TORONTO—It was reassuring last week when over 300 vehicles, most of them tractor-trailers, became stranded on a stretch of highway in southwestern Ontario.
A snowstorm brought the traffic to a halt. Army helicopters and snowmobiles were dispatched to rescue motorists stranded in their vehicles, many of them overnight or longer. People told tales of how they tried to ration their gasoline, turning the engine on for five minutes each hour to give just enough heat to keep them from freezing.
News anchors covered the crisis from every angle, including the fuzzy tale of one local man who invited trapped motorists to his home for a hot meal.
But for me, the images of tractor-trailers frozen like dinosaurs were comforting. Here at last was proof that even armies of snowplows and oceans of road salt cannot conquer a good ol' blizzard.
Sure, I know that sounds weird. How can the thought of being stuck in your car shivering between moments of heat, hoping the gas lasts the night be anything but disturbing? It’s difficult to explain but it has to do with a point of pride Canadians quietly cling to.
You can see it on the faces of those same news anchors as they talk about living in Montreal or Ottawa and learning the lessons of winter driving. You may even know it yourself if you have battled with a daily deluge of snow trying to overwhelm your driveway. Maybe it is just a guy thing, but no battle is really worth winning if there is no chance you could ever lose.
Winter, however, has been getting weaker in this vast land. We hear tales of Inuit falling through Arctic ice, and polar bears starving when they can’t hunt their favorite prey, seals, because the Arctic Ocean has yet to freeze.
There is something integral to the Canadian identity about facing a winter that can whup you good. It gives us something to complain about in the elevator, uniting total strangers in a universal love of loathing the icy winds and frozen feet.
But there is something more than that, for me at least.
In this day when commerce rules, and the steady drum of traffic is to us what the rambling river was to our ancestors, there is a peace in knowing that this machine that hums day and night can in fact be brought to rest.
For those of us that spend precious hours traversing congested highways, there is something so pleasing about the promise of a snow day to bring the daily grind to a grinding halt.
If you are in too warm a climate to have ever known the childhood joy of waking up only to find the weather has overwhelmed the roads and school had been canceled, I extend to you my humble condolences. There is nothing finer than spending a weekday tobogganing.
And so even though I love my job like I could love no other, there is something that calms the mind in knowing that at some point the weather can win, that I can be forced to stay home and type from there. And if not, I can take that Canadian pride in knowing that though my face has been frozen, my windshield is scraped clean and I have beaten a worthy opponent.
