Something that depends on the weather

Bottomless Lake in Fundy National Park, NB

There are a lot of stereotypes about Canadians that exist that are not necessarily true, like that we are all lumberjacks, it is winter all year round, we live in igloos, and that we smother everything in maple syrup.  (I admit in regards to the last one I am a bad Canadian - I have a hard time even liking the stuff. *ducks the Canadian equivalent of rotten tomatoes*)   If there is one stereotype that holds true though it is that Canadians love to talk about the weather.  I heard on the radio a couple years ago that Canadians have the most weather networks on television compared to any other country in the world.  To be fair though, if Canadians are a little over-obsessed with the weather it is because we have a whole darn lot of it.  When a country's landmass is the 2nd biggest in the world and borders three different oceans, there is bound to be a bit of a variable in our meteorological forecast from place to place.


Canadians not only have a different perspective on the weather, we also have different seasons.  When I lived in Calgary, someone summarized the different seasons quite aptly: "in Canada there are only two seasons.  Winter, and construction."  *bum, bum, bum, ding*  ... ... ...  Okay, the joke might lack a bit of ooompf when I type it out, BUT travel across Canada and you'll realize how true those words are.  In Halifax every other street in the downtown had to divert the traffic to do road maintenance. In Montreal there were almost as many skyscraper construction apparatuses that I don't know the name of as there were skyscrapers.  In Ottawa I was awoken from my sweet sleep every morning at 8am to the sound of exploding dynamite from the construction site next door!  I live in BC and every time I want to do a roadtrip during the summer months, I have to allot time to be stopped in the middle of nowhere so highways can be expanded and maintained.  Construction is such a big deal in Canada from March to October that it might as well have its own season!

In all seriousness though, seasons do differ quite a bit from one end of the country to the other.  For instance let us consider the season of autumn (a word that I much prefer to the synonymous "fall").  Autumn in my hometown in central BC will last 1-2 months - what I would say is the national average.  In contrast, autumn in Calgary typically lasts 2 weeks: one moment the leaves are yellow and then before you can blink they are off the trees!  On the far opposite end of the spectrum, coastal BC will still be experiencing what the rest of the country considers autumn weather in the middle of January.  Lucky bastards.  Speaking of winter, just last year those of us living in ski resort towns in British Columbia watched the television in downright envy as those on the eastern side of the country got all of our snow. If Canada was a little shorter across the middle I'm sure we would have gone over with our bobcats and shovels to borrow a few buckets of the white fluffy powder! Temperature has no consistency either. When I moved back to British Columbia after living in Calgary for 7 years I almost laughed aloud when I heard people complaining about the -15 degrees Celsius weather we had for a couple of weeks.  In Calgary that was average.  Likewise I also had to hold the giggles back when I visited the land of eternal temperate temperatures - Vancouver - in May one year and heard everyone comment at how hot it was at 21 degrees Celsius!  Again, for perspective, this past summer my hometown had a few days where it was officially the hottest place on the planet at 43 degrees Celsius. 

Anyways, if there is a point I have to make it is that weather in Canada has no consistency, thus it neutrally makes for one of the most dynamic topics of conversation.  Likewise, an experience of the weather is one thing that all Canadians have in common, despite our geographical differences, so the topic binds us together and unites us as a people.

This conversation also allows me to illustrate my disappointment, frustration and resignation that although I travelled to Eastern Canada to experience the splendour of their fall colours, which were due to arrive near the end of September, the weather did not cooperate.  The summer months had the resilience of an energizer bunny, effectively causing autumn to be a full month late!!!! Grrrrrrr.....

The National Art Gallery in Ottawa

Alas, I'm afraid my pictures of an Eastern Canadian autumn are few and far between.

*sad face, cue violin music*

Something about the Canadian dream

"There is no Canadian dream." I read this statement yesterday in an article quoting Ben Carson as he praised American exceptionalism in his bid for Republican presidential nomination in the States.  I almost snorted out loud in the coffee shop where I was perusing my facebook page.  What ignorance!  Anyone who makes that sort of statement obviously does not know Canadians very well.  This sort of person makes the assumption that Canadians prefer mediocrity, when the fact is the Canadians just happen to value modesty as much as we also value our own awesomeness.  Canadians have a lot of pride and a lot of aspirations - we just don't talk about or flaunt them as the Americans do.  There is a Canadian dream, but it is not something advertised or blown out of proportion.  It is something lived and something that is an innate part of us.  Anyone who spends any time living with Canadians will begin to get the sense of how this dream permeates our society.

In fact, recently in a write-up for a women's conference that was discussing the different experiences a woman faces through the decades of her life, I took a moment to ponder the Canadian dream:

"When I was a teenager I put a lot of thought into my 20s. To me they were golden years of opportunity where I would be able to figure out the mysteries of life, the universe and everything. I would decide what I wanted to do as a career, get a college or university education then use that as the foundation to launch the rest of my life. I figured I would get into a serious relationship around the age of 21, maybe get married at 23 or 25. I would graduate from university in my early 20s, be set for life and start raising a family. It was the typical all-Canadian dream."

