A Shining Star

I actually took this picture a few weeks ago, and was saving if for a day like this, when anything else I might care to write seems frivolous and empty.

I've lived in Vancouver almost nine years now, so long that I don't even get allergies in the spring any more, and I've never seen a sea star within city limits. I'd never seen a purple one before, either. This day I was walking along False Creek and happened to see a dozen of these purple ones and a half a dozen of the more common orange ones in a sheltered piece of foreshore near a marina.

When I lived here before, in 1990, False Creek was so dirty you wouldn't have seen this. First, the animal wouldn't have been there, and secondly, if it had it wouldn't have been visible as deep as this one was, about a metre down. I didn't even need a polarizing filter to capture this one, the water was that clear.

It's easy to say that things are dirtier and more violent and in every way worse today than they've ever been, but now I don't know. To give myself a little perspective, I was reading about an even worse school attack than the one at Virginia Tech which took place in Bath, Michigan in 1927, in which a man dynamited a school and killed 45 people, most of them children.

Talk about your good old days.