By G.D. Maxwell
Winter’s come to Smilin’ Dog Manor. Like so many of British Columbia’s weather-related phenomena this year, it announced itself with a bang, a drunken, slobbering brute of a guest barging in unannounced and unexpected. Another in a string of Stupid Weather Tricks pulled on a population grown tired of bearing their brunt.
Monday was one more of what’s become a whole tribe of Indian Summer days – +10°, sunny, laundry-hangin’ weather. The greatly reduced but still refreshingly clear waters of Sulphuric Lake placidly mirrored the last deciduous red-yellow leaves punctuating an upside-down forest of stickbare aspen and bushy evergreen and reflected a sky so blue and clear if you looked at the lake long enough you lost up-down perspective.
Tuesday was threatening to be a rerun day but with bruise-coloured clouds scudding by for entertainment. Then all hell broke loose.
At Bowron Lakes Provincial Park near Barkerville, B.C., one of the lakes that form the oddly-shaped, quadrilateral canoe circuit runs for miles roughly northwest to southeast. If you’re not in a rush to see how quickly you can paddle the 115 km chain of lakes – and let’s admit it, it takes a special kind of fool to turn a trip like that into a race – you might be on Issac Lake for two days or more.
What Issac has in length, it lacks in width, being long and narrow with a 90° dogleg right thrown in for good measure. The high peaks rising from both sides of its shoreline hold the promise of deviling winds, a promise Issac generally delivers on if you stay on it long enough. That’s why, even though its width doesn’t seem like much, paddling near a shore is prudent.
Being short on prudence but long on luck, my Perfect Partner and I were near enough the shore when Issac turned from glassy to ghastly in about the time it took to say "Weather’s coming." A microburst seemingly slammed wind vertically down onto the lake, wild whirlwinds kicked up, whitecaps appeared and grew into standing waves. Surf was up.
We clung to rocks and branches at the shoreline while the canoe bucked under us like an asthmatic mechanical bull in a down-and-dirty redneck bar. Having started the day’s paddle in sunshine, we were soaked to the bone as quickly as if we’d stepped into the lake itself.
And as quickly as foul weather came, it departed. Issac went back to being calm, we bailed the canoe, the sun was consumed and never appeared again for the rest of the trip and I gained new insight into those hapless fishermen who drown each summer on B.C. lakes during sudden storms. It was impressive.
As it was when winter arrived on Tuesday.
From foreboding to kickass in less time than it takes to torture this sentence did the weather turn. Light rain reprised its earlier appearance but before its gentle tapping on the roof could even register, it morphed to hail and ceased to fall down, adopting instead a trajectory best described as explosive. Hail flew in every direction including up! It pelted windows, covered the earth and floated on the lake like so many little, raw dumplings.
Wind plastered freezing rain onto trees, buildings and Zippy the Dog. This was weather soup at its best, a constantly changing continuum of precipitation that finally settled into snow and blanketed the countryside in the colours of Cornelius Krieghoff.
In the ensuing stillness, reminiscent of the eye of a hurricane with unearthly light and dancing clouds, Zippy suggested we go for a walk. Since the maelstrom knocked the power out for the 82 nd time this summer, his timing seemed marginally better than usual.
It wasn’t until we neared the path that leads into the woods I finally noticed things were askew. The first hint was the 60 foot spruce laying across the roof of one of the guest cabins at a neighbouring resort. It had snapped in two like a snowboarder’s fibula on a huck gone bad and snapped again at the roofline, giving the appearance of having been draped diagonally over the small cabin. Miraculously, its fall and sudden stop hadn’t even broken a window.
Being a naturally helpful kind of guy, I decided to share the good news with the resort’s owner, figuring he might want to know how well-built that particular cabin seemed to be. In the hundred metres between where I was and where he lived, four large trees were down, three uprooted and one more snapped like a twig. One giant, wedged precariously in the branches of two other trees, hung like Damocles’ sword above another of the guest cabins whose front porch had been modified into abstract angles by an adjacent tree that had fallen to the ground.
Like salmon in a stream, once I saw one felled tree I began to see dozens. All along the lakeshore trees were down, leaning, aslant, pickup sticks left behind in a giant tantrum.
Opting for the relative safety of the road instead of the narrow path through the woods, we hadn’t walked far before encountering the first tree lying across its width. A ball’s throw further was the second. Off the side, one lay across power lines that held under its weight. Across the street, the lines weren’t so robust, lying limp where they’d been severed. At the corner, another house had a new roofline courtesy of two large spruce that had hit, on their way down, what five others downed on the same lot had narrowly missed.
A chainsaw-wielding neighbour said something about 60 trees being reported down along the highway between where we were and 100 Mile House, a ratio of 1 1/2 per kilometre. The local bush, missed by this summer’s fires, was suddenly littered with firewood-to-be. Winter has arrived.
Which means it’s time to drain the water, shut off the heat, hide the valuables, such as they are, and beat it back to Whistler and the comforting smell of melting ski wax. It’s time to become immersed again in issues of sustainability, affordable housing, urban – let’s stop kidding ourselves – planning, and the increasing rift between the indolent and absent wealthy versus the indolent and underhoused poor. I can’t wait.
If there’s any justice in the world – and I’m not sure there is when I watch my president south of the border continue to trample, in his quest for world domination, the Constitution he swore to uphold – this will be one epic winter. We’ve struggled through extreme summer, extreme autumn, fire and flood and if we don’t deserve extreme winter and snow up to the eaves of our houses, who does?
Get ready.