The thing that stands out for me in my summary of what the typical all-Canadian dream looks like, is that it focuses on education, on family and on finding a productive and meaningful place in society.  These focuses differ some from the American dream, and these differences become apparent when one starts to compare prevalent political ideologies between the two nations.  Proud socialists, Canadians value education - which is why we promote and fund our public schools and Colleges better than the States. We value family which is why we have universal health care, subsidies for parents with children, and paid maternity leave.  We value finding a productive and meaningful place in society, which is why topics like environment & climate change, science, and social justice have been such huge themes in our recent elections.  American politics, and consequently the American dream, focuses more on capitalism - the opportunity to gain wealth through free enterprise.  Canadians value this too, but possessions and financial success are often mere by-products of our larger dream.  And this approach has worked for us, as this article from 2014 bluntly states.

So, Mr. Carson, I am afraid you are dearly wrong.  Canadians have a dream.  It is a wonderful dream and it is a modest dream. It is a dynamic dream that we are not afraid to shape our society around.

Something to be remembered

Once when I was in my early 20s and my sister was still in her early teens she came to visit me in Calgary.  I had all sorts of exciting shenanigans planned for her visit, but knowing we couldn't possibly fit them all in I decided to give her the opportunity to choose an activity from among them.

"So, what would you rather do this weekend - ," I asked, "go to the museum or zoo?" Yeah, my shenanigans were that exciting. I had a secret wager with myself that she was going to pick the zoo, after all - cute, cuddly animals that you don't have the opportunity to see every day - how could you not?  In truth I really wanted to go to the museum but I seriously doubted how a feature exhibit on the building the trans-Pacific railway could possibly stimulate a 14 year old brain.  My sister surprised me though when she picked the museum, almost without a second thought.  Oh yeah, I remembered, we are sisters.  Strange things like preferring museums to zoos must run in the family.

When I was travelling in Eastern Canada I had the opportunity to visit my fair share of museums. In fact, at one point in Montreal I reached a point of museum overload when we visited the Place de Calliere, Planetarium, Biodome, Musee de Marguerite Bouregoys, Centre d'Histoire de Montreal, Bank of Montreal money museum, Chateau Ramezay and a few other places I have already forgotten all in the matter of a couple days!  My journal entry from October 1st reads, "Yesterday: too many museums."  That's it.  That's all the energy I had to write!  My brain was so fried that by the time we got to the Musee des Hospitaliares I was doing that thing where you read a sentence, get halfway through and realize you don't have any clue what it is saying so you start reading from the beginning again only to get 1/2 a dozen words in before you realize you can't even recall what they were, so you start again and the vicious cycle repeats itself.  I ended up giving up at that point.  Apparently there can be too much of a good thing.  The good news is: I recovered.  By Ottawa I was prepared to visit museums again, only no more than one a day this time.

The thing about going to so many museums is that you begin to see how they have a tendency to be all the same.  Take First Nations exhibits, for example.  By the end of my trip I was getting seriously annoyed with them.  I voice my frustrations in my journal:

"Canadians seem to think that this is our history, but the truth is that it is us trying to record the vestiges of a dying culture because our ancestors nearly stamped them out of existence.  How many museums have I entered that have told me what the First Nations did, what they wore, how they survived, but have never told me who they were? There is almost never a story of a person, of a soul that represents the soul of his or her people, and that is the real tragedy of these museum exhibits.  History remains a white man thing - with the remnants of the civilizations we have conquered displayed in our halls."

There were exhibits, however, that offered a fresh perspective that I really appreciated.  In the Canadian Museum of History I went through an exhibit entitled "1867: Rebellion and Confederation."  This exhibit told the story of the context surrounding Canada's confederation, about how the American revolution to the south had pushed up the British loyalists who had a superiority complex over the French Acadians and the only reason these two cultures completely at odds with each other came together was because they were worried about being annexed by the States. I found it extraordinarily amusing that the origin of Canadian identity was in the desire to NOT be American.  Despite our close ties to the US today, this one fact remains a pivotal expression of Canadian identity.

What I really pulled away from the 1867 exhibit, however, was the fact that when Canada became a nation, it was in fact not a nation.  People in Canada still thought about themselves as British subjects.  They still carried British Passports.  It wasn't until World War I, as I learned later at the Canadian War Museum, that Canada was recognized on an international stage as its own unique country.  It was because of World War I that Canadians decided to take over their own international affairs, that we began to take pride in saying that we were Canadian and began to seek out symbols of our cultural identity. 

