I have made some interesting discoveries regarding my last piece and the rumour about the weather in Victoria never dropping below zero. I wrote to Environment Canada early this week and asked them if there were in fact any years where the temperature stayed above zero degrees for 365 straight. A few days later they returned my email. I was told that there are multiple weather stations in the Victoria area and that every year at least one of them dropped below zero. However there is one weather station, Gonzales Heights, which has had four instances of never dropping below zero. These occurred in the years 1925-26, 1939-40, 1957-58 and 1999-2000. I thought all this was pretty cool for three reasons:
1)This is a fact that I could not just look up on the internet, how often do you bump into a question these days that takes more than two minutes to google up an answer?
2) I have a genuine interest in this sort of thing, I think it’s pretty wild that there is a place in Canada where it never freezes.
3)The fact that I got a response made me feel pretty cool.I have actually received a few emails regarding this question from Environment Canada, they thanked me, said it was a great question, and even did some further research on it. I think these people are really bored.
something sort of about the weather, long term...
Outside of the weather website, I read something on metacritic.com the other day that fits in nicely with thoughts I’ve had about people’s attitudes toward their birth year. This October marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints”. This is a fantastic album and nicely captures the brief flicker of hope that existed throughout the world in 1990. On Rhythm of the Saints, there is a song on the album titled “Born at the Right Time”. Simon sings about how lucky a child is to be born in the year 1990. The lyrics in this song are fantastic:
I see them in the airport lounge
Upon their mother's breast
They follow me with open eyes
Their uninvited guest
Too many people on the bus from the airport
Too many holes in the crust of the earth
The planet groans
Every time it registers another birth
Never been lonely
Never been lied to
Never had to scuffle in fear
Nothing denied to
Born at the instant
Church bells chime
Whole world whispering
Born at the right time
That is just a small sample as I don’t want to bludgeon you with all of it, but there is a sense of hope in these words. The song also recognizes the challenges that face a world with a growing population and increasing pollution. Paul Simon has captured perfectly everything happening in one of the more hopeful periods of humankind. The music from this period, and especially that on Rhythm of the Saints makes me ponder what was the best year to be born.
This question that is entirely a matter of opinion so I don’t want to dive too deep into what the best year was, obviously there is no right answer for that. If nothing else it has been an interesting topic of conversation for me. Personally I would have liked to have been born in the mid 1970s. Prince Rupert would have been economically strong during that time; it wasn’t the rootin’ tootin’ Fort McMurray of the 60s that it once was, but it would have been good enough for me. Besides that there was the music that I could have been around to witness, grunge was taking off right around the time I was old enough to appreciate it. Sports like BMX and skateboarding would have been thrilling underground activities to be taking part in, not the commercial enterprise they are now. In relation to those sports, Mount Hays ski hill was open for business and one of the greatest yearnings of my life has been to experience hopping on the gondola for night skiing on a Friday after school. Besides my birth year fantasy here are a few interesting ones that I have heard from people I have talked to
- my mom wishes that she was born far enough in the past to not feel guilty about using plastic bags from the grocery store when she forgets her cloth ones.
- Most people I have talked to that were born in the 70s, especially here in Newfoundland, say that they’re happy with when they were brought into the world. It makes sense as most of the people I have asked are guys on my basketball team. They are all 30-something engineers that work in the local oil and gas sector and got good jobs at home as soon as they were finished school. Take that Fort McMurray present day.
- My roommate, Dave, wishes that he was the first human ever born so that he could invent all the social norms. The example he gave me was “I could just decide which was the coolest way to be standing around, could you imagine that"? I can’t really.
One thing that unifies basically everyone I talked to is that they would rather have been born in the past. This isn’t very surprising, it is at best mildly upsetting. People love the past, they know it, it’s comfortable, and if it was difficult, it might already have been dealt with. Not like the problems of today.
Every generation has some grim prospect that scares them into thinking that living in the past was the best. The scare factor du-jour is climate change. Paul Simon was writing at a time when the first environmental scares were coming to an end and the world was coming into “overpopulation fear mode”. O.F.M. lasted only about a decade and then we were back to climate fears. I have two musings about this climate fear that has us all wishing we could go back to the safety of the cold war. The first comes from a look at a topographical map of Antarctica. That place has the highest average elevation of any of the continents. When the ice melts and all of us that dwell in low lying areas are drowning, I’ll be setting sail for the brand new ice free paradise of Antarctica 2.0. It will be like the ending of the Lord of the Rings. The next one comes from my earth science prof last year who said “if climate change is a disaster then it is the slowest moving disaster of all time”. She’s right, we have all the time in the world, so please everyone throw your plastic bags around, try not to carpool in the morning, the only thing I yearn for more than night skiing is new continent exploring. Aren’t a lot of albums re-issued after about 20 years? Re-release it with some bonus tracks Paul, I’ve got all sorts of material.