There are little oceans in the Rocky Mountains. In early May they are clouded and cramped with ice and falling withered greens. From the window seat of a Boeing 757 you can see their loose connection, feel their common threaded intimate source.

As the crow flies towards Vancouver International Airport you can see the forests of log booms tethered but adrift in the blinking gulf. They look like Twainsian rafts, monuments to nothing, waterlogged beams for the shifting and silent water.

Out the small portal window you can see the patch work farms that brown-dot the landscape in Richmond. They look almost nothing like the farms of Prince Edward Island from 35000 feet and as you are stunted awake by the gathering wind you are shined on to one fact: Everyone in Vancouver is sleeping and you, you are only just barely awake.

* * * * *

While the moon begins its sandpaper treatment of the earth, the sidewalks of Coquitlam are a festival of disregard, as the municipality prepares for its monthly, "anything goes" garbage day. In the terse rubbish piles professional junk collectors sift though the refuse for treasure as a Klondike panner, for gold. Their ½ and ¾ tonne pick-ups, like frail jalopies, rattle and spit under the pressure of their attached trailers, filled to a vice with other people's waste.

A boy, maybe ten, steers a red wagon, a micro example of the truck driving pro, armed to the fore with a screen-less monitor and a stout old tower hard-drive gone rusty on the bottom from standing near water or a heater, or both. He smiles as I wink by and in front of him his father rubs his hands gleefully, and adds his son's work to his own; all of it piled in the rickety trailer one could easily suppose they found the day (hour) before in a crumbling heap in Port Moody, or Burnaby, or New Westminster, or Port Coquitlam, or Surrey, or any other suburb that surrounds a city like Vancouver which, though it is surely home to a most casual and easy beauty, still produces its share of waste.

The city is dry and dirty right now, the people are all hoping to awaken to see all their difficult trash removed—like a memory too sore, annexed from the mind—by The City, or a professional junk collector, or that ten year old boy, dragging that purposeful red wagon through that soft British Columbia night.