Silence and Secrets: The Stanley Park Forest

The Stanley Park Causeway, a narrow ribbon connecting the Lions Gate Bridge and the City of Vancouver, curves through a thick forest of cedar, fir and hemlock trees. It’s the only way into and out of the city for people who live on the North Shore. A narrow three-lane road that carries 60 – 70,000 cars each day.

I’m sure most well-heeled drivers think little of this remarkable forest adjacent to the city. Keeping the windows of the Maseratis invariably sealed on their commute and posh sound systems insulate drivers from the darkness and the depth of the woods just a few feet away on either side of them.

For most, the causeway and forest are afterthoughts. At 60 to 70 kmph, it takes just over three minutes to drive end to end. Some may find it pleasant. Others barely notice.

Traffic speed, forest stillness

The forest can’t be understood by anyone travelling at that speed. The forest itself barely moves at all. It is silent and still. No movement except perhaps a gust of wind, the call of a raven, the rustle of a skunk moving through the underbrush.

I lived most of my life on the North Shore. For years, I biked to work downtown, riding the causeway and into Stanley Park itself. The roads in the park were rarely busy, and the forest trails were mainly deserted.

These commutes were a peaceful respite during the day for me. Away from the frantic activity of the causeway or the intense city riding, I was closer to the forest, attuned to its silence, aware of its immensity.

But trees don’t speak, at least not in a language we understand. They guard their quiet, legions of them, thrusting out of the earth, their thick trunks and branches, green leaves and needles. You’d feel their silence if you walked among them, along Stanley Park’s soft brown trails, past rotting stumps and lush ferns and salal bushes.

They make you feel small and noisy

In places, you can still see broad stumps with notch holes chopped into their sides by loggers over a hundred years ago. Six or ten feet off the ground, the woodsmen would jam board ends into the notches and balance on them while they worked their saws and axes on the trunks.

They make you feel small and noisy, these trees. You might sense their power if you sit on a park bench and stare into the dark tangle of trunks and underbrush. Or if you lean your back against a cedar. Looking up, it’s almost as if the top disappears into the sky.

This forest was the domain of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations for thousands of years. Long before there was a Stanley Park 1. There were aboriginal settlements here, Xwayxway on the south shore and Chaythoos on the north. Now, all traces of those communities have disappeared into the forest.

The human scent

The woods have survived and thrived, though human scent has changed them since colonization. Something of their wildness remains, but their existence next to a sizeable 21^st-century city, Vancouver, has introduced a new kind of darkness — of people wishing to hide themselves or their secrets. It makes the trails feel a little unsafe. People talk, stories abound. And the trees are responsible for their secrets.

Stanley Park is nearly 400 hectares of land adjacent to Canada’s third-largest city. Sixty-five percent (256 hectares) of that area is forest. A perimeter road, a sea wall and a few more minor routes venture into the woods themselves. Gardens, a zoo and aquarium, open-air theatres and several restaurants are big attractions, not to mention a network of trails that wind through most of the forest land.

But many of Vancouver’s city’s fringe groups — homeless communities, people wishing to hide or escape the city as much as they can — have adopted the park as well.

Hiding things

When I was bicycle commuting, I’d sometimes ride with a fellow who kept several “hiding places” in the park forest. I knew Greg from my university days, and it was fun chatting and riding at a slower pace with him when we ran into each other.

He used the hiding places to stash things he’d found about the city on roadsides and garbage bins. He was a bit crazy, I thought. A dumpster diver. His wire glasses were either wet or filthy, and his long blond hair was wild and greasy. He wore baggy shorts all winter except on the coldest days.

Greg showed me one of his places just inside the forest off the northbound side of the causeway. It was a plastic tote box hidden inside a thick tangle of salmonberry bushes. It contained a spare jacket and sweater he could use if the weather was too cold or his clothes got too wet.

There were spare bicycle parts, an empty wallet and a handful of beef jerky packets bound with an elastic band. He was proud of his ingenuity, his resourcefulness. He said other stashes were further inside the woods, but he didn’t want me to see them.

Homeless in the forest

A couple of years passed without my seeing him. Then, while riding a bus, I saw his bicycle lying on the shoulder of the Causeway bike lane. I saw no trace of him. I imagined he was replenishing one of his tote boxes or maybe smoking a cigarette under cover of the forest.

At 7:30 in the morning, it wasn’t unusual to ride past a small group of homeless people sitting on the curb near The Teahouse Restaurant or lying on a patch of nearby grass. They’d spent the night in the bushes, likely off the trail near the parking lot.

According to newspapers and Vancouver media, there is a significant ebb and flow of homeless people in the Stanley Park forest. They live in tents and makeshift shelters in some of the deepest parts of the woods.

