Through My Lens: Clouds on the Horizon
Welp. I have to say: not too impressed so far with Season 3 of 2020.
Canada has had a rough few weeks. I’m not going to offer a rant about how we got here or a sermon about where we need to go. Rather, I’ll just say that my way of coping has been to focus on my own self-care, which I think I’ve gotten pretty good at over the past two years. That means connecting with friends, cooking my favourite comfort foods, and taking some long walks to look for signs of spring.
Above is the view I had a few evenings ago, which, given the current state of affairs in our nation’s capital, struck me as rather allegorical.
I just hope the clouds are not an omen.
Bohemian Waxwing
One of the perks of my house-sitting stint in Alberta last fall was a backyard bird feeder that attracted all kinds of birds — most of which were new to me. Some species, like this Bohemian Waxwing, were much more interested in the mountain ash berries.
Through My Lens: Palm Trees on a Snowy Beach
When feeling particularly smug (which, truth be told, can be far too often), residents of BC’s Lower Mainland like to call where we live “The Tropics of Canada.”
Which is pretty funny.
I took this photo after last month’s snowstorm.
BC’s Wacky Winter Weather
Yeah, that.
That is a wayward barge that was pushed onto the beach during last November’s atmospheric river — the storm that caused so many problems in our province. An atmospheric river is a band of heavy moisture up to several thousand kilometres long, but just a few hundred kilometres wide, that develops over tropical ocean areas before moving north and inland. (I’ve now added the term to my meteorological lexicon, along with heat dome.)
The atmospheric river that ran over southern BC last November dumped about a month’s worth of rain on the region in just 48 hours. Along with all that moisture came some strong winds, which is how this barge ended up on Sunset Beach in English Bay. It has its own Twitter account and is a constant reminder that not all is well, climatically speaking, in my home province.
(C’mon. You didn’t think I’d let a winter go by without talking about the weather, did you?)
That storm, the first of four atmospheric rivers to hit southern BC in one month, knocked out an unprecedented amount of BC’s infrastructure.
For starters, the Nooksack River in Washington State overflowed its banks and then flowed downhill into Canada, completely flooding the Sumas Prairie in the Fraser Valley for an entire month. Located about an hour east of Vancouver, the Sumas Prairie is on the other side of the mountain in this photo, but you get the idea from the photo of the geography involved.
The first time I drove through the Fraser Valley was as a teenager when my family moved from Alberta to BC. After so many hours of driving through endless mountain passes, I could not believe how absolutely horizontal the landscape was.
“And they say the prairies are flat,” I remember thinking.
But that’s a river delta for you, and its rich soil is why the Fraser Valley is home to more than half of BC’s dairy and poultry production. Close to a million animals died during the floods, and thousands of acres of blueberry plants were also ruined. We’ll be feeling the effects of this flood for years to come as the farmers work to bring their fields and farms back into production.
Two other communities, Merritt and Princeton, were also flooded. To give you an idea of the scale involved, the area of BC under flood watch last November was equivalent to the size of Belgium.
Then, in addition to the floods, a series of mudslides and washouts extensively damaged all the railways and highways connecting Vancouver to the BC Interior and the rest of Canada. Five people died, and 275 people spent two days trapped between mudslides on one major highway until they were evacuated by helicopter.
With our transportation network knocked out, nothing from Canada’s largest port could get to the rest of the country and no shipments for export could get to the Port of Vancouver (including grain shipments at a most critical time of year).
The pipeline that brings fuel to the Lower Mainland was initially shut down as a precautionary measure but then remained shut for three weeks, which led to gas rationing in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island. Fuel was brought in from the US by barge.
Talk about supply chain issues.
It was three weeks before the trains started running again. The largest and busiest highway in BC, the Coquihalla, reopened to commercial traffic only on December 20 and to all traffic last week. That it reopened as quickly as it did is quite the engineering feat: more than 130 kilometres of the highway in 20 different sections were extensively damaged, including five collapsed or heavily damaged bridges. It’s not business as usual — the highway will remain an active construction zone for the foreseeable future as all of the repairs are temporary.
There is scarcely nothing left of Highway 8 between Merritt and Spences Bridge where the Nicola River changed course and took the road out with it. The Trans-Canada Highway through the Fraser Canyon reopened only this week. Just to give you a bit of an idea of what the engineers working on the repairs are faced with, this is what parts of the Fraser Canyon look like.
I missed out on all those atmospheric rivers while I was in Alberta. And although I also missed out on Vancouver’s first white Christmas in thirteen years, I did get back home in time for another spectacular dump of snow.
Which was … stunning.
