There was a time in this fair land when
the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood
alone against the sun
Long before the white man and long before
the wheel
When the green, dark forest stood was too
silent to be real
Gordon Lightfoot, 1967
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| A green dark forest of British Columbia |
16th October 1967
A naïve young Englishman starts working in
a bookshop in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. He has embarked on a ‘gap
year’, (a term he claims to have invented), between ten cloistered years of
school and starting college. The schoolteachers had been scornful of his plan
to spend a year off – their language was blunt - thinking no doubt that
hedonism and money would ruin the lad. He was not to be dissuaded; early signs
of obstinacy and a growing taste for travel sped him to the Pacific Northwest.
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| Downtown Vancouver |
Footfall on my journey into a remote land
of unknown people (I have second cousins in Vancouver one of whom I had met briefly)
was in Montreal and Expo 67. British pavilion was reputed to be one of the best. What I saw was
a dull looking hexagonal concrete tower, tapering to a 3D sculptured Union Flag
set in the summit. But inside! Here was a celebration of all that was groovy
about Sixties Britain. Well, England - I doubt the Scots, Irish, Welsh and
Yorkshire were well represented; this was all Carnaby Street and Swinging
London from the Mini (car), Mary Quant, Twiggy, the Mini (dress) and
Beatlemania to The Rolling Stones and a Routemaster Bus. At least the pavilion’s
architect was a Scot!
1967 was the year of Sgt. Pepper, flower
power, Haight Ashbury, tripping out and turning on, Hippies, cheesecloth shirts
and denim. Here was I, heading into the embers of the ‘Summer of Love’ on the
west coast, and I did not know what marijuana looked like let alone how to
smoke it. I lived for a while in a counterculture community where the scene was about drugs and a flourishing protest around the politics of the environment. Music was
transforming popular culture. Scott McKenzie urged me Be sure to wear some flowers in my hair when I went to San
Francisco (which I failed to do, despite plentiful flowers and hair, due to
Commie-hating Yanks, more anon) but I was more intent on finding me a Brown Eyed Girl whilst trying to fathom A Whiter Shade of Pale. Some hardened
but likeable and nutty Geordie boys, “we’re friends of Eric Burdon”, introduced
me to The House of the Rising Sun yet
I avoided becoming a ruined ‘poor boy’.
Vancouver, in Canada’s centenary year of
1967, was still a ‘young growing land’. Two hundred years before I arrived this
land was covered by a thick ‘green, dark forest’ of Douglas fir, hemlock, cedar
and spruce. Several thousands of First
Nations Squamish people lived in split cedar huts on the shores of Burrard
Inlet. The first European to set foot in this mysterious place was Yorkshireman
Captain James Cook in 1778; although an adopted son of God’s Own Country I
identify with his claim of a far off land. For the next hundred years, trade
between Europeans and the Squamish grew increasingly tense, with the Spanish
and British challenging for supremacy over the land. ‘Guns, germs and steel’
resulted in the Squamish and other First Nations peoples of the west coast
being pushed off their land, a shameful practice all too familiar wherever the
British and Spanish ventured across the globe.
In 1792 Captain George Vancouver sailed in
and out very quickly whilst searching the Pacific for the North West Passage through
the Arctic Ocean. Up to this time the area of the current city was heavily
forested and only the inlets and islands were named. It was not until 1886,
when the city was incorporated, that it acquired the name of the sailor who
first mapped the region.
The gold rush of 1858 firmly pushed
Vancouver up the list of places to explore by my predecessors looking for gap
year fun, an opportunity for adventure and getting rich quickly. On the banks
of the mighty and majestic Fraser River a lucky explorer found a few grains of
the magic metal. Over 25,000 giddy prospectors, mostly from California plus a
few early luckless and importunate folk from Christchurch in New Zealand, descended
on Vancouver, swelling the population and causing a building spree. In 1867 another
fine and entrepreneurial Yorkshireman, one John “Gassy Jack” Deighton, realised
the potential for getting rich off of the miners; he envisioned hundreds of
thirsty miners requiring hooch, so he established a saloon downtown that became
the focal point of a modern city that endures today.
One hundred and ten years after the gold
rush, US citizens again came to the city. This time they crept in surreptitiously
rather than with a swagger. They were draft dodgers. 1968 was a watershed year
in the history of the Pacific Northwest in particular, and the world at large. The
Vietnam War invaded our consciousness at every turn, ambushed us via our TV
screens and radicalised students on university campuses. Unlike fortunate me
young American men at the age of 18 were confronted with three choices: - go to
Vietnam and fight (and probably be killed); break the law and refuse the draft;
or go to Canada. I met some of the latter, the nicest guys I have ever met. One
even sobered me up and set me straight after a notorious pot party where my one
and only experience with the weed came to a disastrous end.
My recollection of April 1968 is vivid. It was a time of revolution, violence and hatred
yet with a touch of hope. In the US, students for the first time forced a
university to close. The Civil Rights war was being fought on the streets of US
cities and television beamed its bloody images to our living room. Washington
was in denial. As W.B. Yeats wrote “Things fell apart – the centre cannot
hold”. Civil unrest and demonstrations by students in the US were copied across
Europe in London, Paris, Prague and even my hometown of Nottingham. Today’s
docile cohort of University of Nottingham students would not know how to
revolt. The US President, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a broken man. On 4th
April, whilst driving back from a drive-in movie with my Canadian flatmate, we
heard on the radio of the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was shocked to
hear my friend Bob growl, “Good riddance”, words I would not have expected from
someone I called a friend. Eight weeks later Robert Kennedy was shot in Los
Angeles. Close to that date I had driven to the US border hoping for a day’s
visit to Seattle. On examining my passport the US border agents noticed a
double page spread of Iron curtain country stamps, for I had travelled in East
Germany, Poland and Soviet Russia a year earlier. “You cannot come in”, they
said, “You need a visa from Washington”. None of my companions required such
authorisation to visit their rotten country. Well, they could keep their
decaying nation and their incoming president, Richard M. Nixon. Never was a
more dishonest, duplicitous and criminal man elected to President of the United
States! Was there?
