Day four of pouring rain. Along Venables this afternoon to a specialty leather cleaner, the Ace Of Suedes, with a neat old Kenneth Cole tan nubuck coat I found yesterday afternoon at Corporate Thrift Store in the Fraser Valley. What really sold me on the coat, outside of the filled-up 25% off card in my wallet, was its buttons -- great thick metal studs that you first fit through equally thick metal eyelets, then lock sideways into place, click click click click, like loading bullets into a handgun.

Down to Hastings, the rain not letting up and even intensifying. Little rivers running downhill, the drain grate at the bottom of the Frances Street hill a slalom course of whitewater. The sight of water leaping a foot or so off the road brought back memories of pre-elementary school days in West Vancouver. It sounds funny now to say this, but in 1970, when I was born, the other side of Marine Drive was forest, all the way up to the highway (The subdivisions documented by Arni Haraldsson in his Caulfeild Plateau pictures didn't arrive until the mid-1980s). Streams now piped and ditched ran free, and I remember being taken on walks by both parents, the highlights of which were miniature rapids and waterfalls at the side of the road, streams working steadily away at the recent roadcut's face. Even as late as the mid-1970s, driving up to Squamish on a rainy Sunday afternoon, after spending the morning with my dad's mom, you still had your pick of literally dozens of streams touching down along the roadside (One Sea to Sky Highway stream, M Creek, later had revenge on the tourist gawkers, taking out the highway bridge, rail bridge, and several motorists on a dark rainy winter night in 1981).

Back to work on Michelina again. Writing a children's story, I naturally find myself excavating my own (admittedly not very substantial) memories of childhood, and what I find there is much the same as now: not many people, but lots of rivers, lakes, mountains, forests, park trails, plants and animals, etc...

- posted by cjb @ 7:25 PM