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Remembering Riverview

When I got ill, the world became a dangerous place and the faces of strangers took on a macabre appearance as the wind howled through the chill of my bones like an apathetic ghost

March 19, 2025

The summer rain pelted down upon a blanket of yellowing grass. My load is heavy as I climb up the side of this small, insular mountain. It has roaring buttercups and bluebells, which laugh against the breeze.

I love rain in the summer because everything becomes fresh and the smell of new mud reaches my nostrils.

I walk up and around the hill until I am out of breath. My body can no longer dance and climb or reach upward as easily as it once did.

From a distance, I see the city, its lights flickering like a jubilant queen’s crown. It is a place where the forest recedes at the end of the hill and I find a sort of magical power, which makes the work of my limbs a grateful act.

The cold, sullen faces of city crowds are gone. It is here amongst the long grass and wild flowers that I catch my breath as a black-haired squirrel darts up on a cottonwood tree trunk just to trip me up.

When I got ill, the world became a dangerous place and the faces of strangers took on a macabre appearance as the wind howled through the chill of my bones like an apathetic ghost.

It was after the last semester at Simon Fraser University that I had a psychotic breakdown. By then, my father and mother suspected there was something terribly wrong with me. No respectable Punjabi girl smoked marijuana cigarettes.

I had stopped talking and didn’t do a lot of bathing or eating. And I was hearing voices. 

So after multiple hospitalizations they committed me to Riverview Hospital. The horrid building that looked like the East End sugar factory near the railroad tracks was the thing I caught a glimpse of first. It loomed over the Lougheed Highway and had a gothic charcoal look to it. That building would eventually be closed down.

I roamed the perfectly manicured lawns of the old red brick buildings and wild trees with the same kind of terror that gripped everyone in those days, because women were going missing in the Downtown Eastside. 

I vaguely remembered a psychiatric nurse giving me a few choice words about my appearance.

I had never been one in favour of emptying my feelings as though they were easily explainable in group therapy, but that was what was expected of me.

I drank copious amounts of coffee each day and my fingers were stained with nicotine.

When I first got to the mental hospital, I found myself in a little observation room which smelled of urine, baked potatoes and stale milk. The hallways, with their pale yellow walls and blue speckled floors, were very clinical. My room consisted of a mattress on a steel frame, one cold sheet and a vapour-thin blue blanket.

Riverview was once called Essondale, named after the 19th-century Dr. Henry Essen Young, who played a significant role in launching the hospital. In 1904, the provincial government purchased the 1,000 acres of rural Coquitlam land for the creation of Riverview and the neighbouring Colony Farms.

Patients were at first housed in temporary buildings, and in 1913 the ward that would eventually be known as West Lawn began treating 300 male patients. 

Overcrowding was notorious. In the early 20th century, Colony Farms produced 700 tons of crops and 20,000 gallons of milk a year, using mostly enduring and reliable patient labour.

My ward was not locked. I was left to roam the lonesome elms and green grass.

At night I rolled cigarettes from cheap Indian tobacco. When you are stuck in a mental ward, you have no rights. You get up at a certain hour and go to bed at a certain hour. When I was given my clothing back it was the one outfit I wore as a uniform: a brown velour Charlie Brown sweater, a black leather coat and a pair of old skinny-legged blue jeans with white runners.  Sitting outside on one of the wooden picnic tables outside Penn Hall was a regular event. There was nothing else to do.

Black crows flitted about gulping pieces of fried chicken that I had thrown them. They were ruthless in their pecking order. Viscous in fact. They picked at the fattest and juiciest flank they could get their scavenger beaks into. My Dene friend called them tricksters.

It seemed I kept meeting broken people and I didn’t know how to handle it. I had wanted to leave the suburb of Burnaby to run away to some exotic place like San Francisco, but instead I found Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s skid row living in a small room at the Washington Hotel, which I had decorated in pink taffeta. My Dene friend would tell me stories about her husband’s dog sled. 

We could hear the train whistle in the distance at Penn Hall hall where they had a big TV with tables and chairs in the middle, a kitchen and real food like hamburgers and pop. It also had a computer room. Now, sitting outside on the wooden picnic tables, I felt absolutely alone and trapped.

Riverview Hospital was a dreaded place to end up. The anger that bubbled up inside me at my family for calling the police was palatable. I thought that no one had the right to interfere with my life.

But in the end  I made giant strides in my recovery, which now catapulted me into the fourth dimension. I found myself attending AA meetings on a regular basis at Riverview.  

I sat at on wooden picnic tables arranged outside of Penn Hall. There was a sullen woman I met who held a plastic baby doll to her chest. She walked up and down the width of the smoke pit clutching the doll as though it was a real baby.

A group of men gathered by the door to Penn Hall. I watched with curiosity the scene which was now unfolding in front of my eyes. She looked so alone. I went up to her and told her I trusted her.

If there is one good memory I have it is this one, because the next day I saw her she had abandoned the plastic doll.

That is one of my very last memories of Riverview. I am glad it is closed down.