning. The eagle represents the kingdom of the air. The whale, the lordship of the sea. The wolf, the genius of the land, and the frog, the transitional link between land and sea.

We got a look at Shore to Shore, a sculpture by artist Luke Marston that depicts his great great grandfather, Portuguese Joe Silvey, and the two First Nation women he married during his time here. Silvey was one of many Portuguese who immigrated to Brockton Point in the 19th century to fish and live in a community of First Nation, Hawaiian, and Portuguese people.

We crossed back toward the shore to see the Nine O’Clock Gun, a 12-pound muzzle-loaded naval cannon that is shot every night at 9:00 p.m. Cast in 1816 in England, it was brought to Stanley Park in 1894 to notify fishermen of the 6:00 p.m close of fishing for the day.

We finished our tour of the east side of the peninsula at the Brockton Point Lighthouse (built in 1914); the S.S. Empress of Japan figurehead, a replica from the ship that sailed between Vancouver and the Far East from 1891–1922; and the Girl in a Wetsuit, a life-sized sculpture just off the shore created in 1972 by Hungarian artist (and Vancouver immigrant) Elek Imredy.

At the northern end of the park, we got a view of the Lions Gate Bridge connecting Vancouver to North Vancouver. The suspension bridge from 1938 would also be our way out of town towards the ferry for Nanaimo the following morning.

We continued on to Vancouver’s Chinatown, one of the largest Chinatowns in North America. Chinese immigrants first came to Vancouver in real numbers in second half of the 19th century, first driven by the British Columbia Gold Rush of 1958, then by the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s. By 1901, more than 2,000 Chinese lived in Vancouver, part of a population of 16,000 in British Columbia. But by the time the railway was completed, the Canadian parliament had passed a head tax on Chinese immigrants, charging them $50 for entry. In 1901, the priced was raised to $100. Two years later, it was $500. It was a not-so-subtle message to dissuade further immigration once the work had been done.

I first visited Vancouver in 1985, when Chinatown seemed exciting and vibrant. Today, it feels rundown and dying, with closed shops and homeless camped on the street. In the late 1980s, wealthier Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants began to settle in Richmond, about 10 miles to the south, in an area known as the “Golden Village.” A Chinatown Revitalization Action Plan was created for Vancouver in 2011, but it does not appear to have had any significant results thus far.

We parked the car in Gastown, Vancouver’s first neighborhood. It was named for a steamboat captain and barkeep named “Gassy” Jack Deighton, who arrived in 1867 to open the town’s first saloon. The area quickly became a hub for loggers, fishermen, and seamen, and today is a national historic site filled with shops and restaurants.

Gastown is also home to a steam-powered clock, situated on the corner of Cambie St. and Water St. It has a distinctly old-timey feel, with a glass exterior exposing the intricate set of cogs and wheels inside. But it was actually designed and built in 1977 by clockmaker Raymond Saunders, who has built more than 150 custom clocks, many of which serve as public works of art. Built over a steam grate, the clock sounds every 15 minutes and lets off steam on the hour. We waited patiently to see the full show at high noon.

The museum contains nearly 50,000 ethnographic objects, as well as 535,000 archaeological objects. I was particularly drawn to its vast selection of ceremonial masks from around the world.

The museum’s Great Hall, showcasing a series of huge totem poles — was closed for seismic retrofitting. But we did get to see the jewel in the museum’s collection: The Raven and the First Men, a sculpture created by Bill Reid, a prolific artist who is a member of the Haida indigenous group. His magnificent sculpture, carved from a single block of laminated yellow cedar, depicts the Haida creation myth, in which a raven discovers beings hidden inside a clamshell and coaxes them out to become the first Haida people. Later, bored with these aimless men, the raven discovers a group of women inside a mollusk and brings them to the men.

The Museum of Anthropology also includes Koerner European Ceramics Gallery, an interesting collection of more than 600 European ceramics donated to the museum in 1987.

We sat down at Sandbar Seafood, which has excellent views of the city along with a great menu of seafood. I chose the cedar plank salmon, while Dad had the blackened ling cod. We left relaxed and ready for another gameday.

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