It was really quiet at the Citizen on Monday and Tuesday as most people took a few snow days.
That’s one of the drawbacks of being in the news business: often when other people get time off for unusual happenings, that’s when you have to be at work more than ever. Like during the windstorm, people want to keep abreast of what’s going on out there, but they don’t want to, or can’t, get out to see for themselves. Enter the news crew. So no snow days for me, though I did get a lift in to work with someone who had a taller vehicle than I do, which was in no danger of bottoming out on even the most snowed-in road.
Actually, it can be a bit fun, venturing out when most people are tucked in at home. We news types have to have some adventure-seeking in our personalities. But I haven’t seen this much snow since I lived in Nova Scotia.
What early this week put me in mind of was the time when I was living in Yarmouth and we had a blizzard. More than 90 centimetres of snow fell in one day, and the howling winds cut visibility to near zero. Snow drifted up to the point that people were literally stuck in their houses, barricaded behind mountains of the white stuff. Walking was a particular challenge, because the snow was up to my waist. I’d never before felt like I could actually get stuck — as in, have to be rescued because I was unable to move — while walking before.
At that time I lived a couple of blocks from the newspaper office, so I clamboured out and trekked in to work down the centre of the main street. Like it mostly was this week, everything was closed up and dead. One of the only signs of life I saw was the snow plow trying to keep up with the falling precipitation. As I was walking down the centre of the main street (the only clear-ish path available) the plow loomed up out of the snow, ghostly. I couldn’t even hear it coming over the howl of the wind.
We called that storm “White Juan”, as it followed Hurricane Juan that had hit Nova Scotia (though missed Yarmouth) earlier that same year.
While the series of snowstorms we had this week still did not come close to equalling that experience, they were something for the record books here on Vancouver Island where 10 centimetres of snow is usually considered enough for a snow day and has the kids out building snow men.
I think we’ll still be talking about February 2019 for many years to come, as I still remember White Juan, and many here still tell tales of the 1996 blizzard.