If you look at your grandparents’ old photo albums you will see some black and white pictures. They are small. They are of people you’ve heard about. Most of those people are no longer here but their pictures are in your hands, which is neat.
Those were the days when pictures were precious. You took twelve of them. When the rolls got longer there were twenty-four, and then thirty-six.
It took you weeks to get through that roll.
Now you click a hundred times at a child’s birthday party. You skim through them faster than a blur and stop at one or two and they stay in your camera or phone for, well, forever until you have too many and download them onto your computer where they meet with thousands of other pictures that are there, just there, and largely forgotten.
With film you held the photos, showed them, put them in an album and then opened the album on special occasions. And everyone said, “I remember Uncle Ned. He was so nice.”
They were different times. That is when, in black and white, Walter Cronkite said, “President Kennedy is dead,” and the world went into shock.
Black and white, twelve pictures to the roll, was when Burkeville was born. It was during the Second World War and airplanes were a big and sadly disposable weapon.
Many were built by Boeing in the old hangars at Vancouver’s airport, which was then just a small landing strip, and to keep the workers from taking hours to get to the plant, the federal government built a town at the end of the runway and named it after the president of Boeing, Stanley Burke. If you ever get that question on a test you can wow them.
At that time the little airport was out in the sticks. The only things in Richmond, just across one of the fingers of the Fraser River, were farms, and going the other way, across the Fraser in South Vancouver were mud flats.
The federal Wartime Housing department cut streets into the bush at the end of the landing strip and built tiny houses and rented them cheaply to the workers, who could now walk to the hangars. After the war the houses were sold to veterans.
Nowhere on earth is there a town that looks more idyllic. Norman Rockwell (don’t ask, just look on Google) would pray for a town like this. This was middle Canada, middle America, the pretend middle of anywhere that only exists in paintings, never in photos, because no place like this really exists.
There were ditches with a wooden bridge in front of each garden. The houses were cozy—that’s another way of saying they were either four or six rooms. The backyards had chickens and the front yards had children.
The curved streets were named after airplanes: Wellington, Anson, Catalina.
Seventy years later it is still the same.
Two other things about it stand out. Firstly it is the only place people live on Sea Island. There is only Burkeville and the airport. It has no mall, no stores, no gas station, no laundromat, no library, no medical marijuana dispensary, no traffic lights and no sushi restaurants. In short, it’s a really nice place.
Secondly it has just one minor drawback. The little airstrip right next to it is now a giant runway with 747s landing on it and they go over the houses so low they only just miss the roofs. At full throttle the engines blanket the town with thunder, and it can happen every couple of minutes.
Okay, you can’t have everything.
“I don’t hear a thing,” said Lou, who is big and friendly and lives on a corner lot and has plaster people with pointed hats all around his yard.
Lou has character. Lou and his wife, Linda, always have clothes on the line, even in the rain, even in the winter when it rains for weeks.
“It was good enough for my mother in Manitoba so it’s good enough for me,” says Linda.
They are deliciously cool characters, like many who live in Burkeville, and I was looking for them to introduce to Murray so Murray would believe me that there are characters here and so we could put Lou and Linda on television and earn our pay.
Knock, knock.
Please be home. Knock. He’s not home.
“They’re not home,” said a neighbour walking down the country street. “They never go out, but today they’re out.”
But I can’t hear this neighbour. An airplane is landing overhead and I don’t mean it is landing just beyond the town. I mean it is landing overhead. It is just that it misses the little town by an arm’s length and touches down on the runway just on the other side of the fence that ends the town. Close, I thought.
“What’d you say?” I shout.
“He’s not home,” said the neighbour. “And you don’t have to shout. Just wait, then talk.”
Neighbours know when to talk and when someone is out.
“How do you stand the noise?” I ask.
“We don’t hear it,” said the neighbour.
That’s what Lou said when I first met him. “What noise?”
We go on. I know there is a woman who lives at the end of a dead-end road where no one passes by. She puts her dahlias out front in jars and sells them. The sign says: “Flowers $2 a bunch. Please leave the jar.”
Knock, knock. She’s not home.
What is going on? The only people I know in Burkeville are not home.
We drive around but we don’t go far because you could walk across town in five minutes. Then we see a woman with white hair that has a red patch at the back.
“Beautiful,” I say to Murray as a plane is landing.
He doesn’t take his eyes off the road or the plane, both of which he can see without moving his eyes. He didn’t hear me.
“Beautiful,” I say again.
He looks at me. “Let’s talk to her,” he says. “She looks interesting.”
“Good idea,” I whisper.
She turns out to be the kite lady. The red dye forms a maple leaf in the shape of a kite. She makes kites, she flies kites, she has a trunk load of kites in her car.
