Winter Storms In With Little Cat Feet

Hi everyone! I'm in Vancouver and it rains a lot here but it's cool because the dampness combined with the cleanliness makes my hair look super fantastic.

It rains, yes, that we all expect. What we don't expect is insane winter storm with hurricane-force winds that smash into the land and topple water-logged trees so that they crush things. More on that later.

I got into Vancity in a turbulent night flight. Call me a sadist (and the petrified woman next to me would have) but the bumpiness of the flight was nice for sleeping. Like an infant who stops crying in a moving car or next to a running vacuum, the white noise, or I guess white movement, of bumpity bump bump lulled me into a surprisingly satisfying sleep. Which was good, because I landed around midnight and headed up to Whistler the next day with nary a sleep-in to be seen. Miss Doretta Lau, lately of Burnaby by way of New York accompanied as did Sarah, my brother's girlfriend. It was a good car ride. We ate McDonald's in Squamish. Nobody barfed (my childhood carsickness made the Whistler drive torture, although it paid dividends on one occasion when my brother found a lost wallet en route to a garbage can because we had to pull over on account of my barfing. He mailed the wallet back to the guy, who sent him a hundred bucks as a reward. I got twenty of it for barfing.)

We'd heard tell of the incredible base of snow that Whistler had been blessed with unnaturally early in the season. Last year, I skiied one day on what sage old mountain types described as the "worst day of skiing in seven years". It involved a skiing surface that been frozen and then scoured to a cement-like consistency sprinkled with rocks, and the occasional surprised small tree. It was fine as long as you didn't turn. It was a day when you could easily imagine your hip shattering. This year, the snow was deep and soft and plenty and falling steadily. We went to bed early in anticipation of the glory that awaited the next morning.

Doretta has just started eating meat, which I find really entertaining. Maybe it's because we were roommates for two years and she used to tell me that using one of her pots to cook meat was like using one of her pots to cook a baby. Maybe it's because Janey and I used to make up elaborate stories about the meat frenzy we'd have in the apartment when she was not home. Dorrie was never smug about her vegetarianism, but she was vigilant. Feeding her bacon is so much fun. I had a burger every day for three days running just to model proper carnivore behaviour.

Because we are hardcore, we live hardcore and that meant waking up at the crack of dawn, or technically before the crack of dawn to eat some bacon grease (with eggs and english muffin), put on way too many clothes and clump over to the lift. It had snowed hard all night. There was (you ready?) 48 centimetres of untouched powder on the mountain. For any of you from backward countries that do not yet embrace the metric system, that's just over a foot and a half. Of fluffy fluffy poof powder. There was so much snow it was confusing. I know Blackcomb mountain pretty well but there were moments when it didn't make sense. Why is the chairlift so low to the ground? For example.

Apart from being the friendliest person ever, Sarah is a beautiful skier. So beautiful she was paid cash money for four years to teach people to ski on Whistler Blackcomb. Doretta got a crash course in getting down the hill and then decided to brave the runs solo. I got to ski with Sarah the rest of the day. Wow, powder. It was skiing on pillows. It was also, we both agreed, the hardest skiing work we'd ever done. I fell a lot. The lactic acid burn was part of that. At one point I was on a double black with my tips pointing up the hill sliding backwards and contemplating death when I realised that the key to my salvation was to flop backwards into the puff of snow. I saved my own life, then I got up, skiied one turn, and fell over again. It was a day of fun and happy exhaustion and sitting on the chair listening to people laughing or muttering "oh shit" just before crashing was excellent roadside entertainment. By 2 pm, the mountain was deserted; everyone had gone home in exhaustion. We skiied out and went back to the cabin... and then the pain began. My boots fit a little too big for me and slinging around craploads of snow all day meant smashing my toes again and again into the front of my boots. I tried to rachet them tighter, so my ankles were bruised, and my legs were so tired and wrecked that the sore was going to last for days.

But we're hardcore (see above) so we skiied the next day too.

The only hitch there was that we were expecting my mom and dad and brother to come up and join us. After some garbled attempts to communicate via cel phone with my dad, we talked to my mom at home to learn 1) the lovely snow storm for us had been an up-to-hurricane-force gale in Vancouver 2) they had no power and 3) a tree had fallen in the park behind our house and crushed the garage. So they were deciding to stay there. My brother came up though, and schooled us all with his righteous (and, let's be honest, rested) leg strength the next day.

It was one of those days that is perfectly nice and fun but all day you're thinking, "Huh. Crushed the garage. What does that mean, exactly?" and wondering if trees falling count as an act of God. Trees had fallen all over the Lower Mainland crushing all kinds of things like cars and people's bedrooms. They didn't crush any people that we heard but some of the hobos that live in Stanely Park are unaccounted for.

We got home that night and it was dark out, but the garage looked pretty normal. Well, normal but squished. A little witchy. Yeah, a tree fell on the top and the subsequent pressure blast blew out the windows. The roof has to be rebuilt. Insurance does cover it. I'm sorry I missed the sound. Not sorry I missed the 2.5 days of no power that followed the storm (that's why you cook with gas, people). The tree was giant and only the top hit the roof (though the top of a 100 foot tree, so still massive). My dad and I looked at the roots and they were rotten. We will burn parts of it in our fireplace for payback. No bikes or cans of paint were harmed. We're still having turkey.