06.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Ethel Wilson

SWAMP ANGEL

II
You can drive from Vancouver to New Westminster along a highway bright with motor hotels, large motor car parks, small shops, factories of various sizes. At night everything is bright with lights and Neon dazzle. In the daytime you will see that some of these motor hotels are set in old orchards, and among the rows of neat homogeneous dwellings stand old cherry trees, sprawling and frothing with white blossoms in the spring. Later, when the blossoms fall, the gnarled trees in their ingenuous beauty remind the urbanites and suburbanites, speeding past, of another kind of place. The delicate impression is crowded out and vanishes, obliterated by every modern convenience.

-Ethel Wilson: from Swamp Angel 

The swamp angel was an 8-inch 200 pound gun used during the US Civil War circa 1863; also, the name of a small revolver manufactured by Forehand and Wadsworth.