Also in April 1968 I witnessed a political
phenomenon I doubt I will see repeated. It was called Trudeaumania. It came to
Chinatown in Vancouver. With the visit of the forty nine year old Pierre
Trudeau bringing glamour, sophistication and hope, a sea of passionate
Vancouverites had found a new type of politician. Just elected Liberal Party
leader he was Prime Minister of Canada within weeks.
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know you can count me out
John Lennon, 1968
Yet through all the anger of ‘68, all this
demand for change, and all the hysteria, Vancouverites sided with John Lennon -
they wanted no part in destroying what they had. When I left the city in July
’68 it was still the peaceful, serene and friendly place I had encountered ten
months earlier. Modern Vancouver was founded on trade. In 1967 it welcomed folk
from every continent; if you were prepared to work it gave you prosperity, fun,
a breathtaking landscape – and tripping out every night. Vancouverites wisely
know why their city works; it is because they welcome all, judge nobody and
celebrate the positives of living every day. Back in that day too, men and
women lived as equals and treated each other as such.
---------------------------
But time has no beginnings and the history
has no bounds
As to this verdant country they came from
all around…
Built the mines, mills and the factories
for the good of us all.
And when the young man’s fancy was turning
to the spring
Their minds were overflowing with the
visions of their day
Gordon
Lightfoot 1967
16th October 2017
That former naïve young Englishman returns
to his bygone pasture of wild oats. With the love of his maturer years by his
side – and now a father, grandfather and Grumpy Old Man wiser and wistful – together
they have come to rediscover a city esteemed by many folk as one of the most
desirable places on the planet in which to live. How would it be?
Once again there is a Prime Minister Trudeau living at
24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa. The green, dark forest still swathes the province
close to the city. Stanley Park continues in its tranquillity; the ocean views
from the ten-kilometre seawall walk are the same, with the single pine tree
precarious atop Siwash Rock. English Bay is just as I left it after an all
night barbecue in ’68. Both of us were reminded that the people on the streets
smile all the time, even when it rains nonstop for four days. As I had been in
’68, Canada’s most famous troubadour serenaded us with songs of train rides, sinking
freighters and lost love. We are Lightheads.
Has anything changed? Of course it has,
fifty years is a long time in the life of a city. Claudia, one of the aircrew
on our flight in, captures the essence of Vancouver’s change. “British Columbia
has become wealthy, I cannot afford to live in the city now. When the Brits
left Hong Kong many of the wealthy Chinese disinvested there and bought up
downtown Vancouver”. The skyline is indeed changed from ’67, with vastly more
high-rise apartment and office blocks reaching up from the tight grid system of
streets. Trade permeates the urban landscape from the grand old Hudson’s Bay
Company department store on Georgia Street to the ugly Canada Place built for
Expo 86 on the waterfront. The latter did more to internationalise the city
than the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1887. Granville Island
Market is new, to me, and the reason we spent a day in its sublime food halls
and breweries. Gastown is mature, sucking the tourists in but housing the wondrous Inuit
Gallery of art and craft from First Nations people. Chinatown may have lost its
magic and sparkle yet there is still wonderful food.
In addition to “Gassy Jack” Vancouver’s
history is sprinkled with colourful characters. Skalsh the Unselfish, who was
turned into stone by Q’uas the Transformer as a reward for his unselfishness,
is commemorated at Siwash Rock; Steve Brodie was a young revolutionary who,
through brilliant leadership, organised a thousand jobless men in 1938 to
occupy two Vancouver buildings for thirty days to highlight the plight of the
unemployed; Emily Carr, painter of green forests; Bill Duthie, founder of a
chain of bookshops in 1957, who always found jobs for gap year travellers; and
Simon Fraser, a Scot, who gave his name to one of the most tempestuous
universities in Canada. Nonetheless, my favourite Vancouverite is Joe Capilano.
A man of passionate political beliefs he would thrive were he alive today.
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| Stanley Park totems |
Joe Capilano was born in 1850 and became
leader of the Squamish in 1895. Joe held firm beliefs in the rights of his
indigenous people and their ownership of the land, their customs and the
culture of coastal British Columbia. He saw (like his contemporary indigenous
peoples of Australia and New Zealand) the white man exploiting the forests and
the rivers and polluting the landscape with mines, mills and factories. In 1906
he led a delegation to see King Edward VII in London. Joe and his fellow chiefs
explained to the king that the Squamish had as much right to the land as the
white man, that they had families and art to cherish yet they were receiving
none of the privileges the white man was grabbing for himself. Sadly for Joe
his trip to England was unsuccessful. Upon his return he banished the Roman
Catholics from his villages and he was ostracised by the indolent European
majority in B.C. But his people esteemed him until his death and I hope they do
still.
In 2017 the role and standing of the First Nations in Vancouver and the
rest of Canada is being rehabilitated, slowly but thankfully. As in Australia
with the Native Peoples and in New Zealand with the Maoris, the white man is
waking up belatedly to the fact that Joe and his people know how to tend the
land and fish the rivers yet avoid the depletion of natural resources. If
scientists and politicians are agreed the Arctic is melting then they should
try to understand Joe’s philosophy and think up some solutions quickly to
reverse the melt. I think Justin Trudeau is up for it. I very much doubt the
forty-fifth President of the United States is.
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| Vancouver fall |
If you would like to share your experiences of Vancouver and views discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.
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