Comox Valley · Life
Growing Older as Downtown Courtenay Becomes the New Vancouver
A bridge that took a generation, traffic lights you have to ask permission from, and the strange feeling of watching the big city catch up to the small town you slowed down to find.
There is a particular feeling that comes over a person when the place they have walked their whole life starts to feel like somewhere they need a map for. It is not a dramatic feeling. Nobody faints. You just stand on a corner you have stood on a thousand times before, looking at a crosswalk that has grown buttons and pads and little chirping speakers, and you realize the town has quietly graduated to a level of complexity you never signed up for. I am not a young man anymore, and I have worked the kind of life that uses a body up faster than the calendar does. I came to the Comox Valley, like a lot of people did, because it promised to be slower than the world I came from. The cruel little joke of the last few years is that the Valley apparently did not get the memo.
Downtown Courtenay is in the middle of becoming something else. Not all at once, which is almost the harder way to watch it happen. If a place changed overnight you could at least grieve the old version cleanly and move on. Instead it changes one intersection at a time, one detour at a time, one set of orange cones at a time, so that the transformation arrives the way grey hair does — you don’t notice the individual strands, you just look up one day and the whole head has gone a different colour. I have been looking up a lot lately. And what I keep seeing is a small town doing a very convincing impression of a city, while the people who have lived here the longest stand on the sidewalk trying to remember which way the traffic is supposed to flow this week.
The bridge that took a generation
Let me start with the bridge, because the bridge is the thing everyone keeps asking me about. For years now there has been a second crossing taking shape over the Courtenay River right beside the old 5th Street span — a dedicated walking and cycling bridge that finally opened this week, with the official ribbon-cutting happening down at the Simms Park pavilion. It is a handsome thing, I will give it that. A four-metre-wide, cable-stayed crossing with the wires fanning up off a single mast, the kind of bridge you used to have to drive to a real city to see. They built it so people on foot and on bikes could get across the river without dismounting and shuffling along the narrow sidewalk of the old bridge or, worse, merging into traffic and praying. On paper it is a good idea. I am not against bridges. I have crossed a great many of them.
What gets me is the timeline. This crossing was talked about, advocated for, studied, costed, re-costed, designed, redesigned and argued over for the better part of two decades before a single piling went into the bedrock. Community groups were writing letters about a cycling bridge when I still had a full head of dark hair and a back that worked without negotiation. Then, once the thing was finally approved and the contractor was finally chosen, it still took the better part of a year of active construction to actually stand it up. Twenty-some years of wanting, a year of building, and a budget that climbed past eleven million dollars by the time the dust settled. I do the arithmetic on that sometimes when I am walking past, and I think about how many ordinary lives that span of time contains. People got married and grew apart in the time it took to plan this bridge. Kids grew up and moved to the mainland. A man can go from middle-aged to senior in the gap between a good idea and a ribbon.
I am not saying that to be sour about it. I am saying it because there is something genuinely disorienting about living long enough to see a public project go from a gleam in a planner’s eye to a finished structure you can walk across, and to feel the whole arc of it against your own body. When a thing takes that long, you measure it in yourself. The bridge is new. I am not. We arrived at this corner of the river at the same moment from opposite directions, and only one of us is getting younger.
Push the button and wait
Then there are the lights. Up at 5th and Cliffe, which is about as close to the heart of downtown as we have, the city has been rebuilding the intersection — new signals, new curb ramps, shorter crossings, the whole modern package. They closed it down overnight for weeks to do it, and detoured everyone around through streets that were never meant to carry that kind of load, and now it is finished and it works differently than it used to. The lights are smarter now. Some of them won’t change for you unless you tell them you exist. There are pads and buttons you are expected to press, and sensors that decide whether a person or a bicycle is actually standing there waiting, before the system deigns to give you a green.
