I grew up in Richmond, BC, Canada (designated a city in 1990), that encompasses a series of islands at the mouth of the Fraser River Delta, Lulu Island being the largest and most populated. Originally these islands were temporary villages for the Coast Salish and Musqueam people, who would set up seasonal camps and villages to fish and collect berries. Later, European settles would cut, dyke, drain and clear the land for farming this fertile soil near the river lands. The late 1800’s would see an influx of Japanese fisherman followed by the Chinese Canadian railroad workers.
I have always lived next to the sea or the ocean. In Iran, where I was born, I have memories of holidays at the Caspian Sea. As refugees in Greece during the Iran-Iraq war, we lived close to the Mediterranean Sea. In the late 1980s my family immigrated to Richmond, on the edge of the Georgia Strait, extending from the Pacific Ocean.
At the time, Richmond was a small town with mostly farmland surrounded by a system of dykes. My favorite memories growing up were catching minnows in ditches with friends, wandering the boggy marshes and foggy fields, picking mushrooms, surrounded by the patterns of codes and conduct from the varying species of birds and animals. Gossiping, hunting, gathering.
The last several decades have seen significant growth in population and development, drastically altering the landscape and atmosphere of the farmlands and marshes I grew up near. Wide open spaces, are now strip malls, condos, offices, train stations and temples.
There was a blind spot between Lulu and the future, that space between identities where she could get lost forever. Piecing it together in the strange luminescence, Lulu no longer greets you at the door. We were asked to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The ponds and ditches are gone and townhouses cover train tracks that once scarred parts of the city. Neighborhoods faded away to giant unwelcoming mansions, standing shoulder to shoulder and neighbors competing with who can grow the most tropical trees in Canada.
The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to take refuge on the edges of town, to find some common denominator between the landscape and this dream that loosens like a bad tooth.
Along these edges, on the dykes, there is in silence, just the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, and the great slow gestures of trees. Flocks of birds dive, as planes move upwards breaking up the distant mountains fading in the sunsets like blue giants in a mirage. The water rises and falls in the old Finnish village, sitting on its stilts, holding on as long as the town will have them.
A skinny coyote walks through the frozen wetland on River Road, I follow it, watching his careful steps, and there is only the moment, and that is where it prefers to be.