But then, just over a week later, a king tide and wind storm pummelled the city and our world-famous Stanley Park seawall.
Some of the damage was caused by logs set free by the November floods that came down the Fraser River and have been in the water since.
Why am I writing all this? Well, last year was pretty tough on all of us, but, to be honest, I don’t have much hope that this year will be any easier. If it’s not the pandemic, it’s drought and wildfires. And if it’s not drought and wildfires, it’s flooding and mudslides. We call these events natural disasters, but there is nothing natural about once-in-a-century storms happening every year. Atmospheric rivers are not new to BC, and they aren’t all bad. (They play an important role in maintaining BC’s water supply.) But they are increasing in intensity and frequency, so much so that oceanographers are coming up with a rating system for them, like the ones used for tornadoes and hurricanes, to help us better understand their risks.
What I find most sobering is the realization that BC has climate refugees. Months later, people who had to evacuate because of the wildfires or the floods are still out of their homes. Many will never go back to their communities.
It’s a lot to take in about the place where you live.
One last note: Barge Chilling Beach is a bit of an inside joke for those of us who live in Vancouver. Google “Dude Chilling Park” if you want to know more. The sign is temporary and has since been taken down.
Merry Christmas!
Fish Creek Provincial Park, Calgary, Alberta
Through My Lens: Prairie Slough
Here’s a landscape I never get to see in Vancouver: the wide open prairie with its big, big sky. I took this photo about a month ago, well before the first snowfall.
Through My Lens: Alberta Poplars
One of the cool things about my time here in Alberta are the variety of trees — so unlike any of the ones growing in Vancouver’s rainforests — that I get to photograph.
These, I’m told, are poplars.
Through My Lens: Madrid Street Corner
I started writing about Spain way back in January, as a way of distracting me from the Long Winter (aka the second wave). And it worked, for the most part. But I never could have guessed I’d still be writing these posts near the end of 2021. (Or that we’d be in the middle of a fourth wave.)
What can I say? Pandemic brain is real.
But yes, all things must come to an end, even my reminiscing about Spain, and so I’m going to finish off the series with this photo of a street corner in Madrid. It’s appropriate as a metaphor, I’m thinking, because in many ways we are at a crossroads as we look ahead to our second pandemic winter and all the uncertainty that comes with it.
Spain is all about the number three for me. I’ve visited it three times, and on two of those trips I visited three cities each. I’ve spent three days in Barcelona and I’ve been to Madrid three times. All of that was a happy accident, but I’m glad my trips to Spain covered such different regions: Catalonia, Castille, and Andalucía. We Canadians tend to think of European countries as tiny and uniform, but they’re not. The culture and geography between regions are often as varied as different parts of Canada.
On my last ever night in Spain, I was wandering aimlessly through the centre of Madrid. It was a chilly night near the end of November and the streets were teeming with people. I never did figure out what the crowds were about, but it made for a festive evening. I had that sad melancholic feeling I often have on the last night of a trip, and I was delaying my return to my hotel.
Then, softly, gently, it started to snow. And I knew it was time to go home.
Armchair Traveller: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep’s wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world. … At the end of the road I looked back again and saw the gold light die behind her; then I turned the corner, passed the village school, and closed that part of my life forever.
Laurie Lee’s memoir about his walk across Spain just prior to the start of the Spanish Civil War is a classic. If you are looking to read some quality travel writing about Spain, this is the book for you. I was a recent university grad when I first picked it up, the title catching my eye because I had a strong urge that summer to go on walkabout.
Exploring the world the way Laurie Lee did rarely takes place anymore, and reminds us all that whatever inconveniences we might experience on our travels are a cakewalk in comparison to his trek across Spain. Find the weather a tad uncomfortable? Laurie Lee endured heat stroke. Don’t like the food? Laurie Lee subsisted for days at a time on wild grapes and figs. Think travel is too expensive? Laurie Lee paid his way by playing his fiddle for pennies.
Don’t like going through multiple security checks? After a year in Spain, Laurie Lee finds himself in the middle of a war and has to leave the country, with just an hour’s notice, on a British destroyer sent out from Gibraltar to pick up stranded British citizens.
Laurie Lee didn’t gloss over the poverty he witnessed and described the people he met in a non-judgmental way that is refreshing. But as the months and the miles go by, with the rumours of war increasing, you know it’s a walk that might not end well.
At the end of the summer I first read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, I did the sensible thing and found myself a job. But the job didn’t stick and within the year, I had bought myself a rusty, years-old Honda Civic, packed it up with everything I owned, and drove across the country to start a new life.
And as I said goodbye to my mother, it was the first and only time upon leaving home that she cried.
There and Back Again 