The Place Where You Live: Southwestern British Columbia

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This is the first in a three-part series of posts arising from a graduate course on global environmental history co-taught by Tina Loo (University of British Columbia) and Tina Adcock (Simon Fraser University) in Vancouver in the fall of 2024.

Introduction
by Tina Loo

This series comes from the global environmental history course that Tina Adcock and I co-taught in the fall of 2024. The seminar readings introduced students – many of whom are pursuing topics unrelated to environmental history – to how environmental historians have dealt with questions of agency and scale.

One of the weeks dealt with “place,” a strangely elusive concept. To help students begin to understand it, we asked them to write about a place that was important to them, based on Orion Magazine’s long-running feature, “The Place Where You Live.”

Mountains in multiple. Maskinonge Overlook, Waterton Lakes National Park, August 2024. Credit: Tina Loo.

Building on Rebecca Solnit’s observation that “a sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together,” Orion invited contributors to consider the following: “what connects you to your place? What history does it hold for you? What are your hopes and fears for it? What do you do to protect it, or prepare it for the future, or make it better?” We asked our students to do the same, and I wrote a piece as well.

During class, everyone read their story aloud. It was a way to get to know each other, but also because we wanted to talk about how we tell stories. We’d assigned William Cronon’s “A Place for Stories” (1992) and we hoped getting everyone to write about a place that was important to them would provoke reflection about the power of places on/over us, the kinds of stories we tell about them, and the power of progressive and declensionist narratives.

The pieces in this series reflect the diversity of our classroom: there are three about southwestern British Columbia; three about the North American continental interior; and three about Asia; specifically, China and India. We hope they make you think about the place where you live and what place is. Enjoy.

Bell’s Landing Beach, Gabriola Island, British Columbia
by Natasha McConnell

The first time I heard an eagle’s cry, I thought it was a seagull.

I was maybe 7 years old, tidal water lapping at my sandals and soaking the back of my shorts, crouched down to poke at something in a tidepool. Being a well-trained Vancouverite, I immediately looked up to spot the incoming food thief, only to catch sight of the distinctly brown wings of a bald eagle. It was by far the biggest bird I had ever seen. It circled high above me for a minute before breaking away towards a tall tree.

Bell’s Landing, the beach where first I heard an eagle’s cry, felt like a place apart. My brother and I named the rocks, engaged the locals (read: harassed sea life), and practiced various rituals to earn passage to and from the beach. It was more than the beach itself which made it feel like a world apart. The long voyage to Gabriola was a rite of passage, the infrequency of our visits a signal for reverence. Even the Island’s size made it special. The rest of Gabriola was very small. It consisted of my grandparents’ house and garden, and a small cadre of shops down the road. The Island was small, but the beach was enormous.

Bell’s Landing is not a tropical paradise, but it is beautiful. It is rocky, not sandy, with boulders curved by waves and a border of slowly rotting seaweed along the tide line. All along the top of the beach are logs, many decades old, bleached by the sun and worn smooth by the rain. Above that, on a short cliff, are the trees: cedars, arbutus, and Douglas fir. When I was young, the trees were so big I thought they went on forever.

View of the sunset from Bell’s Landing Beach on Gabriola Island, BC. Credit: Natasha McConnell.

Now I know that behind those trees are houses; that it is a typical Pacific Northwest Coast beach; and that the travel time to Gabriola is only four hours, or 30 minutes if you take the seaplane. The beach is smaller than it was before. But other things have grown. The number of houses on Gabriola have multiplied, though there have not actually been many more built. The Island has gotten larger, now that I am in control of the car. In my head, the names on street signs eclipse the names my brother and I gave the rocks.

Scale shifts, as we grow taller, as our minds stretch farther, as our stride grows longer, and our free time shorter. But I sometimes wonder what I lost along with the old scale, the one where the beach was a world, and there were only four shops on Gabriola, and an eagle’s cry was loud enough to make me fall into a tidepool.

Natasha McConnell is a Kwantlen Polytechnic University alumnus, and a current student at the University of British Columbia pursuing an MA in History. Born and raised in the Lower Mainland, Natasha’s research focuses on the history of Indigenous-settler land policy in BC in the 20th century.

Fairview Slopes, Vancouver, British Columbia
by Jurian ter Horst

Rainwater can gush down from Broadway toward 6th Avenue.
Sunlight warms up the north side of the street; you will find shade on the south side.
On a cold and windy day, you avoid the streets and prefer the avenues.

Other than the sounds of cars and sirens from Broadway, the regular impatient honk at the nearest intersection, and the odd, loud music playing cyclist, this is a quiet neighbourhood.

Only in summer you taste the saltiness of the ocean breeze. The smell of food, occasionally noticeable on Broadway or in the alleys, does not reach my avenue.

The street blocks feature an interesting mix of buildings. Yet, the street grid does not spark one’s imagination.

I live on the Fairview Slopes. Although my description suggests that it is a rather dull place, we – my family – are happy here.

The Laurel Street land bridge takes us from the Slopes to False Creek, our closest access to nature – human-made nature, to be clear. Its trees, grass, and water make it enjoyable to us; its proximity convenient.

