Beware the Ides of March

What can be said about a day like today, listening to the rain coming down on the skylight, and then looking out the window to see that actually it is snowing. I am bewared, but the forsythia, just starting to open, is surprised, and the crocuses are fallen over in despair.

Take It Away!

The Sunshine Coast is about 50 miles north of Point Roberts but today it seemed a lot further. We awakened this morning to snow, again, but gathered our wits and belongings and set off for Point Roberts now that the first of the month has come. And lo, by the time we crossed the border (a crossing so fast today that we barely had to slow down), there was no snow. There was as much snow down here as there was up there over the past two weeks, but it has been just enough warmer (just above freezing instead of just below) that the snow was all made to go away.

And that seems like a good enough way to start the new year: without snow, without sub-0 C. temperatures, and without a crowd at the International Market, all hoped for harbingers of good times ahead.

The photos are in the ferry terminal parking lot on the Sunshine Coast (Langdale) and from the ferry toward the shore at Langdale. Way too much snow, even for the seagull.

Twelve Days of Christmas

It’s been twelve days now since I’ve left the property, which is two acres (mostly woods, but with the house and one open field), and I haven’t even been much outside because it’s cold and because the snow is pretty deep and I don’t have much in the way of winter boots. In any case, it has been pretty much a white landscape which has an aesthetic appeal with respect to purity and cleanliness, of course, but lacks much in differentiation, at least it lacks much that I am used to looking at and differentiating about. I walked down to see the fishpond, but the fishpond was covered with ice and the ice was covered with snow, and that was that.

The snow remains abundant, even though the temperatures have risen (today, it is 2 degrees C./about 38 F.—I only do rough equivalents from C. to F. or F. to C., but before I came to Canada, I’d couldn’t do anything but 32 F.= 0 C.). The trees boughs have all given their snow up, but the ground is more accommodating. It is of course going to be very wet when this all melts, but unlike Whatcom County, the entire Sunshine Coast is on a fairly steep incline to the ocean, so the water goes away very quickly without flooding us. We live on a part of that steepness: steep road down off the highway and a driveway steeply down from the road. Christmas week is not proving to show much work ethic among the road clearers. They’ve got the highway tidied up, but we are on a road less traveled and, as Robert Frost warned, ‘that has made all the difference.’

Nevertheless, because we were really running out of all the things that we choose to consider necessities (milk, onions, garlic, apples, bananas, fresh vegetables of any kind), we got into the car to see whether it would succeed in the driveway and then succeed again in making a left turn onto the road in order to get us up the two blocks to the highway. The car is a 4-wheel drive Subaru Forester, but it doesn’t have snow tires and we don’t own chains, so it has to do what it can. It could, although it was having a little trouble in the driveway snow if Ed was urging it to take anything but the path of least resistance. Then it didn’t make the turn up the road to the highway. Instead, it wanted to take the turn down the road to the minor highway. The alternative was straight ahead into the big ditch. Down the hill: better choice.

Then, the next problem. This road has maybe 20 houses off it, but the steepest part of the road is at the bottom, and down at this part there are only us and one neighbor house. All the neighbors above us were going up the road, so not much traffic had made it as far down as our driveway. Thus, on the last downhill stretch, which we were on, the snow was still pretty well gathered where it had fallen. We made our way down that 600 yards an inch at a time, the car insisting all the way that there was actually plenty of stuff to slide around in. Then, at the bottom, there was the absolutely cleaned up minor highway. Having achieved that, I returned to breathing, and there we were, speeding to the world.

A few groceries, an audio splitter for the computer in order to use my new Bluetooth headphones in the most flexible way, and a 15-minute entertainment walk around the local Liquidation World, and I was more than ready to get back in the car and go home. Amazing number of people out there at the mall, with as many shopping bags in their hands as I imagine they had in all the days before Christmas. And lots of goods still to buy. Really, way too much to look at. No nice white cleanliness and purity.

Even in just twelve days in forced hibernation, I felt like I’d kind of lost contact with the world as it really is, the world of too much that I both long for when I don’t have access to it and am put off by when I do. I wonder if the bear, now in his hibernation, is dreaming about his ambivalent relationship to the world of human food scraps that he loves to mess with and the sight of the owners of those food scraps, the humans he could happily do without.

