‘Aren’t We Lucky?’

Our City’s Beauty Makes Us Cling To It Tightly

By Carol Volkart

There were two of them, one with walking sticks and a red coat, ahead of us on a trail in Pacific Spirit Park. It was Tuesday, Day Three of winter in Vancouver this year, and snow had turned the forest into a Christmas card.

Walkers in the snow in Pacific Spirit Park.

It traced the winding split-rail fence with white puffery; it turned the 50-foot conifers into white-tinselled Christmas trees; it covered the bracken and blackberry vines with white duvets, and it transformed piles of forest debris into mysterious humps of smooth white icing.

The couple, who we’d been noticing as bright counterpoints to the green-and-white world, suddenly changed course and began walking toward us. Closer to, we could see they were an older couple — like us — enjoying a mid-day walk in the woods. We nodded, the way you do at sharers of a favourite place, and the woman looked up under her red hood and smiled.

“Aren’t we lucky?” she said. Not lightly, not casually, but with passion, stressing the “lucky.”

And I thought about how often, how very often, I hear those words in Vancouver. “Aren’t we lucky?”

Along the riverfront trail in Southlands, where the tugboats bump through the waves, sometimes towing booms of logs fresh from the forest. On any part of Jericho Beach, where once, on an early-morning walk, I watched horseback riders giving their mounts a run. On the heights of Point Grey, where if you choose the right streets, you can see the same heart-soaring vistas of mountains, ships and ocean that residents get from their living-room windows. And in Dunbar, ordinary streets with the right kind of trees at the right time of spring, transform magically into a corps de ballet of pink and white tutus.

Carol Volkart meditating on beauty in Pacific Spirit Park on Tuesday.

Those are my areas of the city, but every part of Vancouver has its own beautiful spots, whether it’s the West End’s Stanley Park, False Creek’s long seawall, or Commercial Drive’s quirky business area and streets of colourful houses.

So much beauty. So close at hand. Aren’t we lucky, indeed?

Is that the reason, I wondered, why people feel so passionately about Vancouver? So reluctant to lose their views, their trees, their green spaces, beaches and trails. Even the small businesses and the old houses that remind us of how the city used to be. Could that be why people crowd public hearings to protest threats to any of these things?

The fear, perhaps, of not being able to say, “Aren’t we lucky?” but, “Weren’t we lucky, once, awhile ago?”

Snow transforms the forest in Pacific Spirit Park.