Before I moved to Alberta 3 months ago, I thought the bottom part of a thermometer was just for show. The sub-zero scale, I reckoned, was like the speedometer on my Hyundai: measuring, at the uppermost reach, mere hypotheticals. The thing couldn’t actually go 220 km/hour – that’s just there for aesthetic purposes, to fill in the rest of dial. Plus, it looks impressive.
Now I find out, too late to turn back, that Albertans actually use the bottom end of the stick. Minus 5. Minus 10. Minus 17. Minus 28. Apparently, there’s limit to how far down the mercury will go.
And it’s only November.
When I complain loudly to the locals about this, they smile a thin smile. “Wait,” they say, “until winter hits.”
Winter? This isn’t that?
I came from Vancouver Island, where a cold day meant you put on a sweater under your wind breaker, and maybe postponed your golf game. Block heaters? Ice scrapers? Snow tires? Parkas? We’d heard of such things, but few of us had any first-hand experience with them.
November’s been my crash course. The other day I almost died walking to my car. The coldness skewered me. My toes and fingers turned numb. I pictured someone finding me hours later, my tipped-over body frozen in mid-stride, a thickening lacework of frost gathering on the blueing marble of my skin, my eyes wide with terror.
I made it, in case you were wondering.
So it’s been an education, if that’s the right word. This morning, I wrote some of these thoughts to a friend, a native Albertan. “At least,” he wrote back, “we’re not in Edmonton. It’s brutal there.”
Ah, right.
The funny thing is, he’s the third person in 2 days to say this very same thing to me. At least we’re not in Edmonton. Such, I’m learning, are the consolations of the half-frozen.
But still, it’s cold here. To be fair, I’d been warned. But – like with most things – reality has a distinct force to it that theory can never quite capture. Minus 28 in real-time is much more, shall we say, impressive than minus 28 as a mere idea.
But at least we’re not in Edmonton.