Homeless in Vancouver: Some nights I think I’m binning on a film set

During the day, Vancouver in the rain looks washed out — all gray and gloom. But after the sun goes down the snap, sparkle and glitter comes out to play.

Where Vancouver’s incessant precipitation is concerned, a little light goes a long way.

At night the wet city glistens and pulsates with reflected light. Brittle, shattering reflections of blues, yellows, greens, reds, and whites—all the visible palette of electricity in fact—combine kaleidoscopically in puddles and spread across every wet surface, only checked in their riotous advance by sharp-edged and ink-black shadows, which both limit and intensify the neon squiggles and splashes of colour.

It’s always exciting!

There are certainly a million puddles in my big city today

When Raymond Chandler, in his novel The Big Sleep, wrote, “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in”, he could’ve been writing about my neighbourhood after dark, in the rain.

On any sufficiently wet night, the streets and back alleys of the Fairview neighbourhood become dramatic backdrops where you can imagine anything happening.

Something really does lurk around every corner. There really are a million stories in the big city.

As I splash through paved back alleys that are all sharp light and slashing black shadows, in my nightly quest for returnable beverage containers, I shouldn’t (and I wouldn’t) be the least bit surprised to see either of those hard-boiled private detectives, Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade, throwing out their garbage and recycling.

And when I think about it, I trust that Spade, or any of Dashiell Hammett‘s other characters, would put out their fair share of beer cans but I’m just as certain that Chandler’s Marlowe would only be leaving out wine and whiskey bottles.