She brings a tiny one out from her tiny pretty house. The string goes over her finger and the kite flies up by her shoulder.
She teaches kite-making in schools. She is wonderful.
“Could we see you fly a big one?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No, it’s against the law.”
“Say what?”
“Can’t fly anything this close to the airport,” she says as a flying aluminum tube with three hundred people inside slides overhead just out of reach. The ground vibrates. She smiles. I am thrilled.
The kite lady who can’t fly her kites. Stop the presses. The story is good.
“I want to show this place to my girlfriend,” said Murray.
If you get a chance go visit Burkeville. It’s on the way to the South Terminal, which was once the only terminal. A sign will say: Burkeville.
Take a look, visit Lou, buy some dahlias, but don’t fly a kite.
The Swimmer
What I like most about the man with the booties and gloves is that he doesn’t do what he does for publicity. He is totally quiet about being a nutcase—a brave, determined, unflinching, admirable nutcase.
Pete Cline and I met him after Pete apologized for wasting our time. He is the camera guy who took incredible pictures of the hands of two veterans in the story about John the Barber and the Gerry the Gardener. He knows his way around a camera.
On the morning of January 21 last year he suggested we go around the park. Halfway around Stanley Park on any morning in late January of any year you see the same thing. Nothing.
Sane folks, even joggers who are not, are smart enough to avoid icy paths, cold rain and dark skies with a promise of more icy paths.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No problem,” I said, trying to believe what I was saying.
We went to Third Beach where Tom the lifeguard works, but he only works there when people go swimming. No swimmers, no lives to save.
Pete parked and I walked ahe
ad of him. I always do this at Third Beach because their bathroom is open year round. No matter what I think of the Park Board I thank them endlessly for their open-door policy.
It is raining. I am under my umbrella looking down at the beach, which even on a good day in the winter is almost always empty—and this is not a good day.
“Whoa,” said I out loud in a way even more thankful than for an unlocked bathroom.
“I’ll get my camera,” said Pete.
There was a man in a bathing suit coming out of the water.
Pete is large. He ran. I also am too large for my frame, but I jumped. You know the way a five-year-old jumps when something exciting happens? You don’t? Well then go look at a five-year-old when something exciting happens. You see what he/she does? Now look at me. Yes. Embarrassing.
We go down the long steps to the sand and then in city shoes walk across the wet, sticky beach. The wet, sticky beach goes over the tops of my shoes and slips down onto my socks.
“Hello, we don’t want to bother you,” I say.
That is fairly ridiculous. There is no one else in sight, we are talking to the only person besides us down here and we are obviously bothering him. To say we don’t want to do this is a stretch.
He is kind.
“It’s okay,” he says.
My questions are asked without periods or commas. “Why when who and again why?”
He is not slender. He is not a competitive swimmer. He is not young. In short, he is wonderful.
“I do it every day,” he says.
His name is Mike. “It’s refreshing.”
“No matter what mood you are in before you go in, you are in a better mood when you come out.”
This is better than Dr. Phil, I think. He just leaves you crying.
Mike was wearing gloves and booties. “Too cold to walk on the sand and too cold on the fingers.”
Then he laughed and said, “I wear a swim cap when it snows, otherwise I’d look like an ice cream cone.”
But what I liked most about him was he was doing this where no one was likely to see him. He wasn’t doing it for publicity and nor was he doing it to get into conversations about why he was doing it. For this we apologized. He was now getting both.
He was doing it for himself. Anything you do for that reason has extra rewards.
“If I am stressed when I go in I am not stressed when I come out.”
Better than rows of books on how to de-stress yourself. They just leave you trying to breathe deeply while emptying your mind while not thinking about those things that stress you. Don’t think about them. Just don’t. Don’t! Don’t think!!
And then he left, in the rain, walking over the wet, cold, sticky sand. He had only his towel over his shoulder. His car was in the parking lot, the only one there besides ours.
If it wasn’t for Pete and me there would have been no one watching, and Mike had done this hundreds of times, hundreds and hundreds of times.
Anyone who does something just for the sake of doing it and not for the sake of being known for doing it is a master of the art, even if no one knows it.
● ● ●
There’s one other little thing about Third Beach that you may already know from an earlier book but just in the remote possibility you did not get that book here’s another chance to know it.
During World War ii swimming was off limits. In fact the park was off limits for anyone except the army. Third Beach was the main point of defence against an attack by Japanese ships.
Cannons were lined up on the ridge high above the beach. Behind them, under the current parking lot of the Teahouse, was the store room for the artillery shells. If you look around right near the curb you will find a steel plate on the ground. That was the door that led to the brass shells and the steel projectiles and the gunpowder.
The Teahouse was the officers’ dining room. If you go into the army make sure you are an officer. The grunts who did the work and loaded the cannons and peeled the potatoes lived in barracks in the beach parking lot.
