City Scenes

Although he had run this route a hundred times, running along the waterfront in Vancouver was a highlight of his day. Some days the setting sun lit the city in gold and the clouds were a vibrant pink dotting the sky. Today it was overcast and threatening rain – but the cool, almost electric feel in the October air made him run harder.

Jake had moved to Canada five months earlier when he accepted his first full-time teaching position at the University of British Columbia. Determined to have a life outside of work, he had opted to rent an apartment downtown. Every day when he got home, rain or shine, he would quickly change, throw on his runners, and take the shortest route to the water. There, he could run without traffic lights or intersections to slow him down. Today, the rain clouds had driven people indoors, so he didn’t even have to weave past many people on the path.

This was the time carved out in his day when he didn’t have to think. Work was energizing but incredibly busy, especially with midterm exams looming, and it wouldn’t ease up until the end of the term. Jake didn’t mind – after all, he had moved here for the job. But since arriving, he hadn’t done much other than work, have beers with his colleagues, and run. Since his contract was for three years, he was starting to think he should maybe try to meet some people outside of work. His older sister, married with two kids back in Australia, kept badgering him to join some dating apps, and he was starting to think she might be onto something. Not that he would give Maddie the satisfaction of admitting that she might be right, particularly when her motivation was likely a selfish desire to live vicariously through him. He didn’t blame her since her romantic life with her husband was probably taking a hit due to having two kids under the age of four.

Jake was starting to feel a little tightness in his right calf as he rounded the point at Vanier Park. The water was dark grey and choppy, making the view with ocean, buildings and sky into a scene like a black and white photo. He stopped at a bench to stretch out his calf. Maybe he’d slept in a funny position the night before, which was enough to require a muscular tune-up now that he’d hit his mid-thirties.

He did some stretches, watching some people in windbreakers hurriedly walking dogs before the sky opened up. He was doing a lunge with his hands on the back of the bench when he happened to look down. He spotted something on the ground underneath the bench. Stretching forgotten, he bent down to pick it up. It was a small notebook with a black cover. Someone must have dropped it. He opened the notebook to see if there was a name or other contact information in the front. No luck.

He flipped to somewhere in the middle of the book to see if there were any other clues. On the page in front of him was a picture of an oriental-style building in a garden, a pond with koi in the foreground. He didn’t know much about art, but it looked like it was done in watercolors with outlines and details in black ink. He read the swoopy handwriting below the picture “Classical Chinese Garden”, with a date from about a month and a half ago.

He flipped through the notebook, recognizing some places from his runs by the water. He also recognized names of a few places that he had heard about in Vancouver. Some pages contained vibrant, detailed pictures. Other pages contained samples of colours, or several images of the same tree with slight differences, evolving from left to right into what the artist was trying to achieve. This little black book was where an artist practiced their craft. But there were no portraits, just scenery, and no clues as to who the owner of the book might be.

Jake had been standing by the bench for a while, engrossed in the images. Suddenly, he felt a drop of rain on the back of his neck. He quickly closed the notebook to protect the pages and tucked it inside his zippered jacket. He didn’t have paper or a pen with him to leave a note about the book, so he figured he would take it with him to protect it from the elements, then return the next day to leave a note with his phone number.

He cut his run short, heading toward home, clutching the notebook against his body under his jacket to keep it from getting wet.

The next day, Jake returned to the bench with a note that read “Found: Small black art notebook” and listed his cell number. He put the note in a Ziploc bag, then taped it to the bench.

Over the next week as he waited for a reply, he would sometimes look at the pictures in the little black notebook, seeing the places he ran past through different eyes. Science World lit up with different colored lights. The old-fashioned style of the Burrard Street Bridge contrasting with the modern downtown skyscrapers. Sea planes landing in the harbour near Stanley Park.

Some of the pictures showed the nature and animals in the city – a Great blue heron fishing near the shore, a group of ducks swimming in a man-made pond just south of the sea wall, dogs playing in a park with a waterfall, and countless flowers that he could only admire since he definitely didn’t know their names.

After a week without hearing from anyone, Jake had developed the theory that the person who had lost the notebook didn’t realize where they had lost it. He had checked on his runs that his note was still in place, so as long as the artist knew to look there, they couldn’t have missed it. Jake decided to widen his search, assuming that the owner of the notebook would want it back. After all, it was like a journal of pictures – moments and memories that he was starting to treasure even though they weren’t his.