If you have spent any time on the mainland, you know exactly what this is. It is the same logic that runs a Vancouver bus stop or a SkyTrain platform — the city as a machine that responds to inputs, where you announce your presence by pressing something, and then you stand there in the rain and wait for permission. There is a whole grammar to it that younger people absorb without thinking. You press, you wait, the light considers your request, the little figure goes from a hand to a person, you cross within the allotted seconds or you start over. For someone who grew up when a crosswalk was just a place where the cars were supposed to stop and usually did, it is a small daily lesson in being managed by infrastructure. I am not too proud to admit I have stood at one of those new corners, having not pressed the right thing, watching cycle after cycle of green go by for the cars while I waited like a fellow who forgot the password.
It is a tiny thing. I know it is a tiny thing. But the tiny things are exactly how a town tells you it has decided to become a city. Nobody puts up a sign saying “we are now complicated.” They just start expecting you to interact with the streets the way you would interact with an airport. And every one of those small expectations lands a little heavier on a person who is already spending more of his energy than he used to on the basic business of getting through a day. There is only so much new a body and a mind want to learn after a certain point, and the town keeps adding to the syllabus.
When the city follows you home
Here is the part that I think a lot of longtime Valley people feel and don’t quite say out loud. A great many of us did not end up here by accident. We came here on purpose, and the purpose was almost always some version of away. Away from the traffic. Away from the pace. Away from the version of life where everything is engineered and optimized and scheduled to the minute, where you are one more data point in somebody’s flow model. We came up the Island, or over on the ferry, looking for a place where the river still ran past a downtown small enough to know, where the Glacier sat up there on the ridge being older than all of our problems, where you could buy a coffee and not feel like you were participating in a transit study. The whole appeal was that nobody was redesigning us.
So there is a specific kind of unease in watching the exact thing you ran from come walking up the road behind you. The cable-stayed bridge, the actuated signals, the language in the city press releases — “active transportation corridors,” “placemaking,” “complete streets,” “downtown gateways.” That is not Courtenay language. That is the vocabulary of the same planning class that shaped the mainland, the people who think about cities for a living, the ones with the lanyards and the renderings and the very confident slide decks. They are good at what they do. I am sure the bridge is beautifully engineered and the intersection is statistically safer. But you can feel them in it. You can feel the city-makers reaching up the Island, and you realize the slow little town was never as far away as you hoped. It was just next on the list.
People have started saying, half as a joke, that Courtenay is becoming the new Vancouver. I understand it is partly a real-estate line — a way of talking about what has happened to the price of a house here, which is its own long sad story. But it is more than money. It is the texture of the place changing into something that wants to be measured against a city instead of just being a town. And for those of us who spent the back half of our lives specifically getting out of the way of all that, “the new Vancouver” is not the compliment the boosters think it is. It is the sound of the thing you outran finally catching its breath in your driveway.
The Capilano problem
I keep coming back to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, of all things, and I have had to sit with why. If you have never gone, it is that famous swaying footbridge strung high over a canyon in North Vancouver — a feat of engineering that an entire tourism industry has been built around. People line up and pay good money to walk out over the gorge and feel the whole structure breathe under them. It is the perfect monument to a certain idea of the city: take a wild and beautiful piece of country, and let clever people with cables and calculations turn it into a managed, ticketed, perfectly safe experience that you are invited to be impressed by.
And now I walk down to our river and there is a cable-stayed crossing with its own fan of wires, gleaming over the Courtenay, and the resemblance is not lost on me. I am not saying our bridge is a tourist trap. I am saying that the same instinct made both of them — the instinct to take the water and the gorge and the simple business of getting from one bank to the other, and turn it into a designed object, a statement, a thing the planners can point at. For a man who came here to get away from exactly that kind of confident engineering of the natural world, seeing it appear over my own home river is a quietly unsettling thing. It is the Capilano instinct, scaled down and dropped into a small town. The elite designers of cities have a way of finding every river eventually.
