Strange Sights

The trip down from the Sunshine Coast began in total sunshine, but transited to gray clouds as we moved further southward.  I read a weather report the other day saying that for the next couple of weeks, the border area would be the battle ground between a warm, wet front coming from the south, and a cold, dry front coming from the north, and today’s drive made that seem at least visually correct.

Usually, we drive pretty much straight through (with, of course, a stop at Home Depot to pick up the months necessaries), but today we had a few additional adventures.  Ed, in search of some photographs, wanted to spend some time on Mitchell Island,  which lies in the Fraser River just east of the airport and very close to Home Depot.  The Knight Street bridge has an exit to Mitchell Island that we are always tempted to go right on, just before the right turn that we should be taking a little further on.  So, when we cross the Knight Street bridge, we chant loudly, ‘No going to Mitchell Island!’ until we are safely past the turnoff.  But today, it was ‘Yes, Yes, Yes--to Mitchell Island!’

My prior knowledge of Mitchell Island was that it seemed to contain all the empty cargo containers in B.C.  Stacked very high and very deep and very wide, were the cargo containers, like enormous kids blocks..  But then, this summer maybe, they disappeared.  Who knows?  Gone back to China?  But, it turns out that Mitchell Island is filled yet with all the equivalents of cargo containers.  There are great quantities of metal scrap, piled maybe 25-feet high behind fences about half as tall.  There are numerous very tall structures that are part of and attached to very long conveyer belts that lift, carry, and then deliver giant piles of gravel and wood pulp, maybe, down to barges.  There are all the ruined cars in the world, carcasses stacked up, lined up, poured in together, even unto on top of the roofs of sheds.  There are stacks and stacks of cut wood, milled lumber heading for somewhere else, somewhere where they still are having a building boom, I guess.  There must be 20 small businesses that sell auto parts for various kinds of cars, the rescued insides of those auto carcasses above.  There’s a drywall dump.  There are more useful and ruined products on that little island than my philosophy had dreamed of.  And someday, I imagine, all the containers will come back to be with their friends.

As a chaser, we dropped in to Galloways Specialty Foods (Richmond, on Alderbridge just west of No. 3 Road).  At Galloways, you can buy 50 grams or 5 kilos of dill weed, or ground cumin, or any other herb you have ever heard of  and plenty that you haven’t, or any other item that you might ever use in cooking and that was dry enough to put in a sealed plastic bag.  Lima beans bigger than any I have ever seen.  More different kinds of dried beans than I know the names for or even knew existed.  Three or four kinds of corn meal/corn flour.  Black rice, wild rice, short grain rice, long grain rice, all of the same in brown rice, mixtures of all of the before mentioned, red rice.  You can buy a little, a medium amount, a lot: it’s all there to choose from.  For only $1.50, you can have 50 grams of choice Saigon cinnamon.  You could spend an entire day in this small store and never actually see every different kind of food item that is there.  The world in a box.  A box that was more pleasing than Mitchell Island, perhaps, but no less a wonderful sight.

I forget sometimes that those sights are one of the things a city is for.