Harrowsmith Fall 2019 | 255So, like a good ship captain, I
steered around the storm by keeping
the wind on my right. During the last
Storm of the Century, the year before,
I was confined to the house for three
days. But that had more to do with the
township than the weather. We got a
hard rain followed by a flash freeze.
All the water got trapped between the
snowbanks on our dead-end road and
froze to a depth of two inches—not
quite enough to support the truck.
Our township snowplow guy picked
that week to go ice fishing and his
replacement breezily informed me
that he didn’t “do” ice. That left us
stuck in the farmhouse for three
days until we finally organized a
dinner party and invited one of the
neighbours to bring his backhoe.
My wife loves a good storm. She
sits bolt upright in bed when she
hears that buses are cancelled. She
jumps out of bed, stokes up the fires
and starts to cook. There’s a whiff
of adventure in the air. She believes
other people will be safer at our
house, where she can keep an eye on
them and feed them. By noon, the
house is full of sisters and cousins,
whom she reckons up by dozens.
I once read the letters of a
saddleback preacher who ministered
to the pioneers of this community
in the 1840s. He complained how
difficult it was to give comfort to
his parishioners through the long
winters because he was so depressed
himself he didn’t want to get out
of bed. But that all changed pretty
quickly. By the 1860s, they had built
churches and community halls and
were busy hosting debating societies
and putting on theatricals.
Farmers do not catastrophize
the weather the way the Weather
Channel does. They’re just gloomy
about it. The gloomiest farmer I ever
knew spent some years as a sailor on
the lake freighters in his youth and
that plugged him into an enormous
database of bizarre incantations
that blended with his Celtic heritage
to deliver a rhyming couplet for
all occasions. He was sort of like
Hallmark cards for Druids. He would
step out on the front stoop, pause and
squint at a pale moon, and mutter,
“There’s water in her eye,” which
meant rain when you didn’t want it.
Or he might glance up at the chimney
and declare, “ When smoke descends
fair weather ends.” Sometimes he
would glare at birds in the fields and
say, “Seagulls on the sand,” which I
didn’t learn till years later was one
half of a dark observation about gulls
coming to the land whenever a storm
threatened at sea.
None of these predictions ever
offered happy news. I once asked him
what two rings around the sun meant,
and his dour reply was “Basically
crap weather for the next six months.”
Squeaky chairs, catchy drawers and
sticky salt all worked together to
reinforce his message of doom.
Apparently, these things are
genetic because his grandson grew
up to become a weather forecaster
for the CBC. HTRUE CONFESSIONS FROM THE NINTH CONCESSION