Vancouver is most at home
in heavy rain. The water hammering down
on residential streets could not care less about
the cost of the houses, whose inhabitants,
glad now just to be dry and out of the storm,
peer at the gale through windows against which
the ocean wind continually throws more rain. Money
means nothing to the falling water.
Expensive sedans, beaters, delivery trucks
and jammed buses alike splash through the pavement’s rivulets,
spray rising from their tires. Drivers peer at the avenue ahead
blurred by streaks the vehicles’ wipers
frantically attempt to again clear.
Store windows in the sodden shopping districts
are equally fogged whether the invisible merchandise
is marked-down vegetables or bespoke jewellery.
The few pedestrians—in suits and ties, cast-off clothing
or under hard hats—hunch along wet sidewalks
thinking only of being out of the weather.
In the drop-pocked harbour, a dozen anchored freighters
endure the steady downpour as they wait their turn to
load wheat, potash, lumber or to unload
high stacks of dripping containers. Steel decks
are slick with water that also soaks
the sand and rocks of the inlet’s beaches, empty
except for drenched logs and a solitary walker.
Under the rain, the city extends comfortably
around its coves and over promontories,
low hills and creek mouths, stretches at its ease
from the mountains that northwards crowd the shore
to, away south, the delta of the great river
also pouring water into the sea.
Tom Wayman received BC’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Questions and Answers
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
My family moved from Prince Rupert to Vancouver in 1959, and I did grades 10, 11, and 12 at Prince of Wales Senior Secondary, followed by a BA in Honours English at UBC 1962-66. At UBC I worked on the student newspaper, The Ubyssey, of which I was editor-in-chief 1965-66. In those days The Ubyssey was a farm team for the Vancouver Sun, so while a student I was employed for three summers as a vacation relief reporter on the Sun. Journalism provided me with a sense of the city I hadn’t previously possessed.
In 1969 I returned to Vancouver from the US, where I’d gone to grad school in California and taught for a year at Colorado State University. For the next 20 years I lived mostly in Vancouver, working at a variety of blue-collar and white-collar jobs. I was active in the radical labour movement, which, again, offered perspectives on the city unfamiliar to me before. Even after I moved to BC’s West Kootenay in 1989, I returned occasionally to live in Vancouver while teaching in the city’s suburbs for Kwantlen College and Douglas College.
Not surprisingly, I still have many close friends in Vancouver, and return to visit often. Although the appearance of some city districts has changed considerably during the more than 60 years since I was a high school student, other areas look much the same. As a young man, I heard Vancouver referred to as “an ashcan in a jewelled setting.” How much truer is that description today, as the city reels under the social effects of rampant real estate speculation, deindustrialization and a personal-debt-based economy.
Yet certain fundamental aspects of Vancouver remain. For example, the rain. I was driving out of the city on the eastbound freeway one October a few years ago in a downpour, thinking about the stories of friends of mine struggling to fashion an existence in the city they love despite its flaws. That Vancouver autumn rainstorm, falling on rich and poor alike, seemed to erase at least temporarily the city’s divisions and problems. All who thrive and endure here are situated in a shared, and thus unifying, geography that includes frequent sopping-wet weather. Thus the idea for the poem was born.
When I came to write it, I wanted to not minimize the city’s economic disparities, but at the same time to suggest that our common environment hints at different model for a society than the one we presently try each day at our employment to make functional. In terms of form, the poem is structured in two thirteen-line stanzas, followed by a third six-line one. The first stanza emphasizes the city’s residential districts (where the city’s inhabitants are “most at home”). The second stanza is focused on the commercial areas. Since these neighborhoods have blurry boundaries, some sense of the commercial is found in the residential stanza (“delivery trucks / and jammed buses”) and some sense of the residential is found in the commercial (that solitary walker beside a sodden English Bay or Kitsilano beach).
The third stanza returns the poem to a consideration of the title and the poem’s first sentence: how the city, for all its artificiality, has taken root and grown amid the succession of gales sweeping in from the Pacific. Vancouver now appears to be an almost-natural outgrowth of the underlying landforms and drainage systems, the city comfortable with the accomplishment its presence represents, at ease with its locale. In an era when many shrill voices try to convince us to dissociate ourselves from where we live, I believe the city under the falling water has something to teach.