Barrel Strength

Why do we live in Canada? Canada is Huron for “post-glacial scrape”. It is cold three-quarters of the time. If your woodpile is gone by the end of March, you still have all of April and a good deal of May left in which to heat your house. Yes I know that the thaw begins in earnest most years in early April. This year it began in mid-March. Whoopee-doo! It is so close to an ice age here,  every month of the year except June, July, August, and September, and even in September you have the stove on some nights to keep the cabin warm.

I sat outside tonight smoking a cigar, which I recommend as a contemplative activity, seated on my deck, in the lee of my cabin.  I watched pine trees sway 15 degrees off-centre in a relentless ongoing blast of cold wind. The temperature, which had attained a freakish 30 degrees centigrade last weekend,  seven days ago (not seen since 1966), was officially 8 degrees tonight. I sat outside in a thick sweater, a windbreaker over it, with a toque (wool hat to Yanks) and gloves, wondering how any creature could live tonight. Every bird must be huddled in the woods, and any mammal must be in a burrow or a barn.

I once hear a Sudanese taxi driver describe what it was like to go home. Everyone slept outdoors on cots in the hot season (11 months of the year, I suppose), so that everyone was rather like in summer camp: the night was filled with the sound of people chatting amiably into the late hours. The night was a social and hospitable time.  Nor does the house in a hot climate  function  as it does in Canada. Here, one’s house is a heat conservation device. There, one’s house is a place to store property, or fend of an attack.  The kitchen is separated so that the house does not absorb the heat of cooking. Too hot inside? Take your bed out into the starry night, where everyone else is out on their cots  talking in low voices.

As the wind blasted outside tonight, I thought of the Dominican Republic, where we were a month ago.  There, you stick a cut wooden pole into the ground, and half the time it sprouts roots and turns into a tree.  And our trees! The weather invited them to sprout leaves last week, as if this place were the Dominican Republic. But the trees were too wise. They are programmed not to be deceived by warmth coming too early on the season, possibly because they work according to the warmth of the earth, not the sun.

And colour! Here every colour is found on a camouflage suit: grey-brown, grey, dark green, reddish-brown, and maybe black.  The northern eye longs for the yellows, blues, oranges and reds of flowers, and gets them for four months a year.

It seems I am always cutting wood, splitting, stacking and drying it for two years, so that when it meets its destiny in a cast-iron stove , it will burn well. So that, when I come in from the cold, I feel the palpable warmth of the cabin, and know that, though I live in an oven for three-quarters of the year, it is a safe place, where we can comfortably endure the dreadful climate we live in. Where the glass of wine is on the table, and great music on the horn.

I know this is no more than the adapted northen mind speaking, but life in the Canadian house-oven is quite comfortable. It has to be so. Everyplace else in post-glacial scrape is miserable. If you don’t believe me, just stand outside tonight in the wind.