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In spring, thoughts turn to…

The calendar says it’s spring. The creeping sunlight early in the morning and lingering alpenglow late in the evening say it’s spring. The rapidly looming World Ski and Snowboard Festival says it’s spring.

The calendar says it’s spring. The creeping sunlight early in the morning and lingering alpenglow late in the evening say it’s spring. The rapidly looming World Ski and Snowboard Festival says it’s spring. Zippy the Dog, who wants nothing so badly as to sit atop the melting snowbank outside says it’s spring and if I don’t take him for a run, well, shame on me.

So why does it feel like one massive April Fools joke?

Most likely it has to do with the skiing. The skiing — and, of course, riding — says it’s still winter. Okay, not the in-your-face-and-up-your-nose winter of January, the days of endless powder January that threatened to break the snowfall record set only a year ago. Yeah, there’s a little suncrust in the morning and enhanced patio drinkin’ opportunities in the aprèsnoon to hint at the spring to come but up high, in the bowls, on the other side of the ropes and especially in the shady trees and, well, pretty much the entire rest of British Columbia, winter still rules the day.

It must have come as quite a shock to Cro-Magnon Whistlerites 20,000 years ago to wake up and discover the most recent glacial advance was headed down the valley. The Ice Age cometh.

I mean, let’s just think about it a minute. Here they are, minding their own business, spending most of their time chasing after mastodons, wielding outrageous slings and arrows, all so they can have warm coats, juicy burgers and ribs, and some way cool parabolic tusks to snag a few runs on the mountain when time permits. Life flows in endless cycles. Chase the mastodon, ski the mountains, spear a few fish in the summer, a little mountain biking for good measure, then WHAM. Just when they thought it would always be such and winter couldn’t get longer, it does.

I’m wondering, did it start so innocuously they didn’t even notice it? Say with a monster snow season and endless snow in a March so memorable it deserved a name? Big pow days in April, stretching into May? How long did it take Neolithic Whistlerites to realize this wasn’t just an unusual season and that they’d better get their sorry butts further south before they became the Lost Tribe, frozen in time?

It would be easy to dismiss the current winter we’re having as just a random blip on the radar screen of the most recent, receding ice age. Easier still if last winter hadn’t been so massive as well. After all, our best and brightest scientists tell us numbers don’t lie — the Earth’s heating up, the glaciers are still shrinking, the polar ice caps are melting, and if we keep consuming at the pace we’ve become accustomed to, Whistler will be oceanfront property in our great grandchildren’s lifetimes and Vancouver will be a coral reef somewhere offshore. As though I needed another good reason to crank up the heat and leave the fridge door open. Ooh-whee baby. Surf’s up.

There are those who will be appalled at my laissez-faire attitude toward impending global meltdown. I don’t care. Maybe it’s Olympic Angst, maybe it’s the culmination of the Season of Endless Snow, but maybe it’s just my inherent belief that life’s an experiment, that humans aren’t as smart as they think they are, and that Nature has more than one trick up her sleeve.

Who knows, maybe this whole global weirding trend, at least the part we can measure with our puny, primitive scientific instruments, is just one elaborate April Fools’ joke and Mother Nature is sitting back with a big shiteating grin, laughing at us as we fall all over ourselves trying to figure out what it all means. Maybe life ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with a series of bizarre weather tricks that make the Great Flood look like an April shower. Heck, if you can believe the naysayers, the energy-eaters blathering on about global cooling — you can’t, no matter how much they’d like you to — you can believe anything.

As for me, I’ll take what comes and what’s come this winter has been easy to take. Someone’s got to win — if even temporarily — in the climate change sweepstakes. Who deserves it more than us? That was a rhetorical question.

 

Correction

It’s not usually my practice to explain, apologize for or correct inaccuracies that creep into Maxed Out. That’s understandable given so much of what appears here is inexplicable and more or less entirely made up — Motto: Don’t let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. As for apologizing, if I started, where would I stop? Yes, that was a rhetorical question too. Getting easier to spot, aren’t they?

But a couple of weeks ago, in a column entitled Onward Christian Soldiers — I’d just like to say, at this point, I only write the columns, there are others far wittier than I who think up the titles — two unfortunate errors somehow oozed through my normally sharp-eyed editing process. Both, ironically, cast former Whistler councillor Krispi Wells in an unflattering light she, as it turns out, doesn’t deserve.

First, I referred to her as a former Whistlerite. This accusation is apparently one of those forgotten-but-not-gone errors. She says she’s still living in town. I’m sure she wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. I guess we’re just running in different circles these days and don’t bump into each other very often.

The more egregious error was relying on information in the BPSports story referenced in the column and calling her — gasp — a Southern Baptist. Krispi says, “No way, Jose!” She says, and who can say otherwise, she is not now, nor has she ever been, a Southern Baptist. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that.

Now that I know… so do you. I can’t believe such an august publication as BPSports would print such blatant inaccuracies. Then again, I can’t believe I even know BPSports exists. If I really thought it would help, I’d call up the chowderhead who wrote the story and give him a piece of my mind. Given that he was writing for an on-line zine published by the Southern Baptist Convention though, I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t know what to do with a piece of anybody’s mind and probably wouldn’t recognize one anyway.

I regret the error and exult in the knowledge Ms. Wells has not, in fact, entirely lost her mind and been lured to the dark side of organized religion. She’s still just a whacky Whistlerite, exactly like the rest of us… only better dressed.