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.
Recipe Box: Gazpacho
In my tour through Spain these past almost eleven (!!) months, I haven’t been talking about the food. That’s been rather intentional — there were so many memorable meals I could have written about that it would have taken me off on another tangent altogether.
Those meals were so memorable that I made sure to pick up a couple of cookbooks to take home with me. One is filled with recipes of typical Spanish dishes and the other contains only tapas recipes. (Both are published in English — let’s just make that perfectly clear!) But when it came down to deciding which recipe, of all the Spanish dishes I like to re-create in my own kitchen, to write about here — well, that was a near impossible choice.
In the end, it was last summer’s heat dome that decided it for me. Gazpacho is a life-saver when the temperature hovers near 40ºC and as soon as I saw what was headed our way back in June, I whipped up a batch to sustain me through that crazy week.
Confession: the first time I was served gazpacho I really didn’t see what the big deal was. I was at a small dinner party here in Canada, and the host came out with a large bowl of finely chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers all mixed together. Gazpacho, she called it. And so, many years later when my sister and I were enjoying a round of tapas on our first night in Córdoba, I was taken aback when the gazpacho arrived.
“This is gazpacho?” I said to my sister, pointing to my glass. It was beyond delicious and a world apart from the cold, sad mixture of vegetables I’d been led to believe was gazpacho. But, in case you are confused, gazpacho is not merely a thick version of V8 juice. It’s so much more than that.
My sister laments that she can no longer buy gazpacho by the carton the way she could when she lived in Spain. She now satisfies her craving with this recipe, which she claims is the closest to the gazpacho she had in Spain. And since we were always served gazpacho in a glass in Spain, I serve it that way here in Canada. Yes, it’s soup, but it’s perfectly quaffable.
And it’s the best meal to have when you’re in the middle of a heat dome.
Gazpacho
3 pounds ripe tomatoes, cored and roughly chopped
1 small cucumber, peeled, seeded, and roughly chopped
1 medium green bell pepper, cored and roughly chopped
1 small red onion, minced
2 medium garlic cloves, minced
1 small serrano chili, seeded and minced
kosher salt
several slices day-old baguette
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar*
1. Place in a large bowl two-thirds of the tomatoes and half of the cucumber, bell pepper, and onion. Add the garlic, chili, and 1 1/2 teaspoons of the salt. Combine well and set aside.
2. Toss with 1/2 teaspoon of salt the remaining tomatoes, cucumber, pepper, and onion, and place in a fine mesh strainer over a medium bowl. Set aside for one hour, then transfer to the bowl with the rest of the vegetables.
3. Add the baguette slices to the liquid drained from the vegetables. Soak for one minute, then add the bread and any remaining liquid to the vegetables. Toss well to combine.
4. Transfer half of the mixture to a blender and process several minutes until completely smooth. With the blender running, slowly add 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil. Strain soup through a fine mesh strainer into a large bowl, then repeat with the remaining mixture and olive oil.**
5. Stir in the sherry vinegar and season to taste. Transfer to a pitcher, cover, and refrigerate overnight before serving.***
Notes:
*Use the best sherry vinegar you can find. I’ve learned that a poor-quality vinegar will make your gazpacho pretty much undrinkable.
**Some recipes call for setting aside some of the chopped vegetables to use as a garnish if you like. I don’t like, so never do.
***The flavours need time to blend, so don’t skimp on the waiting time. Several hours is the minimum.
Elizabeth Lake
Who of us knew walking would become a thing when this pandemic first hit? Not me. Such a simple act, which has been my balm in Gilead these past nineteen months.
And yet, who of us by this time are not bored to tears with their neighbourhood, having explored every corner of it?
Even me — and I live next door to one of Canada’s most spectacular urban parks.
And so, on this Thanksgiving I am grateful that the stars have aligned and I have a (temporary) change of scenery. I’m in Central Alberta for some weeks, which at the moment is stunning in all its fall glory. There are lots of trails and walks to discover, too. Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon walking around Elizabeth Lake, in the centre of Lacombe.
Here’s some of what I saw.
Córdoba
If you draw a triangle on a map of Andalucía with Seville at one corner and Granada at another, Córdoba is at its apex. As my final stop, this city truly felt like a culmination of my week in Andalucía.
Just as I had in Granada and Seville, I arrived in Córdoba after dark. The bonus about late arrivals are scenes like this.
That’s the Mezquita, which I have posted about before. Here’s a look inside.
The Mezquita is a cathedral built inside a mosque built on top of a church. Its bell tower encompasses the mosque’s minaret.
Orange trees are ubiquitous throughout Andalucía. (There are 25,000 trees in Seville alone.) This is in the Courtyard of the Orange Trees, which is part of the Mezquita.
Not far from the Mezquita is the Jewish Quarter.
This small synagogue is no longer used for worship, but it is open to the public. Its walls are done in the Mudéjar style. That’s the women’s gallery up above.
Córdoba’s Jewish Quarter is filled with narrow streets like this one. I’ve written a lot about the Moorish influence on Spain, but it should also be noted that Spain’s Jewish community used to be one of the largest in Western Europe.
My first day in Córdoba was wet and dreary, but the next day dawned cold and clear with spectacular blue skies, unlike any I’d yet seen in Andalucía.
It was the perfect finish to my 48 hours in Córdoba, and to my exploration of Andalucía.
Seville
As I am making my way around Spain through these blog posts, I’ve come to the realization that I’m nowhere near finished with this country. There’s still so much for me to see and, also, so many places I want to revisit.
Like Seville.
After 48 hours in Granada, I moved on to the capital of Anadalucía. I didn’t have near enough time in Seville either, but I was able to thoroughly explore two of its main sights: the Cathedral and the Alcázar.
Catedral de Santa María de la Sede (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See) is the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, and second-largest church in all Europe — only St. Peter’s in Rome is bigger.
It’s built on the former site of a mosque, but the only part of it that predates the Reconquista is the Giraldo. Built in the twelfth century, it was the minaret of the mosque and is now the Cathedral’s bell tower.
If you climb up to the top, the view of the Cathedral from on high gives you a sense of its immense size.
Seville’s Alcázar is where the Catholic Monarchs oversaw Spain’s explorations of the Americas, and where Christopher Columbus reported back to after his travels. (He is buried in the Cathedral.) The main difference between this royal palace and the Alhambra is that the Alhambra was built by the Moors for their use, whereas the Alcázar was built in the Moorish style for Christian rulers — the architectural style known as Mudejar.
Like the Alhambra, the Alcázar has some splendid gardens.
Which obviously require a lot of work to maintain.
As Spain’s fourth-largest city, Seville has a very different feel from the other Spanish cities I’ve written about so far. Its size, for one.
And some modern touches, for another.
All too soon, another 48 hours had flown by and it was time, once again, for me to move on. Adiós, Seville. Until next time.
There and Back Again 