Pop 89: Talk about the weather
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
A couple of ago years I drove from Saskatchewan to BC to pick up my sister and take her back to Val Marie for a week of hiking Grasslands National Park for her birthday present. It was October 2nd and late in the afternoon when we pulled into Swift Current and decided to stop at Humpty’s for their all-day breakfast before turning onto HGHWY 4 and heading south to Val Marie. While our remarkably cheery waitress placed plates heaped with eggs and toast in front of us, I watched the clouds roll in.
A couple of ranchers, sliding into the booth across from us, asked the waitress for coffee to “take the chill off.” I asked them if they could tell me what the weather was like further south.
“Let’s just say,” one of them replied. “I’d finish those eggs and hit the road, if I were you.”
“There’s weather coming up from Montana,” explained the other. “But you might just beat it.”
Around here weather means bad weather. At best it means a sudden change. In October you can pretty much be assured that any sudden change will be bad for drivers and folks stuck out in the elements.
By the time we’d bolted our food the sky was dark, and the wind yanked the car doors from our hands.
But I had good tires and a reasonable heater and we decided that after twelve hours of driving what was another hour and a half? That hour and half turned into nearly three and half hours of crawling along a country highway through blinding snow, high winds and sudden icy patches.
We pulled into the driveway as the snow drifted in behind us, burying the car overnight. My sister spent the week on my couch, reading and sleeping. Occasionally we ventured into the wintry weather, taking short walks around the village and up cemetery road. We never made it up to the Grasslands where, just a few days earlier, on a long hike, I’d napped in some tall grass under a warm sun.
Mine is not an unusual story; weather stories are legion on the prairies, made more urgent by the fact of remoteness. It’s one thing to be caught in a storm in downtown Toronto where you can duck into a pub, shop or restaurant. It’s another to realize you wandered too far and didn’t factor a sudden drop in temperature on your return trip. On one such foray I tried to prevent frostbite in two of my fingers by pouring coffee from my thermos over them. I felt nothing until half an hour later. There is nothing like the burn of thawing flesh.
Just last week I was on a road trip with another sister listening to an audio book about the catastrophic storm of 1888 dubbed The Children’s Blizzard. The story reminded me of those about impoverished and imperiled immigrants who came to the West in the hopes of starting a new life of freedom and prosperity, only to discover the paradise promoted on foreign immigration posters was actually a hard, dry, and remote landscape governed by natural forces beyond their ken. In 1888 those forces, in the shape of an extreme weather front, took many remote families and country schools by surprise. As David Laskin writes in his version of The Children’s Blizzard, “In three minutes, the front subtracted eighteen degrees from the air’s temperature. Then evening gathered in, and temperatures kept dropping in the northwest gale. By morning on Friday, January 13, 1888, more than a hundred children lay dead on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie.”
Of course, blizzard stories abound in Canada, from whence the 1888 cold front generated. I recently heard about a schoolteacher in Lac Pelletier who died, along with three children, making their way to an outhouse during a Spring blizzard. The tragic truth of these events is that very often the teachers were children themselves, often only a year older than their charges. Yet they were forced to make life or death snap decisions. Do we hunker down and burn all the books and desks, hoping the storm passes in time of the wind doesn’t howl down the chimney? Or do we make a break for it, tie the children together with a rope and make a for the nearest farmhouse? The problem was, as any prairie person knows, in blinding snow and dust storms, visibility is nil. One can be within a foot or two of home and pass right by it without knowing it. My father tells a story about being a baby in a carriage caught in a dust storm with his mother as they returned home from a visit with a neighbour living on the next farm. If not for his beloved dog Bruce leading them home, they would have been lost. Or worse.
Whenever I hear these stories of near misses, or being saved by dogs and horses, I feel the urge to pass them on to friends and family younger than I. Here is a reminder that we are not masters of the universe, I say. Despite what Silicon Valley technophiles tell us, despite – and perhaps even because of – a reliance on GPS, wifi, free roaming, heated car seats, etc, creature comforts do not stand a chance against weather. Even when we are safe at home, all it takes is an ice storm, a rogue steer, a high wind, a wild fire, an epic prairie storm to knock out a power grid and with it heat and the electric light.
Last winter we had a few such power outages, prompting me to pull out my camp stove for emergency hot tea. I lit a candle and pulled my quilt around me. I drifted off to sleep with the thought: Weather is at the heart of conversation for a reason. And in the morning, it will be there, like a creature at the foot of my bed, waiting to inform me what it has planned for me today.