Walkie Talkie

Not long ago, Vancouver’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Georgia Straight, posed a question that (for once) was not about real estate or housing: “Crows, yay or nay?” Two columnists drew swords. “See, we’re not alone!” said my wife.

As I sat on our sunny porch to review Bill Arnott’s A Perfect Day for a Walk, a couple of the black bastards alighted on the railing and started their grating caw-caw-caw. No, I am not a crow person. But I suspect that Arnott is, since the birds squawk, preen, and flutter throughout his perambulations around and across Vancouver’s downtown and affluent West Side. His introduction’s first sentence sets the tone: “The crows are in flight, reminders of omens and overcast skies.”

Vancouver’s gloomy weather seldom deters determined walkers, though to me, the perfect walk is best taken when brisk westerly winds banish clouds to the Fraser Valley — when the city, mountains, and sea appear freshly uncrated. Arnott’s drizzly outings are very much about the journey, not the destination. He zigs and zags to find places of interest and stories to tell, detailing dozens of plaques, statues, art installations, and significant buildings along the way. At the end of each chapter, Arnott includes archival photographs that contrast with the imagery he’s just described. These are indeed pictures worth a thousand words and will be of great interest to Vancouverites who wonder what the skyline was like when the Marine Building, the Sun Tower, and the Hotel Vancouver (all three remain standing) were the tallest around.

One by one, Arnott ticks off the neighbourhoods: The West End. Yaletown. Downtown and Coal Harbour. Kerrisdale and Jericho Beach. Curiously, though, A Perfect Day for a Walk fizzles out beyond False Creek and ignores the vast physicality of East Vancouver. There’s an old joke that the only time West Side kids ventured past Quebec Street (the official east-west divide) was for summer vacations in the Okanagan. While Commercial Drive was a fun place to visit once upon a time — when the cafés of Little Italy had a punk rock edge — your car might have been broken into. “East Van AF” would not become a thing until the photo conceptualists of the Vancouver School, including Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and Ken Lum, attained international acclaim in the 1990s. Still, when it comes to financial wealth and hectares of parkland, there remains an astonishing divide between the West Side and East Vancouver.

Tolkien famously said, “Not all those who wander are lost.” As Arnott wanders, his prose can seem like an aimless cataloguing of sights and sounds — all rather meaningless unless you’re already familiar with the territory. Arnott himself stays in the background, making brief reference to jewellers in his family and grandparents who owned a wild property just around the corner from the old Ridge Theatre. Otherwise he mines territory previously excavated by the curmudgeonly artist Michael Kluckner and the reporter and podcaster Eve Lazarus, both of whom make guest appearances along with the former rock disc jockey and MuchMusic host Terry David Mulligan and the poet and activist Gilles Cyrenne. The civic historian John Atkin tosses a wet blanket over several quirky myths, like the one about Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother working in the famously cramped yet celebrity-laden Vie’s restaurant. “Nah! Never happened.”

While Vancouver is a perfectly lovely city — one committed to protecting nature and fostering places like Stanley Park, created in 1888 — Arnott’s meandering fails to answer questions that beg to be asked. How can it be, for instance, that $22-million penthouses are located less than a kilometre from open-air drug markets? And his descriptions of trees, shrubs, skies, the weather, and, of course, crows can be somewhat repetitive. Nature writing is very hard to do well, unless one has the great patience and deep powers of observation of a Wade Davis or a Barry Lopez.

Sometimes A Perfect Day for a Walk is rather insiderly, even if it’s not a guidebook but a meditation on a city. That meditation is at its best with “Gastown, Chinatown, and Downtown Eastside”— a chapter that belies Arnott’s title. That’s because there’s never a “perfect day” to walk through the DTES. In the shadow of those largely vacant, foreign-owned luxury condos, thousands of hollow-eyed, raving, argumentative, and possibly dangerous people crowd the streets and alleyways. How does one countenance countless lives lost or wasted through drug addiction, mental illness, homelessness, chronic unemployment, and poor health?

I still remember my first visit to Hastings Street in the early 1980s: the smell of urine in the back alleys, the wobbly gait and loud squabbles of inebriated souls emerging from un‑chic dive bars, and the vacant stares of lonely old men through the windows of shabby apartments. While the rest of the city has become glossy and polished, Skid Row has gone the other way. Arnott’s deep affection for the area — and his lack of judgment — is admirable, and I should get out of my comfort zone to explore the Footprints Community Art Project, created by those who proudly call “one of the most impoverished postal codes” their home. But I’ll probably just reread Arnott’s fine chapter and ramble across the Granville Street Bridge, hoping to catch a magnificent double rainbow like the one he describes many pages later. Why spoil a perfect day?