Saturday, February 11, 2012

It's about time


Finally, the first real day of winter this winter. We were lightly dusted with 10cm of snow last night, and the temperature is around -9C (-17 with the windchill) --- and I love it. Unfortunately, most Canadians aren't like me. As they become more urbanized and, therefore, less connected to the land that formed them, they spend most of their lives trying to deny its existence and, ironically, complaining about it.

Believe me, from the end of summer to the beginning of spring, my fellow countrymen do nothing but whine and bitch about the cold and the snow and the ice and the slush and the grey skies. I try to convince them that if they just accepted winter as a part of who they are as Canadians; that if they just embraced it; that if they didn't view it as a hostile force bent on limiting their lives they would ski through it memorably year after year. But, I'm never successful. They all want this country to be more like Florida.

Yes, when it comes to winter, Canada is a nation of wimps. The CBC documentary Life Below Zero proves this. It discusses Canadians' relationship to winter as compared to that of Russians and Scandanavians. Now they know how to deal with winter.

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