Dave HuggardThere is no stopping the Radius Project now. After my initial 1, 1.5, and 2-km circles away from home, the 3km radius surprisingly took me across the ocean to new lands. Well, across Burrard Inlet to Vancouver, anyway. 3km south of home just makes it across the water to a little pocket park on the Vancouver waterfront. In those pandemic days, getting to Vancouver felt like discovering a new continent. There’s a world out there! On the ride there, I stopped on the surprisingly shaky Seconds Narrows Bridge for a view of the 3km-southeast point – right on the corner of a bustling, and well-guarded, North Vancouver wharf (I tried getting there on the ground… nope.) 3km from home in other directions kept me within familiar North Vancouver suburbia, with townhouses, a car dealership blaring tinny music, a powerline greenspace, and a house with a Winnebago the size of some European countries. But three kilometers north hinted at something else new and exciting. In a creek at the upper edge of development, I could – and I mean this completely literally – smell the mountains…
Having reached a brave new world across the ocean to the south, of course I had to explore further. So, onward to 4km. And I found… more suburbia! North Burnaby, it turns out, is a lot like North Vancouver. But I also found real exotic Indians – specifically, Sri Sathya Sai, or at least a meeting hall of his followers. The Indian guru, who could create gold objects by sheer will, understandably had a large following. His star is apparently waning these days, but you could fit multitudes in the big old meeting house off Hasting Street. To the southwest, 4km is still just offshore in the busy Crab Park area. Other directions kept me in the familiar environment of North Vancouver, including an incredibly loud, hot, dusty, and immense construction project (what are those huge concrete cylinders?), a Mediterranean-style house (in the former rainforest – like building a West Coast Modern house on Santorini), a more situationally-appropriate house in Edgemont village, and an ironic newly-asphalted parking lot at the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre. And to the North, mountain forest! Admittedly, it is fairly dreadful second-growth, with the haunted feeling of old forest irredeemably altered by severe clearcutting in the 1920’s. But it still has a hint of wildness – someone was charged by a bear here not long after I visited. And I couldn’t help but look up the ever steepening slope to where the next radius would take me…
