Garry Eaton

Lynn Valley

Vancouver is sea and cloud and mountains, and between them many deep ravines, usually with creeks or little rivers running, tumbling, bounding, often vaulting down between trees, and over rocks and cliffs toward some deep, placid arm of inland water connecting somehow, somewhere to the open ocean. They all have names by which we seek to tame them, of course, these hills, mountains, ravines and watercourses. We who live there know, for example, Lynn Valley, which despite the aura of well-bred tranquility exuded by its name and the fact it's well within the limits of a city, provides matchless mountain scenery, and for those who seek it, dangerous adventure. To earn that reputation, and keep it despite the closures and the warnings and the precautions, it's little river, rocks, falls and trees take the lives of several incautious citizens and/or their equally excitable dogs each year, whose bloated, battered bodies are eventually recovered and go on to inhabit early graves. It is there, it exists today, waiting for a sunny afternoon to vent itself in a sudden thunderstorm, and produce the wild torrents that make it a magnet for the hapless and the tragic.

rock ground to powder
beneath the glacier's mass
soil for violets