If you stand now where the cannons were you will see many ships. Some are from Japan, carrying cars. Again, why do we bother with wars?
Walking
And one more thing about that same spot.
It had been a long time since Shawn Foss, a cameraman at ctv, had been to Third Beach. He had moved out to the Fraser Valley and had been working there. Now he was back and we were going through the park.
“This is where the cannons were,” I told him as we drove by the Teahouse. “And down on Third Beach is where we will find a story for tonight.”
We had only worked together a few times so I wanted to be really cocky. Plus if you can’t find it at Third Beach you can always go on to Second Beach and just pretend you misspoke—and then run for public office.
Nothing on the beach, of course, because if you are going to be cocky you are going to get shot down. Remember what comes after pride. Oh, come on, yes you do. You at least know someone who went to church at least once.
Back to reality. Nothing. So if nothing works, turn around. This is another reference from that same source.
Long ago there was a fisherman who wasn’t catching anything. He complained to his boss and the boss said, “Fish from the other side of the boat.”
Pretty dumb solution, probably thought the fisherman, but you’ve got to do what the boss says, so he did. And his boat almost sank from the fish he caught.
There is a lesson here, believe it or not. If something isn’t working, try something else. Turn around. Go ahead, try it.
We turned around and there was a fellow walking by—nothing distinctive about him but give him a try. After all, he is there, and never pass up a parking spot or an opportunity.
“Hello, hate to bother you . . .” The usual.
Yes, he is walking through the park. Yes he walks a lot, in fact every day. Yes, he walks 25 kilometres every day. Yes, he had just spent four hours walking with a friend who got tired and so now he was walking for another hour by himself.
And yes, he keeps track of it all with an app on his phone, which he would love to show us. This included how many steps he had climbed that morning. He had done the long stairway to Third Beach three times and now was going again.
And yes, Shawn would climb up and down with him getting pictures of his feet and all of him and then follow him from behind and then run ahead to get more pictures of him approaching.
“How did that happen?” Shawn asked after he left.
“Easy, we turned around,” I said. “And now,” because we had walked to the top parking lot near the Teahouse, I said, “if you turn around I’ll show you where Pauline Johnson is buried.”
“You don’t know who Pauline Johnson is?”
And there began another story. She was once the most famous Canadian in the world; not just the most famous Canadian woman but the most famous Canadian. You can Google her or read my history book, Haunting Vancouver. That would make me happy.
Cars
Just a shorty—and it’s about time. Most of these stories have been long and I apologize. This one is about cars, which I don’t much care about.
I was at a friend’s house today. His name is Chester Grant and he had a plaque on his wall of a 1957 Chevy, and it was blue.
“It’s a classic,” he said.
“I had one of those,” I said. “A ’57 Chevy, and it was blue.”
“Wow, I’m envious,” he said.
He said he had never had one and didn’t know why he was given the plaque, but he hung it on his wall because everyone says, “Wow, that’s a ’57 Chevy.”
He wanted to give it to me because, well, because I had had one and he had not.
“No, thank you,” I said. “It looks so beautiful on your wall. Folks will be envious.”
The real re
ason was that no one would be envious of my classic 1957 Chevrolet, which I didn’t know was classic when I got it. It came from the factory with classic design, classic two-tone paint, classic powerful engine, classic easy shifting and, most of all, two upright fins above the rear fenders that looked like a pair of attacking sharks. Who wouldn’t want to look like attacking sharks on the road?
My blue ’57 Chevy was my first car but I didn’t know how to drive when I got it. As you know I am from New York and kids in New York don’t grow up with cars. There are millions of them on the streets and they made playing on those streets a challenge, but as for driving, we didn’t do that.
Everyone took the subway and buses. Typical conversation between teenage boys riding on the subway:
“You ever getting a car?”
“Someday. But where would I park it?”
End of conversation.
Anyway, I was about to get married and I thought it would be good to drive my bride from the church to the hotel that we had booked for that night. That’s what people did, I imagined. I could only imagine since I had never been married or driven a car.
To rent a car you had to be able to drive and you had to have a licence. That was two problems.
I found a driving school that advertised a three-hour refresher course. Good enough for me.
I paid, and in the first hour I learned how to go forward in a car with automatic transmission. The next day, the second hour, I learned how to turn. The third day and the third hour I learned how to back up and park. I also rented the car for a fourth hour to take a driving test which I had scheduled to follow the third hour.
“Really? I passed?” I said to the clerk who stamped a piece of paper and said this was my interim licence until my official one came in the mail.
Lesson: trust no one on the road.
An uncle of mine who drove buses for years and then taught others how to drive buses thought my plans lacked some basic intelligence. He drove us to the hotel.
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