Birds in the Hand

We don’t much feed birds in the summer because (a) they can find their own food; and (b) since we come and go, we’d just as soon they not get used to our providing their food; and (c) the bear is perfectly crazy about bird food in the form of seeds, not birds. In the winter, it’s another matter, but only if a lot of snow or very low temperatures are involved. Then we feed them on an emergency basis, figuring they won't get entirely used to the idea that they aren’t going to have to do their own foraging the rest of the time.

This past ten days, now, it has been steady snow and very low temperatures, so it’s bird feeding time. Of course, because we don’t usually feed them, they don’t know to come to our house for food and we don't get very many of them. On the first morning of the snow storm, we put out sunflower seed under the carport, which was protected from snow, but saw nary a bird for at least 48 hours. Then a single song sparrow showed up, although it didn’t exactly look like one: much bigger because his feathers were so puffed up to prevent heat loss. He didn’t mind us watching him from behind the door or even talking to one another (normally, they move away even if they’re not eating the second they’re aware of us). I guess that’s a situation in which concentrating on food seems like a very good idea.

By the fourth day, a second song sparrow had joined in the eatery work and the next day a rufous-sided towhee (perhaps literally) blew in. They all looked so cold and so needy. It made me feel like I ought to at least open the door and invite them into the front hall to stay. But opening the door would indeed cause them to fly away.

Birds eat and eat and eat. And they kept it up. Yesterday, day nine, a second towhee arrived. And today, day 10, all four were here for continued Boxing Day eating. The snow was back, too. We all six of us (counting Ed) spent the day at home, sort of. Food being available here, but no Boxing Day shopping at all.
(The photo is the song sparrow, taken through the window and in very dim light.)

Big House, Little Woods

It snowed ever so quietly all night long, so this morning when we awoke, the world looked much more snowy than the last time I’d checked it. I still can’t get up the driveway even more so, and I don’t have high boots so I passed on a walk to the beach, although maybe tomorrow. The trees were absolutely full, every cedar branch, in particular, fully laden. But then, the slightest movement of air would cause the branch to suddenly release all its burden, which would then fall, as if into an invisible cylinder, slowly sifting down to the ground. It made me feel a little leery about going out because at any minute something considerable might fall on me.

We used to have a cedar shake roof on this log house, but about ten years ago it needed replacing and we were persuaded to change to a metal roof. All in all, we’ve been satisfied with it, but there were two things that we didn’t realize at the time. One was that the local bats slept in that roof, so once the shakes were gone, all the bats needed some other kind of housing. Ed built bat houses around for them out of the cedar shake remnants, but the last one he built didn’t quite get finished because it seemed to me that, as it was, it made a fine outdoor sculptural piece. The first photo above is of the incomplete bat house, which stands on a post about 25 or so feet off the ground, and lacks a front wall. If the wall had gone on it, bats would have roosted there, hanging upside down in their little individual cubbyholes. But it looks good in the snow, even without the bats.

The second thing we didn’t know was what happens to large snowfalls on metal roofs on a two-story house. It is a well-insulated roof, so it just stays pretty much the same temperature as the outside air and the snow on it. And the snow mounds up. So when there’s snow maybe 8 or so inches deep on it, it just sits there until the outer temperature starts to warm up. Then, the snow mass ever so slowly begins to slide down the steep slope of the roof. It projects out over the roof edge until the weight gets to be too much and then, suddenly, it all comes down at once, making a sound like a nearby explosion. The second picture is of that roof snow starting to slide down past the roof edge. About twenty minutes after the picture was taken, a very large amount of snow avalanched down on to the deck, which has glass panels on the front edge. Enough snow comes down, the panels are at risk.

I believe we are expecting snow tomorrow. Or at least I am. The odds would appear to be with me.

Half-Way Through

That is, to next Mid-Summer’s Night, to the Summer Solstice. That’s my idea of Christmas Dreaming. Well the storm roared into Seattle, according to my news sources, but not into the Sunshine Coast. When I quit last night at 11 p.m., it wasn’t snowing and we certainly were not having the promised ‘howling winds.’ This morning around 10 a.m., it did start snowing again and has continued throughout the day, but it is just an ordinary kind of snow storm. Two years ago, we had one like this and the photographic documentation of the 2006 and the 2008 storms are pretty much interchangeable.



The quilt, in between, is of the 2006 storm. No need to repeat making it.

So our power is still on and we can no more get out of the driveway today than we could yesterday. So, I’d say that today is Status Quo.

update: a phone call from a P.R. correspondent brings the news that the Point has about 4 more inches of snow, but has not had terrible wind. Good news, that!