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February 1996 WEST VANCOUVER HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND THIS IS THE WAY IT WAS The Rock The old trunk, scuffed leather straps straining against the press of my belongings, seemed to take over the living-room. We talked around the trunk, ignoring its vintage presence and San Francisco tags. It was time to go. I left West Vancouver thirty years ago and, being a partner in an Air Force career, haven’t stopped moving since. There were trips home for visits, to see places layered with memories, and most of all, to touch the Rock. It’s a sizable chunk of rock heaved up from who knows where or when. I’m told that it was there in 1925 on the beach in front of the lot (near 22nd and Bellevue) that my grandparents, Fred and Annie Lennox, purchased from the municipality for $500. They brought their family from Saskatchewan: my mother Eleanor and her younger brothers. Max and \Mlf. Harold was bom the following year at the home they built on Bellevue. The Rock is foremost among my earliest recollections of playing on the beach in 1947. It seemed huge. Set in its sandy socket, the Rock is about seven feet high and sprawls downward from a circular top to a spreading base. At least one purple starfish was usually positioned on its convex side like a gaudy brooch fastened to the bodice of a blowsy woman. In the spring, after the possibility of another winter storm had passed, we would walk to the beach with our neighbourhood friend to clear a path to the Rock. Our friend was an old (it seemed to us then) Welsh lady whom we called Aunt Daisy and almost every day from June through September she swam from this beach. “Just like a bawth” she’d call out, already submerged as we inched our skinny legs into the sea. On most days, four or five of us children would be with her (Pamela and Jocelyn Searle, Diane Longmuir, my brother Allan, and I were the regulars). She wasn’t taking care of us as far as we were concerned. We were simply going along with Aunt Daisy for a swim. I wonder now that she accepted this responsibility on a beach where the wake from ocean-going freighters hurled logs onto granite boulders. I was never aware of any concern nor of any watchfulness on her part. Aunt Daisy seemed totally absorbed in perfecting her side stroke. “It’s time to clear the rocks away,” Aunt Daisy would aimounce and away we’d go. Every winter the smaller footballsized rocks would roll back into the sandy strip we’d kept cleared the summer before. The Rock is not visible at high tide, just a gentle dimple in the smooth glassiness of the sea gives away its location. It was exhilarating to stand on the top of the Rock surrounded by the sea, saltwater stinging our barnacle-scraped ankles, boldly “walking on water”. We were beach kids, brown and strong and salty. Now, when I return home to the beach, my thoughts drift back to shingled cottages, neutral palettes for massed clouds of blue hydrangea and saucer-sized pink peonies. Walking down the landscaped Weston stairway, I remember a rough trail lined with California poppies. Bachelor’s Buttons and blackberry Pages By: Sandra McGillvray Orgies brambles. The blackberries not only provided us with a quick snack but were also a source of extra dimes to spend at Wetmore’s grocery store. Neighbours, among them the Campbell sisters, the Grays, and the Grahams, would buy our berries for ten cents a basket. After climbing over heaped shoreline boulders, I make my way to the Rock. Tbere’s no longer a path at any season. The Rock is always the same: little pools that capture miimows and tiny crabs at low tide around its base, shiny blue-black mussels clustering up to its barnacle armour, and seaweed lining each crevice, steeped in the heady tang of the sea. On top of the Rock, I can take in the entire circle in a slow turn. Facing south and to the left, Stanley Park remains an evergreen forest, a tribute to the foresight of early city planners. Directly ahead, the land mass of Vancouver to the University of British Columbia on Point Grey looks the same in the distance.To the west, I scan across Burrard Inlet to the Point Atkinson lighthouse. It’s all what I saw with my five-year-old eyes. Every time, I hesitate to make this last quarter turn to the north. Here is change most communities do not experience in a century, let alone thirty years. A wall of apartment buildings and condominiums. Momentary feelings of regret surface until I lift my eyes and see Hollybum Mountain, that solid old bear of a mountain that is always at our backs. The Rock survived the re-development of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway in 1956 when huge chunks of speckled granite were bull-dozed into the railway bed, changing the shoreline forever. To commemorate the Canadian Centennial in 1967, a seawall walk was constructed beside the railway tracks, providing access for all. The children of those Blackberry summers have moved on. Aunt Daisy is in her nineties now, and while they can blast and build, claiming this favoured place, the Rock is mine. The Rock SANDRA ORTGIES