Author: Sam Eifling

The psychic hold that the sea has on a port town such as Vancouver – where the European exploration of the Burrard Inlet predated the city’s incorporation by more than 90 years – is evident in the circular wooden sign that greets visitors to Sailor Hagar’s Brew Pub. The emblem for the North Vancouver bar and restaurant, overlooking the inlet, features a larger-than-life carving of a wizened sailor’s hard squint, his face rutted by years of salt and sun, his white beard draped down the front of his raincoat.

Inside, a sandwich board reads “SPORTS ALL DAY.” And sure enough, if you take a seat on the middle of the dining room, you can see no fewer than eight flatscreens, all of which on a recent Saturday night were showing the B.C. Lions kicking the tar out of the Calgary Stampeders and the Vancouver Canucks thwacking puck after puck past the Anaheim Ducks. Another screen showed keno results, over by the mantelshelf with a model ship with three tall sails in a clear box.

The curious collision of the nautical and the modern were all around the bar. By the flatware station hung a portrait of a sailor, kettle and coffee pot in hand, clinging to a rope on a ship’s deck swamped by waves. The sign above the stainless-steel kitchen station read “galley.” Around the corner hung another portrait, this one of a traditional galley, with men crowded around a wooden table, one with a guitar, another with a banjo, a third playing an accordion, a fourth smoking a pipe. Beside it, also on the wall, stood a lottery machine, like an ATM in reverse. A small waste bin on the floor overflowed with crumpled keno tickets.

The full-scale fibreglass narwhal mounted on the far wall clashed with the veggie burger on the menu. A couple seated beneath a boom with fakes sails lashed to it complained audibly about the saltiness of the gravy and sent back a lasagna they said was inedible. A woman asked a man at her table a hypothetical: “Would you date yourself if you were a woman?”

Every so often, the chatter of the dining room would halt as men cheered and applauded for a Canucks goal. Even the interior of salty ol’ Sailor Hagar’s isn’t impervious to Hockey Night in Canada.

The third race began with the smell of cigarette smoke and the earthy grass aroma of horse shit hanging in the damp night air. The bell sounded, and the announcer’s voice echoed down from the ceiling of the vaulted grandstand, hopelessly unintelligible at the rail. The five ponies pounded ahead, 20 hooves a muffled snare roll on the loamy track, sending mud erupting. Then they were past and out of sight.

Anyone watching a race from ground level at Hastings Racecourse can track the horses until they make the left turn, which at Hastings puts them on a northward course, toward the Burrard Inlet and the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. Looming over the scoreboard – itself still lit, in classic fashion, with individual bulbs, like the border of a marquee – is the waterside grain elevator at the Cascadia Terminal, one of the 28 marine terminals operated by Port Metro Vancouver. The Viterra logo its side is a clue that the agriculture corporation that runs Canada’s largest grain network handles the imports and exports from this particular terminal.

Within a tight radius, Canadian oats meet the world and turn into purse-winning six-furlong runs. Cranelike grain-moving equipment cantilevered in the backdrop as the horses raced out of sight on the back of the track. As with so many parts of Vancouver, aspects of one of its main economic engines hung in plain sight but utterly out of mind.

With the race afoot, track denizens turned their attention from their programs and onion rings to stand on benches and peer, tip-toed, over the rail. Down from the ceiling blared the announcer’s gibberish about who was moving, who was leading, who was fading. A knot of sweat and silks thundered across the finish. “You were close,” someone told a companion, but no one could know for sure as the PHOTO FINISH sign lit in red neon on the scoreboard.

It was Woombroom Express for the win, paying $8.70 on a $2 bet. Slew’s Boy and Soldiers Return followed. From the stands, high up but well within earshot of the hoi polloi, came the unmistakable pop of a cork from a bottle, and a jubilant cry rose just behind.

At the intersection of Main and Powell streets stands the busiest firehouse in Vancouver, Fire Hall 2, distinguishable by the wall-sized mural on the building beside its parking lot that depicts different fire engines since Vancouver was incorporated in 1886. Today this station, which straddles Vancouver’s downtown, its desperate Downtown Eastside and its port, answers more medical calls and calls overall than any of the other 21 firehouses in the city.

The junior firefighter at the firehouse is Chris Wingert, a thick-armed fellow with hair just thicker than crew-cut. On a recent Saturday he said that his time in the downtown hall has dulled his normal notions of excitement.

“I’m pretty desensitized to everything,” he said.

Going out on multiple overdose calls for the same person on the same night wears on the responders, he said. The worst night in his stint there came on the last night of summer fireworks, when the station responded to some 30 calls – mostly medical – during the 14-hour overnight shift.

