Western Street to Northern, Station to Terminal In the long ago, the canoes would have threaded their way through the Separated Points and glided across the relatively warm, shallow and extremely rich waters of the calm estuary here. Flocks of water fowl lingered at the edges, and one could look down through glass waters into…

Main St. In the long ago, this place was a thin arm of land that reached out and almost grasped the hand of the arm on the other side of the water; together, they almost formed a land bridge across the waters of the estuary. These arms of land seemed, to the settlers, to be…

East First Avenue, from Thornton St to Main St We descend into what was surely the water of the estuary, in the long ago, with the tule and cattail, mud banks and sand bars — perhaps there were also cottonwood trees here then, as there are now. There are still empty lots here, but not…

The face of this land has been changed many times since the last ice age (when it was under water), and since Europeans and others began to displace the First Nations in the 19th Century. Was this spot lower than it is now, at the shoreline of the estuary? did it get more fill than…

The birch trees at the corner of Fraser and E5th Ave have had a hard time. To me, birch trees never seem completely at home in this place, as I imagine they do from the photos I’ve seen of the birch forests, and the descriptions of the huge, flawless sheets of bark that were once…