At work one day, he printed up several copies of his “Found” notice with his phone number. Then he sweet-talked the administrative assistant into laminating them. Armed with his notices, tape, and a staple gun in a backpack, he set out on his daily run. At each location from the notebook, he posted a few of the notices.

More days passed with no phone calls, which seemed strange because based on the dates of the images, Jake’s mystery artist was out daily around the city. He started venturing away from his regular running route to more locations. He saw the view of the city from Queen Elizabeth Park, and walked through the quarry garden there. He wandered around near Jericho Beach to find the specific bridge from the notebook. He even explored places at the university that were pictured in the book, like the clock tower and the rose garden that looked out on the ocean and mountains.

Each day he planned out a new place to go. It became a scavenger hunt of sorts. He studied the angles and perspective of each image so that he could post notices near the location where the artist must have been. He started documenting his search, taking photos with his phone of the real-life versions of the scenes from the notebook. He sent the photos to his sister, Maddie, who always complained that she didn’t hear from him enough.

As he wandered through Granville Island, window shopping and posting his notices, a woman asked him what the notices were for. Jake explained, getting the notebook out of its waterproof pouch in his backpack to show her.

“The artwork is beautiful,” the woman said, taking her time admiring each image. “I admit I was hoping you would show it to me since I saw you putting up that poster about an art notebook.” She gestured to the notice he had just posted on a bulletin board.

Jake felt a little nervous having someone else hold the notebook, which he realized was a bit strange. After all, it wasn’t his notebook, but in the past few weeks, it had begun to feel a bit like it belonged to him.

“I’m Tracey, by the way,” the woman said, thrusting out her hand for a firm handshake. “I’m a ceramics artist.”

Jake introduced himself while she perused the notebook.

“You know,” she said abruptly, once he had just barely finished introducing himself, “I have a friend who is organizing an art contest about scenes of the city.”

A few weeks later, Jake was adding some last-minute touches to the next day’s lecture in his downtown apartment when his phone rang. He answered with only half his attention, still mainly engrossed in formatting a document and figuring that it was likely a spam call.

“Hi,” said a woman’s voice on the other end. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I think you might have found my notebook.”

That Saturday morning, Jake was waiting for his mystery artist at the edge of the water in Olympic Village. He fidgeted with the notebook as he waited, scanning the people who walked past, looking for a woman who might be Elise, the notebook’s owner.

A woman approached him, a small white dog on a leash trotting beside her. Jake had remembered her mentioning the dog on the phone – Westley. It was partially Westley’s fault, actually, that the notebook had ended up under the bench. Elise was pretty sure that the notebook had fallen out when Westley had insisted on making some new friends while she was packing up her things into her bike panier.

The woman introduced herself. She was shorter than Jake had expected, petite with curly brown hair and eyes that might be green or grey.

As he was about to hand her the notebook, he hesitated. “Wait, how do I know that it’s your notebook?” he asked.

She looked a bit stunned, then burst out laughing. She reached into her bag and pulled out a matching notebook, handing it to Jake. He flipped through it. The notebook was clearly the sibling of the one that he had had for the past many weeks. It showed scenery from a different place, but it was definitely done by the same artist.

“I have a ton of these notebooks,” Elise said with a chuckle. “I go through at least a few a year. Digital art for clients pays the bills, but I wanted to still practice putting my brush to paper, so I started doing this a few years ago. I knew that I was basically at the end of this notebook,” she gestured to the first, “when I left town. I just grabbed a new one to take with me and didn’t even realize that I had misplaced it until I got back.”

After he had returned both notebooks to her, Jake cleared his throat and said, “I have something to confess.”

About seven months later, Elise and Jake stepped back to admire the new garden dedicated to the memory of Elise’s mother who had passed away during the weeks when Jake was putting up notices around the city. Elise’s artwork had won the first-place prize of $20,000 in the City Scenes Art Contest thanks to Jake’s impulsive decision to submit an entry on behalf of the artist he had never met. Elise had decided to put the prize money toward creating a small public garden near the waterfront path in the neighborhood where her mother had grown up. Jake admired the flowers, the bench in the garden, and the scenery of the city, then shared a smile with his girlfriend while her dog, Westley, tried to dig up some of the freshly planted petunias.