ONE FOR THE RECORD BOOKS


I don't know where this image in my head originated but I do know that it's been filed in there for a long time.  It's a picture of two old people sitting in rocking chairs reminiscing about some of the stand-out memories they have in their lives.  You know, it would go something like this:


"I recall, back in ought 7 - that was the year old Bessie had a set of triplets and they all lived!  Prize cow, that Bessie was!"


And the other person would reply "Yep, and I remember my one and only bumper crop back in '86.  Had to pile it on the ground.  There was mountains of grain everywhere.  Pity it wasn't worth nothing ..."  But that's another story.


At any rate, you get my drift.  People toward the end of long lives examining the outside-the-box moments during their time under this sun.  I already have a few to keep the conversation lively when I get to my rocking chair, and as of last week, I have one more to add - the blizzard of '17.  It was a doozy.


This winter has already had some significant weather, especially compared to last winter when the only significant fact was that it was such an easy-peasy walk in the park.  Just enough snow to make it look like Mother Nature tried and no major cold snaps of note.  Maybe Mother Nature was saving up, I don't know, but this winter has certainly been a different story. 


The Christmas Day blizzard hit the news bigtime.  It was a big deal, true enough; lots of snow and wind and the forecasters really making a big deal of it.  More than the actual weather hazards, I think it was the timing that had everyone going overboard with the warnings.  Is there a time more associated with people on the road than when everyone is headed to Grandma's for Christmas dinner?  The authorities wanted people to STAY HOME.  The storm certainly warranted those warnings, and with any other winter that would have been the highlight.  And the extreme bitter cold the week after New Years, too.  And that night Saskatchewan pretty much shut down because of wind (we were in Mexico at the time but social media couldn't stop talking about it) - these too, would have made the 2017 headlines on their own.


But, fast forward to March 6th ... after a period of warm melting weather that kind of softened us up for spring, and at a time when one would normally accept as safely past that March Lion we always look out for ... and we were back to blizzard warnings again. 


It's not that we didn't believe the warnings.  A March storm is fairly commonplace.  The first eyebrow-raiser was that they were calling it a blizzard when it wasn't even here yet.  There are certain criteria to meet in order to use the big "B" word and Environment Canada don't use it lightly.  We're usually well into the storm before they admit that's what we have on our hands.  Not this time - 36 hours out and our phones were constantly dinging with Blizzard warning text messages.


It blew in right on time and they tell us we got the amount of snow they predicted (although how they measure when it comes in sideways at 80 kph and piles up in rock-hard banks wherever the trees hold it, I have no idea).  The thing of note is that it went on, and on, and on, and on.  I cannot remember another storm with that kind of constant power, that lasted so long.  There was a graphic on the weather news that listed the 5 longest blizzards going back to 1959; last week's storm was 31 hours long, the next longest was 19.


Another measurement compared our barometric pressure to a typhoon in the Indian Ocean - ours was lower.  We had the worst weather on the planet; the winds were equal to a EF2 tornado.  I ventured out to try for a few pictures and believe me, I've never been out in worse conditions and I wasn't there for long.


And the aftermath is amazing.  Our yard has a tree shelterbelt to the north and west.  Snow blowing across miles of open fields built up into amazing banks around our house and right back through the trees to the road.  Every one of them is concrete hard from the force of the wind.  Our grown son who lives in Australia laments he can't be here to build a snow fort, our grandsons are too young to appreciate to opportunity.  This is likely a once in a lifetime event. 


I've gone out and tied markers to where the branches come out of the snow banks so that we can measure their depth when the snow melts; we are guessing 12 to 14 feet but there is no way to tell at the moment.  I am also going to do a time lapse project when the melt starts to see how long it will take for it all to go away because that's the kind of nerd I am.  I am laying odds on there still being banks out there in May, and possibly even June.  This was one for the record books ... and something to talk about in my rocking chair in the old folks home some day.