On June 13th 1886 Lauchlin Hamilton the CPR surveyor assigned to lay out the city took a crew out to cut the first line from the inlet to the creek. One of the crew, his brother in law, became lost in the heavy forest among the gigantic cedars. Pacific Avenue is his story.

The language of Pacific Avenue—sightings, soundings and surveys of what is constructed along the lines that make the city and between the lines of the poem—is a peninsula at once covered with trees and cleared of those same trees. This unnamed city, let us call it Vancouver—why not? becomes a plantation at once industrial but also social. Lay down yr tools pick up this book and build this city in yr mind, being careful to include plant fibre, genetic strands, animal habits and of course etcetera.