Last summer an Australian man holding a can of beer fell into the Grandview Cut near the SkyTrain station on Commercial Drive in east Vancouver. He bruised himself badly on the way down and may even have “broken a bone,” as CBC Radio reported it, when he landed fully conscious on his back at the bottom of the ravine a hundred feet or so beneath the guard rail—which he had climbed onto, according to the news, “looking for some place to relieve himself,” and from which he then leapt or fell into what looked like underbrush and trees and a good place to take a leak, but turned out to be nothing but shrubbery masking the lip of the abyss, into which he plunged with the can of beer in his hand. I happened to be walking out of the SkyTrain Station on Commercial Drive as rescuers in fire trucks and bleating ambulances were menacing their way through the traffic, and I waited impatiently as one so often does for the street to clear so that I could cross over and walk the rest of the way home. Later, when I switched on the news, I learned of the fall of the anonymous Australian man and as I listened I began to regret that I had not followed the rescuers and their sirens and flashing lights, for had I done so I would have witnessed the retrieval or resurrection from the bottom of the Grandview Cut of the Australian man, who had not only, in the words of the reporter, “survived a close brush with death,” but had managed to do so with the can of beer intact, for it was still in his hand when he emerged on the surface. “Still in his hands, yup,” one of the firefighters said to an astonished reporter. “He held on to it pretty tight, I’m thinking.”
That evening I walked down the hill to look at the grimy bit of sidewalk where the Australian had gone over. The method of his rescue had not been reported: did they use a crane, a block and tackle, a helicopter? There used to be a café nearby called the Lusitania, whose washroom I made use of in my walks through the neighbourhood; but a few years ago the Lusitania and the Portuguese couple who ran it were swept away by the SkyTrain Station with its policy of No Public Washrooms, a policy that can be said to have driven the anonymous Australian to his fall. His miraculous survival has given a now desolate part of the city something to remember itself by.
All the best in these memorable times,
