Saturday 1 December 2007

First snow

Well, there was the thaw back in the spring, and now the chucklefest that some people called Vancouver's summer this year has officially come to an end. After weeks of teasing us with several sunny, cold days and a couple nips in the butt by Jack Frost, Mother Nature has finally decided to treat us with a bit of old man winter.

Granted, it's not much. It's just going to be an inch or so, with a couple of flurries throughout. It's nothing compared to the rest of Canada which undoubtedly sees itself greenly envious of the West Coast.

Nevertheless, it's always an event - the first snow. It's the onset of winter as we know it. But my thoughts are this: Last year, we had our first snow sometime in mid-November, followed by a deep freeze that froze the city solid for a week and even saw the death of an elder postal carrier who slipped on the ice and cracked his head on the pavement. Tragic, indeed.

What's equally tragic, however, in my eyes, is the strangeness of having snow before Xmas is even here. When I was just a little fart, growing up in this town, I remember snow coming AFTER the new year, not before. Let alone November.

There's also a few other things that concern me. Namely, the storms that treated Stanley Park like a box of toothpicks, ripping it to shreds a couple of times. That wasn't normal either. In fact, it's rather odd.

Yes, on to the two most overused words in the English language: Global Warming. People say it's one of those things we can't feel, we can't sense, we don't see it coming and therefore we don't do a thing about it. I say that I see snow in my front yard on December 1st, in a city that rarely if ever gets snow before January. I say that Stanley Park was ripped up by some windstorms which I've never seen before in my life. We've even had a new windstorm to start off the new season - a few weeks ago, 110 kph winds in Abbotsford. Tell me, does that not signify something a little bit off in the natural realms?

In other words, it's affecting us. It may not seem to affect us in the way that a war would, but when I can see some very vivid changes in my environment, and those changes very likely a consequence of our human habits, then it makes me a little bit nervous. We humans don't know our own strength.

What makes me even more nervous is this: We humans don't know the strength of Mother Nature. I fear this is just the beginning.

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1 comments:

Idsaili said...

Hi Keith! I'm very happy because you and Fer coming in here!!! I can't wait for that! Kisses... DRI