Culture & Climate

Snow. Lots of it. This afternoon, during the storm, we shovelled our roof than jumped off into the piles below. My brother-in-law visiting from France and his kids joined in. Except for the children's shouts as they jumped, the neighbourhood was quiet (and even the shouts were muffled by the snow). No cars were out and about. It was a Canadian day.

If no work has been done to look at the relationship of culture and climate, it ought to happen and Canada would be a great field site. Snow and winter are as much metaphor as meteorological phenomenon. What do snowstorms do to us? We get clobbered, slammed, buried. The cold creeps in and stays, uninvited. The tires spin, cars slide into ditches, the woodsmoke rises to make the house a home. Canadians share this--Whistler to Winterpeg to the waters off Newfoundland. It is a kind of community only the cold can build. A car in the ditch is everybody's car. The home without power has invitations to come over. When it's twenty below and the snow's gathering, everyone's potential family...

When I had work to do in Phoenix this past August, the temperature was 113 F when I stepped off the plane. Of all the world's cities with a population greater than a million, Phoenix is the hottest, hotter than Cairo, than Mexico City, than Calcutta. I asked the people I was working with what's crazier, spending winter in Canada or summer in Phoenix? They replied, winter in Canada--after all, you don't have to shovel sunshine. Exactly, you don't and you can't. There's nothing that needs doing when its 113 F other than finding an air conditioned space perhaps. Winter though? Winter requires a mess of doing.

And all that doing is most easily accomplished if you work together. What do we do in the cold? We huddle together...(both literally in the hundred miles closest to the U.S. border and symbolically whenever the evening weather report shows another arctic air mass blanketing the country.) Perhaps it's no wonder many of the northern countries are socialist in their political leanings--we know individualism is nothing more than fool's gold when the mercury drops.