Oh, Vancouver!

Travis Mushett    Articles    

Sadly enough, today is my final day in Canada for the foreseeable future. It’s been grand, but I regret that I didn’t really get the opportunity to take in Vancouver until now. The Weather Gods seemed to know of my predicament and provided me with a character that’s been absent during the duration of my trip, the sun.

Pure luck led me to a statue of Rick Hansen, the wheelchair athlete whose globe spanning Man in Motion World Tour raised $26 million for spinal cord research. This statue is placed prominently outside of GM Place, home of the Vancouver Canucks, and helped explain to me the unbelievably warm reception Rick received at the Opening Ceremony. This man resides with Mark Messier, Wayne Gretzky, Steve Yzerman, and Terry Fox on the pantheon of Canadian sport legends.

A short walk from the Hansen statue is the Falls Creek seawall. Along the water are hundreds, if not thousands, of rocks stacked into spikes and formations:

At first I thought the stones had rods running through them to make them stand upright, but a quick lifting up a top stone revealed that they were simply balanced on one another. Luckily, I managed to find the man responsible for creating and maintaining these stacks. Ziggy, an older gentlemen with an indeterminate (Greek?) accent, was wandering amongst the rocks, stacking and restacking them as he saw fit. After he explained that the work was his and his alone, I Ziggy if anyone paid him for his labor. “No, it’s relaxing,” he said. “You ask anyone, they know. They say, that’s what Ziggy do.”

This is only the tip of the Vancouver iceberg. The Games celebration in Robson Square features a zip line and an ice skating rink. The Hudson Bay Company’s Olympic/Paralympic Superstore is still loaded with shirts, stuffed animals, and pairs of the ubiquitous red Canada mittens, mittens so popular that they often force the checkout line to nearly an hour’s length. And MacLeod’s Books is a secondhand bookstore of the first caliber. With any luck, I’ll be back someday when the Games aren’t bouncing me around British Columbia like a pinball. The Paralympics are an intense kind of awesome, but I think a full experience of Vancouver would require an awesome of a more leisurely variety.

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