Reflections on Vancouver

So I've been here close to a year.  The family is packing it up for the summer, and I'll go get them towards the end of August and bring them back.  There are quite a number of things I like about Vancouver, and yet I am not sure this is really the place for me.  I'm noticing that now that summer is finally around the corner, I seem particularly susceptible to the pollens here (whereas they barely bother me in Chicago).  I think I really am not cut out to be this close to nature and truly do miss being in highly, highly urban environments.  There are parts of Vancouver that quality (Yaletown, much of Broadway and even some of Kits) but relatively speaking it is a much lower proportion than New York, Chicago or even Toronto.  I would probably really like it if I could live in one of those neighborhoods, but I just can't with 2 kids.  I generally like the odd ethnic mix in Vancouver, though it can be a bit overwhelming/exhausting.  One would imagine that as Asia becomes more and more important, Vancouver's international stature might improve, but that seems like a long ways off.  Toronto is still the place to be if one is in Canada and loves cities.

It is somewhat interesting that the relatively few fictional depictions of Vancouver are from an earlier period when Vancouver was emerging a bit from its fishing village roots and becoming more of an artists' haven (slight hints of this in Atwood's Cat's Eye and maybe one or two of Carol Shields' stories, though hers are from a slightly later transitional period).  There may be some interesting works from the period when Vancouver collectively turned down the highway plan (I'm thinking of Birney's The Damnation of Vancouver).  This was sort of the height of its hippy days.  But there is not much (that I've read) to document the impact of the massive shift caused by Asian in-migration (and the heating up of the property market!) as the residents of Hong Kong started making back-up plans.  It's fascinating for me to be in a Canadian city that is under 50% Caucasian (about 47% white in 2006 and dropping, whereas Toronto is 53% white, which is itself pretty astonishing if one looks back to the 1980s when Toronto was around 85% white).  If Kroetsch's Puppeteer had actually spent more time in the city, he might have picked up a bit on this.  Zsuzsi Gartner's Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, on the other hand, is set in the era of Vancouver's post-demographic shift that interests me but is too concerned with shallow trends and surfaces.  I suppose the essays in Compton's After Canaan and the stories in Booker's Adventures in Debt Collection are the best I've found yet to sort of tackle the subject.  I don't necessarily want to see a Vancouver-based Crash, but a novel that traced a "native-born" Canadian (not a First Peoples though) who moved to Vancouver slightly after its hippy heydays and now is struggling to deal with the way the city has changed.  Maybe it does exist. (I wonder if I had somehow come out to Vancouver right after I graduated from UToronto, if I would have been able to secure a small piece of property in Vancouver proper before the real estate boom really hit.)

At any rate, Vancouver still might be the better place to raise kids (than say Chicago or Toronto) but in terms of finding a place to retire, I suspect it will be Toronto (assuming the US and Chicago specifically goes down the tubes the way it has been doing -- my Dad has always been a bit of an optimist but he sounded so defeated the other day talking about how bad US higher education has become).  Of course, that kind of defeats the purpose (being old and dealing with cold Toronto winters) but I just really fit in better in places where culture is valued above nature and outdoor activities (and while we will probably have a comfortable "retirement," a place in Toronto and a winter home in Vancouver is probably out of the question).  I found it so odd and a bit depressing that with just a bit of rain, people kind of retreat and don't go out to the culture (and then when it is nice, they are all heading for the mountains).  Theatre attendance is dismal, despite the positive spin that some producers put on the situation.  This is in direct contrast to Chicago or Toronto where even blizzards rarely keep people from concerts and theatre shows and such.  Certainly I am probably twice as likely as my wife to do any outdoor things; she is really more of an indoors person...  So it is not working out that well for her, but I am not really sure what a better alternative is at the moment.  I imagine she is torn between being tired of moving and just wanted to settle down forever and not being at all sold on Vancouver... Probably in a couple of years we could relocate to Toronto after getting all the Canadian paperwork done (and now that I have made a bunch of contacts through my current job), and she'd like that more, but it still wouldn't be Chicago...