I was up all night, socializing
Trying to keep the latent depression from crystalizing
Now the sun is lurking just behind the Scarborough horizon
And you're not even here
On the coldest night of the year.
- Bruce Cockburn
When I was young, before the Earth cooled, our little suburb of a great Canadian city did not have enough of a budget for full snow clearance...
They contracted with some construction types (a few of whom were parents of my classmates) to plough the snow into windrows on the sides of the street. When they had time, the single municipally owned snow blowing truck would come by and blow the snow into a line of (expensive) dump trucks. The truck drivers welcomed the extra paycheques, the contractors pocketed most of the money, and a few aldermen got on the graft train.
The kids would tunnel through the windrows. Some of these snow mounds would grow to drifted dunes of twenty feet or so, and the tunnels could stretch for a city block and would last until the snow blower or spring came by, sometimes weeks.
The more astute and sensitive among you will already have inferred where I could go with this story, if I wanted.
I could chill your blood quicker than a northeast breeze on the Ottawa River with the details as they were related to me in the schoolyard (over and over) in that year when I was(ten years old?) still a child.
Suffice it to say that she was young and it was tragic.
That will serve enough to get to the point.
Meetings were held. The public attended. Long cold winter nights were spent in discussion and recrimination.
Within weeks the city had organized a full snow removal program. They reviewed the budget and found the funds (surprise!) to pay for two or three new snow blowers and a systematic approach to snow clearance that involved public and private concerns and a new and stringent operating and safety code. Windrows were cleared.
No other young person (to my knowledge) has died in that way in the forty plus years since.
...a few acres of snow...
- Voltaire (when asked what was lost when Canada was ceded to the British)
The dialect of French that rang in my ears in my youth is called Joual. This is a word derived from the way the Francais de France perceived the local pronunciation of the word cheval (horse).
This is a telling point.
In France, during the colonial era, only gentry and nobility rode horses. Even plowmen would not ride the nags assigned to them.
It was just not done.
In dispatches from the colony of Canada to Paris you can find examples of the scandalised sensibilities of factotums as they first witnessed local Habitants blithely riding to and fro unsupervised on horseback.
And when they were not challenging class customs on horseback, these peasants were lighting out as freebooting coureurs de bois across the wide continent.
For nearly two hundred years these few, with their native alliances, managed to hem in a numerically superior (up to 100 times more populous), richer, and warmer neighbours to the south (Anglais/Yengiss/Yankees).
The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places - the school, the church and the skating-rink - but our real life was on the skating-rink.
- Roch Carrier – The Hockey Sweater
If you want to know the Canadian identity you have to know hockey. Just as the more individualistic baseball is the focus of how Americans see themselves, hockey is our soul and bedrock and self image.
While the American sees herself/himself in daytime summer splendour, staring down some pitcher on a sun dappled lawn of green grass or running under a long fly ball to make a spectacular catch, the Canadian sees an ice rink and a great pass on the breakaway in the middle of some frosted pond in an endless winter night.
You have to know hockey to know us and hockey only happens in winter (no matter what Gary Bettmann says)
It is winter that rules us, and it is winter that has shaped us. Our history is our geography. We are realistic.
One of the lessons we know in our bones is that – no matter our abilities to span continents, innovate, trade, profit, or make do, we are faced every year with an urgent and undeniable fact – we cannot do it on our own.
Rugged individualism never conquered a Quebec winter or a Saskatchewan blizzard.
Winter is long, cold, and can be awfully lonely even if you are with people.
We have learned to trust each other. We have learned that government works or can be changed and made to work. We are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
We have learned that a breakaway only happens when someone is there to make the clearing pass...
We have learned...
De mon grand pays solitaire
Je crie avant que de me taire
A tous les hommes de la terre
Ma maison c'est votre maison
Entre mes quatre murs de glace
Je mets mon temps et mon espace
A préparer le feu, la place
Pour les humains de l'horizon
Et les humains sont de ma race
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon jardin ce n'est pas un jardin, c'est la plaine
Mon chemin ce n'est pas un chemin, c'est la neige
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'envers
D'un pays qui n'était ni pays ni patrie
Ma chanson ce n'est pas une chanson, c'est ma vie
C'est pour toi que je veux posséder mes hivers
- Gilles Vigneault
Today I ran smack into a cultural difference right here on Daily Kos. A diary was posted about the danger of hypothermia in Washington. I called up the weather for DC and saw that the forecast was for no lower than -3 C (about 27 Fahrenheit).
At first I laughed that anyone could find this to be a dangerous temperature.
Yes, I know that hypothermia can set in at 10 C, Yes, I know from direct experience that street people are more prone to the effects of cold given age, substance abuse, and other factors.
But I also know from personal, direct experience that a windbreaker stuffed with newspaper is more than sufficient to keep you alive and thriving at that temperature... and I also know of at least two dozen doughnut shops in the core of the nearest city where I could sit for an hour or so without being rousted, and I also know of three or four churches, shelters and government programs that are in effect to give me aide and shelter.
Then I pondered what could be the sober difference – are the homeless so deprived in Washington DC, the capital of your country, that they lack even windbreakers? Are they so destitute that they are risk from what (to me) would be a minor frost?
...and the most telling question ...
Where are their brothers and sisters and countrywomen/men?
Are they left alone to face winter?
We are two people divided by a shared language, it seems.
Stay warm.
But it don't snow here
It stays pretty green
I'm going to make a lot of money
Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I made my baby cry
- Joni Mitchell