Drew Shannon
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One of the first things to hit you upon leaving a Gastown bar is a big red W, spinning through the air. I don’t know what the W stands for, who put it there or why it’s spinning where it is. I could find out, no doubt, but in a way it seems more appropriate that a big revolving W should raise more questions than answers. I’ve only ever seen it stationary once, when, fuelled by an unquantified concoction of whisky and whatever sort of ale the bar was selling for under $7 that night, my head happened to be spinning at the exact same rate as the W and we aligned in perfect symmetry. It was a transcendental moment of chemical and mechanical harmony, and I might have had an epiphany if I hadn’t fallen over in a gutter.
Thus, like a giant, ruddy-faced bouncer, the big W slings you out into the night and leaves you to find your bearings. And just as sailors in their tall ships sought guidance from the stars above, the meandering late-night drunks of Vancouver look to the lights around them to try to navigate their way home. But our stars are nailed to brick walls and welded to steel frames. They’re stars of halogen and neon, pixellated constellations of perambulating men and halting red hands. We also have comets and meteorites, but they run on gasoline, rattling out petrol fumes and blasting out their discontented horns.
Rarest of all are the shooting stars that whiz by with a TAXI sign on their roofs. This being so, I tend to walk home most nights, and as my body staggers forward, thoughts stumble back to the night just past. The city becomes full of glimmering apparitions: the bright hum of conversation in big bold letters; the glowing bursts of laughter; the flickering sparks of connection; the tall, shimmering girls of downtown, winking at each other with those dazzling eyes, eyes that make you feel dizzy and small. When the city speaks, it can often feel like you’re not included in the conversation. Sometimes, it even feels as if it’s whispering behind your back, noting your lack of luminosity, the lack of shine in your own skin. And when the apparitions fade and fizzle out, you find yourself alone, moving along some unknown street like a wisp of ashes and curling embers, the remains of something that struggled to catch fire. Somewhere along the walk home is a sign that says “Everything is going to be all right,” but it can be hard to see sometimes.
In such ways, the city reveals something of itself at night, something that isn’t as apparent in the light of day. Vancouver is, of course, beautiful in the daytime, cradled in crystal waters and crowned by diamond-topped mountains. But there is a quality of beauty that can’t be seen in the light upon a surface, but rather in the lights that are borne up in darkness.
What do you see of Vancouver’s beauty at night? One route home takes in the downtown skyline, gazing at itself in the giant mirror that is False Creek, with Science World and BC Place perched proudly on the shore like an orb and a crown, a boast to the riches of the Milky Way above. Another route takes in the harbour and the glittering slopes of the North Shore, where houses flow down like liquid gold. Above them, three floodlit ski resorts cushion themselves within the clouds, each its own modern Olympus.
These lights might please the eye, but don’t say much for the soul of the city, if such a thing exists. But there are other lights. Sometimes, I see them on a late-night ramble home, when I’ve left behind the dazzling skyscrapers and passed the old-time globes of Gastown, and find myself walking down along Main Street by the magenta haze of Chinatown’s lanterns. There, in the distance of the 12th Avenue intersection, is a flickering holy candle in the shape of a Celtic cross, topping the spire of St. Patrick’s Church. And like an echo on Clark Drive, the heart of East Van is nailed to a neon crucifix – a monument of suffering and hope, affixed to the night sky.
But holiest of all is Pacific Central Station, whose neon sign doesn’t hum, but sings from dusk until dawn. There is something in those gentle yet bold letters, charged like copper wire, suspended above the stone: “PACIFIC CENTRAL”
It is an announcement. “Here is Vancouver,” the letters say; caught between land and sea, between its ambitions and its failures, between its kindness and its greed, glowing with the amber heat of friction. In the light of those letters is the light of all the Yaletown penthouses, of all the high cranes in the harbour shipyard and of every needle that gleams on a cold concrete slab. It is the embers of something beginning and something dying; the embers of something struggling to catch fire. I don’t know if Vancouver has a soul, but if it does, I think it must be in those letters.
Upon reaching such an epiphany, I’ll typically slip on the goose crap of Thornton Park and fall into a gutter. But by then, I’m almost back home, back to the crooked house in Strathcona, a long walk in the rain from the lights of downtown. If the keys don’t prove too much of a hassle and the stairs don’t provide too many obstacles, I’ll crash on to the sofa bed, with one shoe on, the other gone a-wandering, and watch as the shadow of a tree plays tricks upon the bedroom wall, white in the daytime, but at night bathed in the soft pink glow of a street lamp. The light of the sun will wake me up, but the lights of Vancouver let me sleep.
Colm O’Flaherty lives in Vancouver.