A few days ago we celebrated November 11th, Remembrance Day here in Canada.  That day I had the opportunity to help my church serve coffee and hot chocolate to the hundreds of people who came to participate in the ceremonial process of remembrance and I did not hesitate to take a few pictures.  War is a tragedy.  It has a huge toll in the cost of life that it demands.  And yet, I feel so grateful for those soldiers and people who have represented Canada in war.  At the museums I visited on my trip I learned that the adversity of war is what helped birth our national identity.  We are not a warlike people; we have not sought conflict as the Americans have throughout their revolutionary history.  But it is through the fires of war that we have discovered who we are and what we believe in as a nation.  It is because of the sacrifices of these people that we can have pride in being Canadian.

For that, soldiers and veterans, I thank you.

Something trippy

Field trips. What do those two words bring to mind for you?  I think of gold mines, railway museums, and now-abandoned towns full of people pretending that they lived 100 years ago and had just started making a new life on an untamed land. 

Field trips are the educators attempts to remove children from the plain boring history of rote and plunk them down in a setting where the past comes alive for them.  At least that is their hope - that the children will be able to engage with the physical environment in such a way that they realize that the events of the past actually mattered.  Warning: there is more to the world than whatever it passing through your twitter feed right now.

The thing was, I grew up in a place that did not have much history to boast of.  Growing up, my field trips consisted of the incredible unexciting opportunity to go on smelter tours! Woo-hoo.  How many ways can you melt rock?  Or mines: how many ways can you hit a rock?  Or settling a village on the edge of the Rocky Mountains: how long will it take you to grow a garden in a field full of rocks?  Don't mistake my words - I love rocks!  But, there has got to be more to life and history and Canada than rocks.

The first day I arrived in Halifax I immediately became aware of a fundamental shift in the nearness and realness of history.  Instead of a railway museum I walk into a Via Rail station where people can still take the train as a passenger across Canada.  I take a tour of a church where a piece of shrapnel is buried in the wall from an explosion that tore the city apart 100 years ago in the middle of the first World War.  I walk into an old garrison on citadel hill where people dressed up as soldiers tell me how in this place they built this fort to be an impregnable defense for the city against invasion 200 years ago.  I might have had a friend who stuck his head into a cannon from the 1850's. He had the same deprived childhood I had so all this history was very new and exciting. 

Very exciting indeed.

Canada is not a country with much history, but the history we do have is irrevocably rooted to place.  And the places where we Canadians live will ultimately determine the history we know and experience.  It is the places we live that shape who we are, and I don't think one can have a conversation about Canadian spirituality without having a conversation about place and its central importance to our national and personal identities.  The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote "Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are."  That seems like something worth pondering.

Something Canadian

Exactly how big is Canada?  I can't even find the number online to tell me how much it would be from Atlantic to Pacific if someone were to draw a straight line across it! Suffice to say that it is big - 9.85 million square kilometers big.

That sort of abstract number is a bit difficult to wrap one's head around.  Recently I had the chance to travel to the east side of Canada and one day I had a conversation with a foreign visitor where I ruminated on the possibility of driving back to my home in British Columbia. 

"Oh yeah, how many hours will that take?" He asked.

I almost laughed at him. I stopped myself in time. That would not have been very nice of me. But the very fact that he was trying to estimate the journey in hours instead of days proved to me just how naïve he was about the size of Canada.

"Um, it would take three days," I try to break it to him softly  "if I drove almost around the clock." The look of shock on his face was priceless.  I admit I was experiencing that slightly sadistic inner sense of glee that most Canadians get when we get to blow people's expectations out of the water with how awesome Canada is.

 

The discussion of distance came up several times on my journey with the various tourists from other countries.  One girl from Belgium was simply amazed that it took me 4 hours from my hometown to get to the biggest Canadian city nearby (Kelowna BC , which even isn't that big).  It takes less than four hours for her to travel from one end of her country to the other. 

So many of the tourists complained about how expensive it is to travel across Canada.  Yeah it is, I tried to explain it to them, that's what you get when your country is so big and things are so spread out.  It is part of being Canadian.  The sad thing, however, about that fact is that the stereotype that Canadians don't travel to visit their own country is true.  I met more Germans at the places I stayed, than I met Canadians.  In my conversations I found more Australians that had travelled from Pacific to Atlantic Canada than I met Canadians who had accomplished the same feat. 

And yet, despite this divide from east to west of this very, very big country, everywhere I went in Canada felt like home.  Even in the fifth biggest city in North America, Toronto, I found Canadians who were pleasant and polite, bucking the expectation of  self-absorbed and rude big-city-folk that I secretly had (I suppose that wasn't very nice of me).  And even though the landscape was incredibly diverse, everywhere in Canada still had a picturesque beauty to it that I think sings to the souls of Canadians, shaping who we are.

Over the next while I'm going to spend a bit more time blogging about my journey and experiences, and the thoughts I had along the way.  I always figured that if I did a Master's Thesis or PhD it would be on the essence of Canadian Spirituality, which I am fully aware is a currently undefined and esoteric notion.  But having travelled across this country I am convinced now more than ever that it is a thing.  Somehow, Canadians are Canadians and there is something spiritual there that is binding us together, despite the enormous distance it may take to cross this land from sea to sea.