The author’s hand-drawn map of the Fairview Slopes.

Human-made nature. I call it human-made because the environment we see in False Creek South today, built and natural, was designed by people. When False Creek South was redeveloped from industrial wastelands into a dense, mixed residential and commercial neighbourhood starting in the 1970s, the natural environment played a key role in its design.1

Now, back up to the Slopes.

There are only few reminders of what used to be here – obviously, way before I moved to Vancouver or even before I was born. There are a few old trees (not even old-growth). There is the raccoon family crossing the street, or a coyote searching for food. They remind you of the impact of development on nature: it was once their habitat, and now it is gone.2 The few 100-plus-years-old houses that remain are testament to the fairly wealthy people who once lived in this area, and, after moving on, whose houses became the homes of low-income tenants. The condominium buildings that in turn replaced many of these houses remind you of the impact of redevelopment: gentrification.3

Whether forced or deliberately, we, too, will move on one day, and our place will be ready for someone else to call it their home. As the City of Vancouver’s Broadway Plan and BC’s Transit-Oriented Development will soon, again, cause dramatic change in this neighbourhood, I wonder what in the future will be left of the place where I live today.

Jurian ter Horst is a historian, heritage consultant and PhD student at Simon Fraser University. His research examines the sensory experience of Vancouver in the second half of the 20th century.

Dreams of Summer: Cultus Lake, British Columbia
by Braeden Mandrusiak

Place does not have to be permanent. The place where I “live” is temporary; it is one of recreation, relaxation, and reflection (given that we live inside our heads as much as we live in the physical world). Although place falls under the dominion of time, humans like to live in the moment. Time often brings about change. We never visit the same place twice.

Cultus Lake, the summertime mecca of recreation in the Lower Mainland, empties out the lands of suburbia, as city dwellers seek to reclaim their spot in nature.

Bounties of nature: Cultus Lake through a summer’s lens. Credit: Jessica Bergen.

Cars drive past the Soowahlie First Nation while going down the Columbia Valley Highway, with the reserve and its place far from many passengers’ minds. The focus on their destination prevents vacationers from seeing the lived experiences of those on the reserve. For the day or the week, this seems to be “their” land now. However, there is only one road into and out of Cultus Lake. In the case of a significant evacuation, Soowahlie would certainly become visible on their longstanding homelands. Most of the time, however, Cultus Lake offers a place where suburbanites can enjoy nature within a highly commercialized setting. Piling out of RVs and SUVs, spitting out emissions in the name of our desire for recreation, visitors leave their traces on the environments of the freshwater lake as well as the waterpark only five minutes’ walk away.

On the beach, pop and country tunes float through the air. Their humdrum beats fill the ears of passersby. Sound has no boundaries here. The beach becomes a living, breathing human experiment, with competing genres of music causing annoyance and discomfort. Out on the water, swimmers and boats rule. A discarded White Claw can, descending to the lake’s rocky bottom, does not belong in this ecosystem, one that I only visit. Nature is not our recycling bin. But visitors’ eyes and cares remain above the water line.

Overlooking the lake, Teapot Hill offers a place to survey the lake’s magnificent expanse. Here, humans seem above nature. Teapots adorn tree branches, tree stumps, and rocks, as human offerings to the natural world. These human trophies are not won, but lost as the foliage, weeds, and mosses envelop them over time. The teapots’ shiny veneer dulls through accumulated grit and grime, but sometimes rain cleanses them from on high. Many things happen in cycles. These artifacts remain, sometimes as shards of broken memories. They filter views of nature through humans’ discard.

Strength of trees: nature’s power holding up the weight of human discard. Credit: Yvonne Ehrenholz.

The meaning of this place changes with the coolness of fall and winter, and with the spring rains. We crave summer’s attributes there. Swimming in cold water is a no-go. We can only conjure up the summer’s warmth in our memories. Cultus Lake becomes a literal place of reflection as waters lap against the dock. Some visitors to this place forget it once summer ends and school begins. For me, this is when dreams of warmer times and places descend, and when visions of next summer begin to dance in my head.

Braeden Mandrusiak is a first-year MA student in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. His current research examines the Valhalla Wilderness Society in the Kootenays region of southeastern British Columbia, focusing on provincial park creation and the intersections between rural and urban environmental identities.

Notes

1. See, for example: Douglas Harris, “Condominium and the City: The Rise of Property in Vancouver,” Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2011): 694-726; David Hulchanski, St. Lawrence & False Creek: A Review of the Planning and Development of Two New Inner City Neighbourhoods (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia, School of Community & Regional Planning, 1984); and David Ley, The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
2. Graeme Wynn and Timothy Oke, eds., Vancouver and its Region (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992).
3. Ley, The New Middle Class.
Featured Image: Bell’s Landing Beach, Gabriola Island, BC. Credit: Natasha McConnell.

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Tina Loo

Professor at University of British Columbia
Tina Loo teaches Canadian history and environmental history at the University of British Columbia. She's written on wildlife management and the social and environmental impacts of hydroelectric development. Her current project is an examination of forced relocations in postwar Canada.

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