Ides of March
Vancouver and Lions Gate Bridge I first read After 18 years in the above-here pluricitato Polaroid Memory of Douglas Coupland.
is a bridge built in 1938 connecting downtown, through Stanley Park to the north of the city, across the bay.
One of the symbols of the city, is beloved by its inhabitants.
few days ago I went on patrol through the park, under and over the bridge, around the time of sunset, to have the best shot ( piss'inpressa that I am, I even climbed through the brambles instead of a street in 30 seconds longer, for fear of losing the right light!).
In the middle of the park, right towards the entrance of the bridge, the forest leaves way to split logs and thin grass: it seems the head of an old man who slowly goes to the streets . I thought it was the destruction of anti-human who knows the proceeds of any yard, but then I read (also on another Coupland), which are signs of a devastating storm that has uprooted many trees in the summer of 2006.
Maybe in your town is an architectural structure to become so huge and grand, just for being there, your own mental architecture, a structure that works as a funnel for your dreams, ideas and hopes.Douglas Coupland, Memory Polaroid
In my city, Vancouver, there is a construction of gender, tales of a bridge called Lions Gate brigde. Three arches connecting the city to the suburbs of Vancouver's North Shore, where I grew up, and the mountains and the forests of British Columbia just beyond those suburbs.
For people not accustomed to cross the Lions Gate Bridge, the discussions between drivers on traffic conditions on the bridge may seem an endless boredom and intensity: "What was the traffic?".
"A single lane."
"Locked?"
"Yeah."
"Across all were empty and two lanes?"
"Yeah."
"It must have arrived by ferry to Horseshoe Bay."
"I was about to go to the Second Narrows, but I thought that after seven on the Lions Gate there was no one."
"I Ferries arrive at the time equal to or even? "
" Oh, and a traffic jam ... "
(Complete with a desperate cry of the driver who does not know the Lions Gate).
the end of 1986 I returned to Vancouver after a year spent outside of Canada. On the evening of my return I looked at the bridge and I noticed that the parabolic profiles of the bays were adorned with lights shining like pearls. The show was so beautiful to leave you breathless.
I asked my father the reason for all those lights, and he had replied that they called "Necklace of Grace", the name of a citizen politician. In the almost fifty years since the bridge was built, the city had wanted to see, in secret, the day that would be able to cloaked in light, and the dream had become reality.
Today, when I return to Vancouver, Gracie is always the necklace with the look that I try stretching out toward the window of the airplane, the show that I absolutely need to see to feel at home again. Here in Vancouver we often forget to live in the youngest city in the world, a city almost completely, and totally of the twentieth century, and that this is precisely the most fortunate of Vancouver. It is the sweetness of the Necklace of Grace to remind me not so much that we live in a city, as in the dream of a city.
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