It's supposed to snow today.
Notice how I said that: calmly, just like a real Canadian, without sobbing or anything. Guess that means the Prozac the city pumps into the drinking water has kicked in.
We on Vancouver Island don't do well with snow. Weather forecasts like today's breed the kind of fearful, squirming anticipation normally associated with prostate exams, say, or Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes.
Gosh, winter in January, couldn't have seen that coming. It never snows in Victoria, except when it does, every year. Apparently Victorians were blindsided by the forecast: When I drove by a tire shop Saturday, it looked like the panicked mob scene outside the U.S. Embassy just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.
But that's OK. It just means we on the coast are fulfilling our purpose in life: to provide comic relief for the real Canada, the one with the block heater cords, square tires and sheets of cardboard shoved between the radiator and the grille of the car.
It's not a lot of fun enduring the frozen misery that is January in Violated Livestock, Sask., so watching Victorians go into earthquake/tsunami/Armageddon mode at the first wintry dusting helps relieve the gloom.
We all have our roles to play in the great Canadian drama, our stereotypes to confirm.
Albertans are the rednecks, a province of grim-lipped, hard-working Sutter brothers who chew tobacco, drink rye and spit out hippies.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba are like Alberta, only with more humour and less money. Think Corner Gas.
Ontario? With a population of 13.4 million, it has more people than Sweden, Belgium or Greece. Yet in stereotype they're all clones, like Agent Smith in The Matrix, identical Toronto careerists decked out in corporate climbing gear (suit, tie, underwear) as they fight their way up the ladder in the
Centre Of The Universe.
Quebec is the well-dressed sibling, hipper and haughtier than the rest of us. We suddenly become conscious of our Kirkland-brand lumpishness when Quebec sweeps into the room with the scarf flung around its $900 Harry Rosen jacket.
The Maritimes? Lobster traps and ceilidhs, except in tiny P.E.I., which has an economy built entirely on potatoes, Anne of Green Gables and bridge tolls.
Newfoundland is the merry rowdyman, full of screech, bereft of cod.
As for the North, it's melting.
Bummer.
And back here in B.C.? We're the land of the misfits, the disconnected and the disaffected. History brought us draft dodgers, remittance men, Finnish Utopians, Doukhobors, Westfalia-driving Sixties longhairs - anyone who wandered to the edge of the world in search of (or to get away from)
something else.
This is how the rest of Canada sees us: Lumberjacks and space cadets. More free spirits than a distillery tour.
Years ago, I was struck by two notices pinned side by side on a bulletin board in Sooke.
"Firewood," read the first. "Douglas fir, dry, split, delivered, $90 a cord."
Right beside it, headed "Souls Reclaimed," was one from a woman who promised to put clients in touch with whomever they happened to be in
previous lives.
This was nonsense, of course. Everyone knows you can't buy a cord of dry, split firewood for $90.
But reclaiming souls is only natural for the part of the country that pioneered recycling, gave birth to Greenpeace (it was a home birth, of course, attended by a midwife/wiccan/aromatherapist) and provided other Canadians with endless hours of entertainment with everything from Maggie Trudeau to Bill Vander Zalm, Pamela Anderson, B.C. Bud, $9 coffee drinks and our pioneering experimentation with the
warm-weather hockey riot.
But wait. The thing about glib stereotypes is they don't always hold up to the scratch test.
In supposedly narrow-minded Alberta, three in four people polled support same-sex marriage, and Calgary elected a Muslim mayor. As for tofu-eating, tree-hugging B.C., 47 per cent voted Conservative in last year's federal election. Thirty per cent of those who live in Ontario, the most stereotypically Canadian province, weren't even born in Canada.
Never mind. They got Vancouver
Island right.
It might be where the rest of Canada shovels its flakes, but we're still afraid of snow.