Calls to the port, while rare, require the trucks to pass through the same security inspection that a civilian vehicle would face. Most of the contact with the port, Wingert said, comes when tourists unpack some cruise ship and stop in for directions after wandering near and through some of Vancouver’s roughest neighborhoods. “That happens all the time,” Wingert said.

On a quiet afternoon, the firehouse’s three vehicles stand shoulder-to-shoulder: the engine, the rescue truck (which has only enough water in it to put out a Dumpster fire or similar), and the quint, which carries a ladder and a massive jaws of life in its rear, replete with its jackhammer-sized cutter and spreader.

In the rear of the house, behind the trucks, the firefighters’ work-worn turnout gear hung from a rack of low hooks along the wall: helmets, jackets, boots, gloves, balaclavas. On the adjacent window sill sat three kettlebells, and on the floor before them stood a ping-pong table with two swaths of duct tape running horizontally to serve as a net.

Wingert said he’d never played ping-pong in more than a year at the firehouse. “Everyone sees stuff on TV,” he said. “It’s not like that. We’re not just sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

The tinny beep-beep-beeps and hydraulic sighs of heavy equipment drifted onto the porch where Bert Bjorndal stood over an eight-burner grill, scorching salmon filets. Nearby, cyclists in stretchy shorts and riding jerseys milled, having returned from a 100-km bike ride for the Mission to Seafarers, the charity headquartered locally in the old house beside Vancouver’s port.

The ministry endeavors to meet every worker who arrives in the ships that pour into Canada’s largest port each year and to maintain this center, where they can get online, help themselves to a free paperback or buy a beer. Currency from around the world dots the wall by the glass counter where sailors can buy cough drops and postcards. It’s flanked by two racks of donated National Geographic magazines, about 1,000 of them, dating back to early ’70s.

Anything to make a wandering seaman feel at home, on a budget.

“I’ve been working around the water all my life,” Bjorndal said. The Abbotsford marine captain from now makes runs mostly up the coast of British Columbia, and serves on the mission’s board. The cat’s cradle of barbed wire atop the chainlink fence just past the house’s yard was unknown before 9/11, he said. Since then, security has not only kept visitors off the port, it has served to sequester men to boats on their months-long journeys.

“For a lot of the seafarers, they’re like captives,” Bjorndal said. “We’re a one-stop place for taking care of the practical needs of the seafarer.” He turned to the grill, and with a jab of one stout wrist raked the spatula beneath one of the final filets.

The fish moved quickly out of the steam tray – cyclists largely preferred the salmon to the burgers also on the table. But then, fish suited the setting.

The rear corner of the mission is dedicated to a chapel graced with a small pipe organ, six short pews and the same vestry book, its brittle pages now almost half-filled, that has rested there since 1966. A carved wooden triptych dominates the wall behind the altar. The first scene depicts sailors hauling empty nets aboard the side of their ship. In the central panel, the men pray to Christ. In the third and final scene, the nets bulge with fish, and they are whoppers.

A cruise ship leaving port from Canada Place is a moment of widespread awe for the denizens of downtown Vancouver. On a recent Saturday, people on the lower deck of the roadway lined the low concrete wall at its edge as though looking from at the mouth of a cave, and watched a towering white Coral Princess trundle along the dock and out into Vancouver Harbor like a horizontal skyscraper.

Cars stopped directly beneath “no parking” signs beneath the main street, and men in reflective work vests congregated under the shadows to watch.

At street level, as the Coral Princess slunk further north and began its westward turn to the Strait of Georgia, a second ship, the Zuiderdam, exhaling gray-brown diesel smoke and churning up a modest wake for a 85,000-ton vessel, began shuffling away. The constant rumble of traffic and the sound of sawing at a construction site echoed off the Vancouver Convention Centre, but the people lining the rail, a couple of stories above the water, made almost no noise.

For all the spectacle, the port is, in one regard, one of the least intrusive in the world. Along with only the cruise ports in Seattle and Juneau, Alaska, Vancouver’s port permits ships outfitted with suitable electrical systems to plug into the city’s electric grid while docked, allowing the ships to run on something other than diesel while idling. To date, according to Port Metro Vancouver, only Princess and Holland America have invested in the conversion.

The aim of the measure is to keep the air and water at the sort of quality that would attract onloookers. One, a woman wearing black sneakers without socks and a black T-shirt with the Rolling Stones lips logo, strode to the rail as the Zuiderdam crept out to sea. She plopped her baggy purse atop a placard and whipped out a digital camera to shoot a video.

“I just am walking around doing touristy stuff,” said the woman, Eline Toes, a Dutch national and an urban planner working at the Dutch consulate in Vancouver. “I thought it made a beautiful picture, with the clouds on the mountain.”

As the Zwiderdam turned west, sure enough, the green slopes of Grouse Mountain and the stray clouds that bearded its peak framed the ship and the logo it angled to reveal: Holland America Line.