Not far from where Brewery Creek starts its subterranean journey at Vancouver's Mountain View cemetary, there lies a headstone with this inscription: "Love one another and remember me once in a while."

It is a touching message from a woman to the family and friends she left behind - but it would be a suitable epitaph for Brewery Creek, a former salmon stream that splashed brightly through thick forests to False Creek, until it was buried alive by a city bent on rapid growth.

The premature burial of Brewery Creek has been repeated hundreds of times in Greater Vancouver, and in cities like it throughout the Pacific Northwest. In Vancouver alone an estimated 700 kilometres of streams now flow through storm sewers.

The streams in the city are functionally dead in that only a handful still support any fish life. Once they had runs of salmon, steelhead and trout that have been estimated at 100,000 fish. Today none of those that have been buried support fish and of the few city streams that remain free flowing only two, Beaver Creek in Stanley Park, and Musqueam Creek, in Pacific Spirit Regional Park, still have a precious few spawning salmon.

But dozens of buried streams are still flowing - and in that there is hope - especially for a growing number of groups determined to bring some of Vancouver's lost streams into daylight - and back to life.

Brewery Creek is typical of the buried streams. It can be heard echoing under a manhole beside 31st Avenue, opposite St. George Street. But it can't be seen anywhere. You can tell from the tilt of the land where it once ran, off towards False Creek, an ocean inlet that cuts into the middle of the city. And you can use your imagination to think what it must have been like there once, before the cemetery was built, before the buildings and highways, when there was still old growth forest, and deep pools holding big trout.

Not far to the West, China Creek and a series of tributaries run under the streets, passing Trout Lake, which was once a wonderful place to catch cutthroat. You can't find China Creek today either - but I came close, stepping down into a vacant cleft of land in the 1400 block of E. 18th. Amid the deep grass and wildflowers I found a hidden storm drain grate - and inside I could hear the voice of China Creek murmuring about a history few of us know.

Old timers in the area can recall how salmon used to come up China Creek, to spawn near the end of Clark Park, at Woodland and East 14th. Water seeps out of a grassy hillside there, in the park, and every few years city engineering crews are called out to shore up a sidewalk that slumps where the flow of water has undermined it.

It pleases me to see the sidewalk start to sag because I know that means China Creek is still down there, fighting for its life.

Around the city there are other signs of struggle, if not rebirth. Marian Penner Bancroft, a Kitsilano artist who undertook a project marking the creeks in her neighborhood, said she first became aware of the lost streams when she watched an apartment block being excavated, nearly 30 years ago.

"No matter how much the builders pumped out the pools of water at the bottom of the hole, it seemed they could never quite empty it," she says.

Years later, looking at Bruce MacDonald's wonderful book, A Visual History of Vancouver, she spotted an 1860's map of the city with blue lines indicating streams.

"It triggered a real curiosity of how Kitsilano looked before Vancouver came into being," she said. "You wonder where the waters went and where the underground flows are now."

A short time later she was thrilled to come across a copy of Vancouver's Old Streams, a booklet first published by the Vancouver Aquarium in 1978.

The book contains a detailed history of the lost streams of the city, together with a map that shows their location.

"I was excited to read that not only were there streams, but also that they had been teeming with fish, right where there are now asphalt encased streets where I and many others live," she said

Using the map, Bancroft began criss crossing her neighborhood, looking for signs of the long, lost streams. It wasn't easy to find any. But slowly she sorted it out - and then set about to mark their routes with small copper discs labelled, "Lost Stream".

On the disc she indicated what had happened to the stream, just a few words like "logging railway" or "development", and in the center she listed four things that had been lost along with the streams. One reads: "sockeye, thimble berry, lynx, fir."

Bancroft said she undertook the project out of a desire "to find a way of recalling what was now invisible, of marking the routes of the streams and in doing so call up an earlier image of this place, to bring some history into the present."

The morning we talked Bancroft had just come in from a walk, through a rainstorm, with a group of individuals who are trying to take her concept a giant step farther. Across the city, in recent years, a number of groups have sprung up that are dedicated to "daylighting" some of the lost streams.

"It was a privilege to walk with them," said Bancroft. "They have a vision that extends beyond their lifetime."

One of those people with a remarkable vision is Charlie Christopherson, of the Brewery Creek Society, which is fighting to bring back to life the stream that rises in a graveyard, and never sees daylight until it seeps into False Creek.

"It began as an historical local investigation in 1982," said Christopherson. "Then the idea finally came across that we might actually be able to get this creek up in daylight and running again." He admits that the 15-year fight has been frustrating - but his group is not about to give up. "We still have the notion we can daylight this creek," he said emphatically.

"There's a terrific resistance on the part of the city planning department and council to even consider the possibility. But it's all in the mind. Actually recreating the creek would be easy. If you accepted the goal of getting the salmon back in False Creek over the next 100 years, you could do it. You'd be able to recapture a lot of the old feeling."

A century ago most of Vancouver was still forested. Old growth towered around Trout Lake, for instance, where huge beaver dams held back the water. Locals fished in the lake and in the feeder streams for cutthroat, and historical comments indicate fish of two or three pounds were common. There were also steelhead and salmon - pinks, chum, sockeye, coho. Salmon once swam through what is now the intersection of Cambie and Broadway; Mount Pleasant schoolboys gaffed chum at Glen and Seventh. In Kerisdale people used pitchforks to catch steelhead passing up a creek under Marine Drive, near Johnson Road.

Christopherson said some people simply seem unable to visualize the possibilities that exist in daylighting some of the lost streams and getting some fish back into the city. But others get it right away.

"One has to be a little bit spiritual to do this," he said. "You have to stretch your imagination to see how the creek must have run through the landscape. You have to be able to visualize and imagine what the scene would be like."

Several years ago Christopherson was invited to Boulder, Colorado, by the deputy-mayor, to see what that town had accomplished with its daylighting project.

"It's an exciting thing," he said. "It's like walking into Utopia there.

"They are using their water system to ornament the landscape, to bring back fish and to link bike paths and parkways.

"They've recreated Boulder Creek. They got fish back spawning in it - and they built a park around it. Bear Creek is more hard edged. It's urban, like Brewery Creek, it goes under roads and stuff. But it is alive; it's got fish."

It wasn't cheap. Each project cost several million dollars.

But Christopherson said he thinks it was well worth it, because it gave fish and birds a place to live - and it made the city more natural, more livable for people.

"And I can tell you - those works will last forever. They'll never lose those creeks again." Beaver Creek rises in Stanley Park, splashing out of Beaver Lake and running through big timber to Burrard Inlet.

For the past several years Mark Hollier, of the Vancouver Salmon and Stream Society, has been working with the salmonid enchancement program to restore salmon to Beaver, Prospect and Spanish Banks creeks.

There's a small pathway beside Beaver Creek and walking there it's easy to see how beautiful Vancouver's lost streams once were.

Last spring, walking that pathway, I saw a pair of cutthroat trout, finning in a tailout. They wore dark spawning colors and nudged together in the movements of a mating ritual. Then, in a twinkle, they were gone under overhanging banks.

Seeing them was a thing of beauty. I thought of Brewery Creek and the gravestone that said "remember me once in a while."

We should do more than remember our dead salmon streams. We should do all we can to make them live again.