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Delbrook fish flops and flies in friendly sky bike

Pedal-pushing public art points to salmon’s struggle
fish

“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
– Gloria Steinem

“I really hate this expression. I bet fish would totally want bicycles.”
– Meg Cabot, Princess on the Brink

A stainless steel salmon hovers near the new Delbrook rec centre.

At first glance Salmon Cycle seems to consist solely of a fish that just leaped from a river of molten metal. But on closer inspection there’s both legs and a bicycle.

The stems are attached where the pelvic fin should be, making the work resemble Darwin’s The Origin of Species if it had been published by Schwinn.

But there’s still more: the fish has an old-timey bike with a big front wheel and as the water pressure increases the salmon pedals faster and faster, as though either a reckless driver or a bald eagle was on its tail.

The towering art installation is intended to be whimsical, artist Bruce Voyce explains, but it’s also meant to suggest the “struggle of the salmon.”

The fish looked a little unsteady on the bike at first, Voyce notes, discussing the challenges of building a sculpture with moving pieces.

“It’s had a lot of tuning,” he says.

Still, it’s come a long way since he got the commission in 2014.

“They wanted to make sure that the artwork wasn’t just parked there later on as an afterthought,” he says.

A Vancouver artist, Voyce began researching the area and quickly was intrigued with a fish ladder running up Mosquito Creek.

There was something about spawning salmon having to clamber up a ladder that grabbed his interest.

“That’s very North Vancouver,” he noted. “What could maybe make it a little more North Vancouver?”

The question stayed with him for a few days until he found the answer.

“I was walking through the garden, I just had this image of a salmon riding a bicycle,” he remembers. “If they can learn to climb ladders, well maybe they could learn to cycle.”

The sculpture is close to Mia Weinberg’s piece, Close to Nature’s Heart, a map bearing the names local streets that snakes its way through the rec centre.

While the sculpture is equal parts steel and whimsy, Voyce is well aware of the struggle of both salmon, streams and streamkeepers, as he was working on the project around the time huge cuts were announced at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
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“We’re dead in the water,” recalls John Barker, president of the West Vancouver Streamkeepers Society when discussing his reaction to the cuts. “All of a sudden government pulls the rug out under your feet.”

The cuts would have gutted the Resource Restoration Program, which routinely lends technical and scientific backbone to volunteer projects, but also an educational program that casts children as stream stewards.

“It was just a huge mistake,” Barker says.

Much to Barker’s relief, the cuts were reversed in June, something the longtime streamkeeper credits to Liberal West Vancouver MP Pamela Goldsmith-Jones.

While the cuts may have seemed like “small potatoes in the scheme of running a government,” the Salmon Enhancement Program “breathes life” into the West Coast’s massive volunteerism, according to Barker.

While Barker says some harm has been done, it’s a far cry from what could have been lost with the cuts, including an education program that put salmon eggs in classrooms around the province.

Raising the fish to the fry stage and releasing it into a stream can be transformative for a child, according to Barker.

“You sew that into a child’s mind, they remember that forever.”

Those programs also helps children become “ambassadors for fish,” according to Barker. Affecting the consciousness of young people dovetails with other streamkeeper work, according to Barker.

Streamkeepers have marked about 2,263 storm drains with yellow fish. Those small paintings are meant to serve as a reminder to anyone thinking about cleaning out their paint cans that those drains lead to fish-bearing creeks.

That message can come from streamkeepers, but it’s often more effective when sons and daughters remind their parents that the soapy water running down the driveway is heading straight for fish habitat.

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Due to steel’s durability, Voyce says he’s hopeful Salmon Cycle will stand for many years.

“If it can make you smile then it’s sort of broken down some little barriers and taken the chips off people’s shoulders,” he says.

The sculpture is meant to add a sense of place and to add to the character of Delbrook, but it’s also intended to “create a sense of possibilities,” the artist says.

“Clearly, a salmon riding a bike is not a simple thing.”

The mechanics of the sculpture (which “neither redeems nor challenges” the Steinem quote) were a little shaky at first.

However, things seem a little more secure lately, Voyce reports.

“The fish is learning to ride the bike a little bit better each day.”