winter maintenance

on living in the (Canadian) cold

Two days ago it was a snow day. I was supposed to have six hours straight of classes, a two-hour midterm I wasn’t ready for, and then ballroom dance practice. I was going to be pressed and stretched in so many directions. I was in bed, dreading it, when Parsa¹ told me it was a snow day, and that all of it was cancelled. I was just whisked out of my life.

“Feels like ‘s no day at all!” I kept saying to myself. No day at all! It’s both good and bad; having nothing to do. I sat in the living room, which was much brighter than it’d been in months, on account of the sunlight bouncing off of the snow outside many times, finding new ways to enter the windows. “Maybe I’ll go outside,” I told my roommates, and then in response, a fierce gust of wind slid a solid sail of snow past the window.

For nine or so months out of the year, it’s easy for someone living in Ontario to forget about the intensity of winter. For nine months, the moments when we are at the mercy of nature are few and far between. And then December rolls around, and ice covers every surface which has been so precisely perfected and regulated. Suddenly, dressing thoughtlessly can bring danger and pain. “Winter maintenance” means scraping out a path for yourself this morning, and the morning after, and the morning after that, all the way until spring.

Maurice Cullen, Ice Harvest

It’s obvious that climate used to have a strong effect on society, when we were all constantly exposed to the elements. Weather affected agriculture which affected nutrition, the division of labour based on sex, family dynamics, and just about everything else.

Nowadays, we spend most of our time indoors, with technology making up for the most severe of our natural (physical) deficiencies, the role of climate in our lives is less obvious. But technology can’t neutralize nature. For Valentine's dinner last night, I sat on a patio which the owners had attempted to winterize with several large heaters and corrugated roofing. My body was toasty, except for my feet, which went numb under my thin leather heels. I left to the bathroom halfway through to rub my paling feet in my hands. The dinner was delicious, the restaurant was beautiful, but winter managed to seep in through the cracks of things.

When I think about the weather, I think about this scene in The Satanic Verses when Gibreel, missing the weather of India, decides to bathe Britain in heat and humidity for all the cultural benefits they might bring:

increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, bayans with handing beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermillion, neon-green), spidermonkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic airconditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc; better cricketers, higher emphasis on ballcontrol among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to “high workrate” having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more British reserve, hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence on dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks’ homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food, the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.

Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires’ disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.

Which makes me wonder what might happen to all the world’s cultures if they were sent into a Canadian winter.

Literary critic Northrop Frye described the “garrison mentality” as the attitude early colonists from Europe developed in opposition to the Canadian wilderness:

…communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting - such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality.

Basically: your house is not just a home. It is a military base from which you wait out an omnipresent threat. You will be able to outlast the threat, but it will come back again, year after year.

I am split on whether or not I’ve handled this well. I’d like to think sharing a harsh winter makes us look out for one another. Maybe that has something to do with trademark Canadian politeness: there is an external inconvenience to commiserate about, an automatic excuse. But I think also that winter can make us more frigid, less comfortable with strangers, unlikely to “drop in” on each other. You need a place to put your coat. We need to know ahead of time what is going to happen when we leave the house. It’s stifling.

But this morning I saw a child in a bright red snowsuit and bulky winter boots. It made me remember that when I was a child, going outside in the winter felt like going into outer space. It was exciting. There were things you could do in the snow you couldn’t do anywhere else. Fall onto the ground painlessly, glide across the ice, build things in the yard that stay up for a week or so. Sometimes snow would get in the space between my mitts and my coat, and make my wrists itch, or my socks would fall down in my boots, but you forced yourself to ignore these things. And the way the school hallways would be wet with dark slush, and balancing yourself on one foot putting on your inside shoes. It would be nice to have a winter like that again.

1. my boyfriend