At age five I would create city tableaus atop my dresser. Alphabet blocks were stacked precariously into office towers (I was not a well-coordinated child), pencils anchored in blobs of plasticine served as streetlamps, and my Hot Wheel car collection created the gridlock that ran the city’s length. Assorted plastic animals – elephants, giraffes and tigers –roamed freely within my utopia, which might have played a part in the traffic jam.
When I was six I asked for a Kenner’s Girder and Panel construction set for my birthday because in a commercial wedged between the Saturday morning cartoons, they promised I could create a realistic modern office tower cityscape with cars zipping in between the buildings on raised highways. Even in black and white television, I was sold. The buildings one could make were truly Modern, in the style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1967-69 Toronto Dominion towers. Armed with travel experience I didn’t have at age six, I realize now that the commercial’s vision of elevated transportation was more akin to Tokyo than my hometown Edmonton, Alberta. But in any case, the actual results were underwhelming. I even wondered if I had bought the wrong construction set.
Now I live in Vancouver, and it occurred to me the other day that I’ve been living inside that urban fantasyland I dreamed of as a kid. Most of the track that our city’s unmanned trains whiz along are outside and held aloft on cement columns. Riding the Skytrain, the landscapes you pass through are varied. There are industrial and light industrial areas, there are suburbs of detached homes close enough to snoop into backyards, there’s one trailer park and one RV park that I’ve spotted. Shopping districts go without saying, but there are also vistas across the Fraser River, showing pulp mills and farmland and mountains in the distance. And of course, with each new Skytrain line added, the new stations become magnets for high-rise development. There are many sections in which a trip will take you through a canyon of condos just like those long-ago commercials promised me. It’s as futuristic an experience while on the train as it is looking up from the ground and seeing these people-movers pass across your line of sight.
One of my favorite stations is called 29th Avenue. It’s part of the original Expo Line which was built when Vancouver hosted Expo 86 and was forever changed from sleepy, small-town city to whatever it is now, which depends on who you ask. This station is not raised like most, but is actually semi-submerged. Slocan Park runs along the south side which gives you the impression of this transportation-of-the-future stopping in the middle of nature and quiet rural life just as the interurban trams did at the end of the 19th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCYO6JFANg0
You can find online, restored and colourized films of streetcar trips along big city streets as seen from the driver’s POV. Because the Skytrain is operated from a central command centre, a single driver’s seat is always available at the front and back of a train. Children rush for them, but so do many adults. The fancy to shrink down to model train size is apparently not only mine.
I wish there were Skytrain lines that covered the whole Lower Mainland (as this region is referred to). More to the point, I wish there were Skytrain lines across the globe, zipping here and there, connecting my neighbourhood to a million others. There is so much of the world I still want to see, so many neighbourhoods I’d like to walk through. It’s only through close proximity that we can appreciate the marvelous paradox of how similar we all are and yet how uniquely different. Yes, I know that’s trite. But another paradox I find is that as our planet gets warmer, we are all growing colder. Earth hasn’t changed in size, as far as I know, yet we couldn’t be farther apart from each other. Imagine then if reaching each other, where we live, where we call home, was simply a matter of walking into one station and getting off at another.
Skytrain lines running across the planet? That’s a kid’s fantasy. We need more of those.
Just Beyond the Very, Very Far North
Dan Bar-el 