I know precisely how all of this sounds. I know it sounds like an older fellow shaking his fist at progress, at bike lanes, at the very idea that a town might want its people to be able to cross a river safely. And I want to be honest that I am aware of the trap. There is nothing noble about being against good things simply because they are new, and a lot of what is happening downtown is, by any fair measure, good. Safer crossings are good. A river path you can actually use is good. I am not pretending otherwise. But you are allowed to think a thing is an improvement and still feel the ground shifting under you. You are allowed to be glad the bridge exists and grieve the slow, unengineered town it was built into. Both of those can be true at the same time, and at my age I have stopped pretending they can’t.
Maybe this isn’t the season for complicated
Which brings me to the thing I have actually been chewing on, the one underneath all the bridges and buttons. I have been trying, lately, to learn how to slow down. Not as a slogan. As an actual, daily, awkward practice. After a working life that ran hard and did not leave much in reserve, I have reached the part of the road where the smart move is to stop sprinting at everything, to do less, to let some things go, to spend my energy where it actually counts and not on whatever happens to be loudest. Anyone who has tried to genuinely slow down after a lifetime of not slowing down knows it is harder than it sounds. The hurry is wired in. You have to unlearn it on purpose.
And the timing of all this is what gets me. Right at the moment I am trying to simplify, the town has decided to become more complicated. Right when I am learning to take fewer things on, the basic act of crossing the street downtown has been upgraded into a task with steps. There is a version of me from twenty years ago who would have found the new bridge and the smart lights and the talk of corridors mildly interesting and gotten on with his day. The version of me that exists now has a finite amount of new-thing in the tank, and the town keeps asking for withdrawals.
So I have been giving myself a permission I think more people my age ought to take. Maybe this is not the season for complicated. Maybe, when the wise project of your life right now is learning how to do less and rest more and stop measuring your worth in how much you can shoulder, it is not the time to also take on something large and intricate and demanding just because it has appeared in front of you. I do not have to master the new downtown the day it opens. I do not have to have an opinion on every corridor or be fluent in every signal. I can let the city be a city at its own pace and let myself be a slower person at mine. There is no exam. Nobody is grading how gracefully I adapt to the pads at the crosswalk.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that slowing down is not the same as giving up, and that declining to take something on is sometimes the most clear-headed thing a person can do. When you are young, saying no to a challenge feels like weakness. When you have worked a long hard life and your reserves are what they are, saying no to the right things is how you protect the energy for the things that actually matter — the people, the river, the morning, the quiet. The new bridge will still be there whether or not I rush to have feelings about it. I can cross it slowly, when I am ready, on my own legs, in my own time. That is allowed.
The Glacier doesn’t hurry
On a clear day I can still look up past all of it — past the cones and the cable-stays and the smart corners — and see the Comox Glacier sitting where it has always sat, patient and enormous and entirely uninterested in the city’s schedule. The river still runs down to the harbour the way it ran before anyone thought to design a single thing across it. The tide still goes out at Goose Spit on its own clock, which has never once consulted a planner. Whatever Courtenay decides to become, those things will keep their own slow time, and there is more comfort in that than I would have admitted when I was younger and in more of a rush to keep up.
I think the town is going to keep changing whether or not it is gentle with the people who have been here longest, and I think the right answer is not to fight every new bridge and button, and it is also not to exhaust myself trying to become a city person in my last act. The right answer, the one I am slowly talking myself into, is to let the new Vancouver be the new Vancouver, and to be an older man who knows how to go slow in it. To press the button when I remember to, wait for the light without resentment, and cross the bridge at the speed my own life is actually moving now — which, after everything, is finally about the speed it should have been all along.
The downtown I knew is becoming somebody else’s downtown. That is how it goes; every place eventually belongs to the next people, and they will not know it any other way than the way they find it. But I was here for the slower version, and I get to remember it, and I get to decide for myself how much of the complicated new one I am going to carry. These days I am choosing to carry less. The Glacier and I are in agreement about that. Neither one of us is in a hurry anymore.
Written from the Comox Valley, on the slow side of the river.