Sometimes I feel like a farmer. No, it’s not that my gardens are so large I need a tractor and silo, it’s rather that farmers as a group are obsessed with weather. Understandably so. It’s a rare year when there is just enough rain, just enough sunlight and just enough warmth to make everything grow and be successfully harvested. Most years it’s a yo-yo between doing rain dances because it won’t rain, and worrying about too much rain rotting crops in the field.
Recent summers have turned us all into farmers in British Columbia. When it rains it pours. When it doesn’t it burns. One threatens floods and landslides; the other ignites the supernatural landscape, fouls the air and causes widespread havoc and destruction.
A week ago, the temperature at Smilin’ Dog cracked 40°C—in the shade—for the first time in the two decades I’ve frittered away summers up here. That hot is no small feat considering the Dog sits on a high Cariboo plateau at 1,128 metres above sea level (3,700 feet) and is several hundred kilometres north of Whistler. Ironically, just a week earlier, it was so cold in the morning I needed to turn heat on to warm the place up and had spent most of May and June wondering whether the soil would ever warm up enough to grow what I’d planted.
The hottest days ever diabolically coincided with plans to join family for a couple of days at a provincial park an hour up a dirt road from us. I have an intense dislike for camping at provincial parks unless I’ve paddled for several hours since leaving the parking lot. Camping at provincial parks—any “campground” for that matter—has marginal appeal. They tend to be crowded, noisy, full of behemoth RVs running generators so “campers” can enjoy air conditioning, iced drinks and TV, and have evening air quality on par with Mexico City as people light up smoky fires to either mesmerize themselves with dancing flames or keep mosquitoes away, likely both.
I tried to convince all involved it made far more sense to simply cancel the reservation and stay put where we could enjoy a relatively cool house, very inviting lake and only one neighbour who, at these temperatures, tended to hibernate. No luck.
It was on the shores of Lake Mahood, sitting in the shade with my feet in the water and being slowly roasted by a katabatic wind rushing down a nearby hot slope that the musings of Blaise Pascal came to mind. Pascal, a 17th century French philosopher, mathematician and Catholic theologian, argued belief in God was a no-lose proposition. He argued if you believed in God and it turned out the big guy-in-the-sky was just a myth, well, all you lost was a lifetime of pointless piety and butt-numbing Sunday mornings.
But if you didn’t believe, didn’t follow the teachings of the Church and it turned out you were wrong, all hell would literally break loose when you took your final bow.
I grew up in the desert. I thought I knew heat. I’ve hiked in Death Valley and across broken lava badlands in summer’s heat. I’ve climbed slot red rock canyons in Utah. I’ve spent fitful nights lying in my own sweat during torpid July nights in Toronto.
I’ve never been as hot as I was on the shores of Mahood Lake.
So I told a friend, a somewhat conflicted Irish Catholic woman, I wanted to join her at mass Sunday, said I’d even bring my own snacks since I would be ineligible to take communion. Knowing I am a card-carrying non-believer, she said no way, hinting the place would be struck by lightning if I so much as darkened the threshold. But she was curious why I’d want to go.
“Because I experienced Hell-lite earlier in the week and feel like hedging my bets,” I explained.
The people in Lytton experienced Hell last week, with temperatures more customary in Dubai and with the hellfire to go along with them. The whole western part of Canada set records. Ditto the northwest U.S. while the other western states continued unbroken years of record drought.
But hey, climate change is a hoax, ain’t it? Trump said so. So have too many others. And even those who believe it isn’t a hoax seem to have some discordant emotions about the whole thing.
How else do you explain the changing roadscape?
Leaving the very airy tent in which I’d spent the previous few nights at Mahood Lake, and it being the day before Canada Day, I was confronted by a conga line of people arriving for the long weekend. Without exception, every single one of them was driving a large pickup truck—three-quarter tonne or better—and pulling an even larger trailer, boat or both.
It only made sense. With a handful of exceptions, the sites at Mahood Lake Provincial Park were all set up for RVs and trailers. In 30-some sites, I’d counted fewer than half a dozen people with tents. The rest were fifth-wheels, trailers and motorhomes, many far larger than some of the places I’ve lived in and far more luxuriously appointed.
In the permitted hours, the place was a cacophony of generators and whirring air conditioners. Ah camping. Ah the great outdoors.
And so it goes. Most Canadians, polls reveal, believe climate change is real and want “government” to do something about it. How to square that with the explosion of RV sales, especially when the statistics reveal that explosion is being led by Millennials, not retired folks as it has been in the past? Isn’t this the generation that grew up with heightened environmental consciousness? The one who wagged their fingers at the generation of swine—Boomers—for screwing the world up?
How would they feel if government finally decided it was grossly unsustainable to allow people to buy big pickups and drag cottages to urbanized provincial parks? Or buy quads to plop their expansive backsides on so they didn’t have to walk to the outhouses once there? Or buy their children those cute little off-road motorcycles so they too could be indoctrinated into burning gas for fun and entertainment?
No? Too radical? Much better for governments to do something like spend billions more to gear up seasonal fire fighting?
It all kind of reminds me of Richard Nixon sitting in the White House during humid Washington summer nights with his fireplace burning for ambiance and the air conditioning running full blast to counteract the fire. Don’t like global warming? Just buy an air conditioner... or an air-conditioned RV.
