What a difference a month makes! When I made my last post on this blog, a month ago, I was looking forward to finishing my first regular academic year at UBC, and having the luxury to look back, and to see how far I’d come in this change of life. The two semesters of the normal academic year are now almost over, and I’m just about to attend my last classes and upload those final assignments. Yet those classes are, of course, online, part of the series of measures to control the spread of the coronavirus that have radically affected lives around the world. I suspect we’ve done a lot better than most. The West End, where we live, is near to Stanley Park and its enclosing sea wall: we can walk or cycle there most days, and people are few enough for us to be unworried by the need to social distance. Spring weather has come with a vengeance now: sunlight, cherry trees and magnolias blossoming and then their petals falling, and the first leaves, still very small, beginning to come on the trees. After the first waves of panic buying, things have settled down in the supermarkets and the corner stores. We can buy food and other goods that we need, and keep in touch with friends and family via WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom, or FaceTime. Classes have moved online with various degrees of smoothness, but reading for them and writing final papers has kept me occupied and to a degree distracted. Life seems to have slowed to a crawl, but this change of pace isn’t a bad thing: there’s a chance to stop, notice things, and look around.

            And yet this calm is deceptive. Only four blocks from us is Haro Park Centre, where nine seniors have died because of the COVID 19 virus, and where many more residents and staff are affected; walk a similar distance in a straight line, and you reach St Paul’s Hospital with its Intensive Care Unit. Walk a little further, across Burrard and Granville Streets, turn left and then right on Hastings, and you’re in the Downtown Eastside, with its homeless population, shelters, the tent city in Oppenheimer Park, and its single room occupancy hotels. People are living on the street, close together: there’s no possibility of social distancing, and while there have been initiatives to enable people there to self-isolate, I wonder if it will be enough.

            At seven every night we gather on our balconies to applaud the change of shift of the health workers at St Paul’s. We can’t see the hospital, but I can visualize it, a terracotta and red brick cliff looming over Burrard Street. It’s an ugly building, made more ugly by a series of extensions over the years, the earlier ones in a pastiche of the original Edwardian core, the later ones in complete disharmony with it: the 1970s wing, where I went for a check-up last year, looks more like a nuclear bunker, with little strips of red brick façade added as a decorative afterthought. Inside it’s austere, functional, with worn linoleum floors marked with long strips of tape in various colours: you pick out the right one and follow it to your destination. Soon, we’ve been told, the hospital will move to a new site further east, by the railway station. And the site will surely be redeveloped, filled up with the high glass condominium towers that are marching west from Yaletown, onto Burrard Street, and springing up nearer us, on the Western end of Robson and Davie Street.

            Thinking of St Paul’s brought back to me memories of an earlier epidemic. When I arrived in Vancouver in 1989, I trained and then served on the helpline for AIDS Vancouver, answering phones in booths tucked away in the office in an old warehouse building off Seymour Street. By the time I became involved, things were still in crisis, but service organizations such as AIDS Vancouver were up and running, even if we lived with the constant presence of death, watching Dr Peter Jepson-Young’s weekly Dr. Peter’s Diaries on CBC, following the slow, inevitable progress of the virus in his body.  Several of our volunteers had been nurses at St Paul’s when the first wave of infections emerged, and they’d told us stories of an earlier time, when the epidemic first hit, and they did not even know the disease that they were dealing with, or the precautions that they should take.  

            HIV, of course, was very different from the coronavirus we are now dealing with: much harder to transmit, acting more slowly on the body, but also far more stigmatizing because one of its modes of transmission was unprotected sex. Thinking back, though, it strikes me that the city was different, too, in a significant way. St Paul’s was much taller, somehow: many of high new buildings, including the Wall Centre opposite the hospital, had not been built. Our AIDS Vancouver office off Seymour Street was on the edge of a Yaletown that had not yet been gentrified, and beyond it was the cleared, fenced-off, grey gravel-covered moonscape of the Expo lands, awaiting redevelopment. On Seymour Street, I’d walk out after my shift past the “meat rack,” a row of sex workers waiting for passing cars to stop. 

            That part of the city has retreated now: there are new condominiums on the False Creek end of Seymour, a park and a cinema, the service organisations still there, but discreetly hidden away in the first few floors of the glass and steel towers. Vancouver has become more divided. As a student, I lived in a dilapidated shared arts and crafts house in Point Grey, not far from the university, with four roommates. There are few such houses in the area now. Some have been demolished, and replaced with family homes, others lovingly restored but reverting to being prosperous single-family dwellings. When I ride my bike on Eighth Avenue up to UBC, I’m often passed by Range Rovers and Porsche SUVs, dropping off children in bright emerald uniforms to the exclusive Point Grey Academy, founded after I left Vancouver that first time, in 1994. 

            I once knew an architect in Vancouver. He’d worked for City Hall. Later in his life he began to suffer from mild cognitive impairment, moving inexorably towards dementia. He seemed to know who I was but could not say my name. I’d listen to what he was saying, and follow his stories, woven together out of increasingly tiny fragments of a remembered past. What he recalled about the city, he would say suddenly, was a wall. It had grown up, right down the centre. When I’d ask him more about this wall he’d be startled, and his memory take flight again, and settle on another topic. But I wonder if in some way he knew more than we knew. Vancouver has become more divided over the last quarter century, greater poverty and also greater wealth, and above all greater wealth. With this new epidemic the divide seems starker. And I still wonder what possibilities the subject I am studying, and the caring profession I hope to follow, offer the possibility of making gaps in that wall.