In a 2015 Globe and Mail article, 2 the reporter meets a fellow who had been living in Stanley Park for at least 20 years, according to a park ranger.

“He’s a one-of-a-kind resident,” the park ranger says. “He’s in an area of the park where the forest is so dense and fragrant that it seems to have a confining weight.”

A home in a hole in a cedar’s roots

His home was a hole around the roots of a massive fallen cedar, with lean-to shelters for sleeping and eating.

Permanent residents are few, according to the ranger. More transient “tenants” pass through and take up residence for shorter periods throughout the year. Mainly in the summer.

The Globe and Mail article portrays the park ranger staff as benign enforcers of park decorum. As long as there are no signs of needles, weapons or fires, there is no urgency for the homeless tenants to leave.

If an “eviction” needs to happen, rangers work with the tenants to find other shelter outside the park.

Even still, I wouldn’t want to find myself on a trail deep inside Stanley Park at night! The trees might be oblivious to this circumstance, but many humans might not feel safe.

Tiny corpses

Worse things have happened.

In January 1953, two small corpses, those of a boy and a girl, were found in the Stanley Park forest. They were covered by a woman’s rain cape. The bodies had been arranged so that they were lying in a straight line. The soles of their shoes touching each other. They were further covered by a blanket of leaves and had remained hidden for some time. A hatchet found nearby was believed to have been the murder weapon.

The discovery became a sensation in 1950s Vancouver. Who were these children? Why had they been murdered?

It became known as The Babes in the Woods Murders, and the case, while it has gone cold, remains open to this day.

Police determined the children had been murdered about five years before their bodies were discovered. Who their parents or families were was a mystery.

Babes in the woods

The investigation was hampered when the medical examiner concluded that one victim was a female. However, a DNA test conducted in 1998 proved that both victims were male. They were brothers between the ages of six and ten.

In 2018, detectives planned to use consumer DNA databases, such as ancestry.com and 23andme.com, to find more information on their identities.

But in 2022, a forensic genealogy investigation identified the bodies as Derek and David D’Alton (seven and six, respectively), the sons of Eileen Bousquet. Almost 70 years after the murder was discovered!

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I first learned about this case in the 1998 novel by Timothy Taylor, Stanley Park. The actual case and all its facts figure prominently in the novel. The main character, Jeremy Papier, an up-and-coming Vancouver chef, is drawn into the mystery by trying to help his father learn more about the deaths. The father is an anthropologist living as a homeless person in Stanley Park.

What the forest witnessed

I was struck by the way the details of the Babes in the Woods case come to light in the novel. Jeremy’s world is complicated and busy, and he’s reluctant to get involved with his father’s obsession.

But he’s hooked when he sees the spot where the corpses were discovered: at the base of a stand of trees. They were immovable, like sentries, keeping silent watch over where the children had lain for five years, the final resting place in their young lives.

The forest as a whole was silent. It did not betray the children’s presence or the way they died. The forest was unmoved, too, when the world (the police authorities and news reporters) discovered victims’ tiny bodies and bore the noise of police cars, radios, camera flashes, and men in trench coats shaking their heads over the mystery.

The forest was witness to all that happened. And the trees, still in Stanley Park, bear their secrets. And the thousands of commuters who speed along the causeway have forgotten.

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One night in December 2006, a mighty windstorm blew through Vancouver. The gusts ripped out thousands of trees across the city, smashing into cars and homes and cutting off power to more than 250,000 homes.

I had stayed in West Vancouver that night and had to take the bus to work the next morning. Walking down the hill to Marine Drive, I stepped over branches and trees that had fallen across the road.

When I finally got a bus, I learned the Stanley Park Causeway had closed. A multitude of trees had fallen across the roadway, making it impassable. The bus was re-routed across the Second Narrows Bridge 12 km away. Traffic was at a standstill. The commute took hours.

Over the course of the day, we learned the storm had taken down thousands of Stanley Park trees — some estimates were as high as 10,000.

I was shocked the next time I rode my bicycle through the park. Roads once darkened by thick stands of trees were now lightened by sun and sky. The green underbrush now reflected light instead of dark. The forest colour seemed thinner, somehow, less vivid.

That’s how the light gets in

The after-effects of the devastation were shocking and still are 17 years later.

But although some of the mystery and older beauty has faded, the park seems transformed, somehow. The way a scruffy kid might look after a good haircut — cleaner, tidier, easier on the eyes.

“There’s a crack in everything,” Leonard Cohen once sang. “That’s how the light gets in.”

The Stanley Park forest has opened a little since the storm. It’s a little less foreboding, perhaps a bit more inviting to park visitors.

But it’s lost some of the mystery, the places into which the dark underside of the nearby city could be swept, concealed. And I miss that bit of wildness that used to exist on the edge of the city that sometimes seemed too shiny and bright.

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