People regularly tell me I have the best job in the world. Presumably bus drivers don’t often hear this, even though the gig is essentially the same—moving passengers safely from one place to another. But I have an advantage: the transportation I provide is via water. And there are days, when I have the boat to myself and the wind in my hair sailing toward a spectacular sunset, when I have to agree.
Humans are weird when it comes to being on the water, particularly the ocean—perhaps something to do with our ancestors’ having crawled out of the primordial sea eons ago. The place still somehow feels like home. Consider the irrational impulse people have to wave at complete strangers when they are aboard a vessel. “You’re floating, and I too am floating!” is the unspoken acknowledgement.
It’s the same reason so many of my passengers suddenly burst into the chorus from “I’m on a Boat” a full 15 years after the SNL sketch of the same name was aired. As the Water Rat told the Mole in the classic children’s story The Wind in the Willows: “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
I tend to agree, and I subsidize my freelance writing habit by driving a water taxi in Vancouver’s False Creek, where heading up the creek without a paddle is literally the job description. It’s a terrible name, it being an inlet rather than a creek, and George Henry Richards—the British navy hydrographer who charted the shores of British Columbia back in the 19th century—probably named it in disappointment after discovering it wouldn’t be a source of fresh drinking water.
The area was, of course, inhabited by Coast Salish people for thousands of years before their unceremonious ousting by European colonizers and the destruction of the ancient village known as Sen̓áḵw on what is now Vanier Park. Reconciliation can seem hard for Canadians to truly measure, but I see literal progress every shift, watching the towers of the new housing development named for the same village led by the Squamish Nation being built on lands south of the Burrard Bridge.
Our wee ferries link several different Terminal City neighbourhoods together, stretching from the Olympic Village to the glass towers of Yaletown, past the stretch of Fairview’s co-op waterfront housing, Granville Island (itself poorly named as the federally managed tourist attraction is technically a peninsula), the bustling West End, and finally Kitsilano.
Nobody thinks of False Creek as a full-fledged neighbourhood itself, although plenty of people call it home, either living aboard ships anchored for free, moored at a marina, or in one of the handful of cute floating homes known as Sea Village. But it is still very much a community and in many ways a microcosm of the city itself. Take one of the most popular activities in this slender sliver of the Salish Sea—dragon boating, a Chinese aquatic custom dating back two millennia. It can be frustrating navigating around beginner paddlers who seem oblivious that this is actually a busy commercial waterway, but it’s also lovely to see so many paddlers of different ethnicities embracing the sport. Historian Pierre Berton is said to have declared, “A true Canadian is one who can make love in a canoe without tipping,” which frankly gives us too much credit, but it makes a certain sense that recreational dragon boating would catch on in a country where canoes were the primary means of transport long before colonization.
We also see our share of the rich and famous. A colleague once took Bono on a private ferry ride when U2 were rehearsing a tour at BC Place and the singer was unable to be driven to the arena from his abode in Kits due to bike lane construction. My own boating brush with celebrity came when I spotted one of the stars from the HBO drama Big Little Lies hiding behind their sunglasses and I played the title track, Michael Kiwanuka’s “Cold Little Heart,” on my Bluetooth speaker, earning an appreciative smile.
Metro Vancouver’s large South Asian community has found its own unique use for the waterway, and taking out charter groups for ash-scattering ceremonies is one of my favourite bookings. Hindus believe immersing loved ones’ remains in the Ganges River helps guide their souls en route to the afterlife, and while English Bay is a heck of a long way from India, it’s only a few dozen nautical miles from Saltspring Island’s Ganges Harbour. “Any port in a storm,” as we seafaring types say. There’s genuine job satisfaction that comes from providing the service, where the vibe can vary from a solemn occasion to tangible relief Baba or Nana is finally in a better place.
These sailings make me feel a bit like Charon, the ferryman from Greek mythology who escorts souls across the River Styx separating the worlds of the living and the dead. I can only assume other deities regularly tell him he has the best job in the underworld. Passengers probably not so much.
