And a Very Merry, Extremely Rare, White Christmas from the Wet Coast

 


I have exchanged greetings with friends and family from Ottawa, Stratford, Tottenham, Simcoe, Wheatley and Leamington today.

They all painted the same story of dreary rain and damp cold.  Now, that's our weather. It's what we are used to, accustomed, acclimated. It is one of the great challenges of living on the Wet Coast, one that sends some newcomers back to from whence they came. We mock them for their frailty.

This time, however, the tables are turned.  When my wee hound awakened me this morning (@ 5:30) I opened my bedroom door to the back yard to discover somewhere between 5 and 6 inches of pristine snow. 

I went to glimpse the view from my front door. Pristine. Not a tire track to be seen. Was this the Apocalypse? No. 

What a year it has been.  An inordinately soggy spring giving way to a hellish summer of heatwaves, heat domes, and massive wildfires sending clouds of somewhat dangerous smoke to blanket the rest of Canada then, at summer's end,  yielding to the arrival of atmospheric rivers and historic floods in the BC lowlands severing both rail and road connections to the rest of this nation. Some of that damage will take years to restore.

Now, in a year of ridiculous and deeply unwanted records, we have Ontario's winter. This is not a Prairie winter. We are spared the severe cold. It is the winters I knew so many decades past in the Ottawa valley. There are just so many changes, each requiring adjustment with the realization that we live in profoundly uncertain times.

That said, I kind of like it. I can only imagine the snowpack we must now have on the local mountains. In a few days we're supposed to have cold but sunny conditions. I can't wait to see those peaks.

And so, Merry Christmas from the Snow Coast.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more