Blossom obsession

 

Jan 10: I was promised to live in the Hawaii of the north but so far the Victorian winter has been unseasonably cold. Children have been skating on the shallow ponds near our place for an unheard two weeks. They managed to make snowmen, which in all fairness, melted in 3 days. While the rest of the country experiences real winter conditions with snowbanks, permanent ice rinks and frozen water lines, here the winter weather this year is upsettingly lukewarm. Humming birds still buzz around and red-winged black birds still made their presence known, but something seems off.

Jan 16: My Victorian friend Jill, who’s been blaming me repeatedly for bringing snow and ice with us from Alberta, sent me a reminder that the famous cherry blossoms on View street are only 21 days away. Like winter solstice offering psychological relief to those that fear the darkness of winter, I circle February 6 with a big fluorescent circle on the calendar. It’s the day I finally expect to get warm.

Feb 1. Woohoo, it’s February. According to the newcomers guide to Victoria, it’s time for cherry blossoms, colourful crocuses and droves of daffodils. If I am to believe the locals, this is meant to be the time of the year where retire your hoodie until November and walk around in your shorts and t-shirt. This is the time of the year you make your Canadian Facebook friends jealous with countless images of blossoms and greens. At least that’s what I was promised. However, last night, while the moon, Venus and Mars lined up harmoniously in the dark blue sky, the temperature dropped below zero, again. This morning the ducks are sitting on top of the ice instead of in the water, as the have been repetitively for the last 6 weeks. Our feathered friends huddle together to avoid the cutting wind.

Feb 6: I went to View Street today to see the Cherry blossoms radiate in full glory. It was a beautiful scene to see all the trees in a brilliant white. There was however a small technical problem. The trees were not covered with flowers, but snow. The city turned to chaos. My boss told me to stay home.

Feb 15. The wet cold continues way past its due date. “This is unusual”, the locals keep saying. In the mean time the remainder of Canada chuckles at the Vancouver islanders complaining about their winter weather. And rightfully so. While real Canucks dig a daily tunnel through the snow to find their front door, Victorians board up their houses at the slightest dusting of snow. The “big one”, the major earthquake that is meant to flatten coastal BC, seems to worry the islanders much less.

Feb 26: I keep staring at the calendar. I can’t get over the fact how cold I’ve been since our arrival in November. My self-image has quickly changed from weathered winter warrior to west coast wimp. It’s true what they say: the wind on the coast really does blow not only through down jackets, but through bones and organs too. Here I shiver more here than in the Rockies on a sunny minus 20 Celsius day. I have no idea how East-Coasters survive ice storms, but they have my eternal respect. I am quietly hoping my body will adjust back to the days I lived in wet windy Holland. So far it has not.

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Mar 6: The flower count has started. This light-hearted event is organized to have the local communities take up the challenge to become the “bloomingest community” of the Greater Victoria area. It is all part of promoting Victoria as a great destination during the shoulder season. I look at my window. “I think the count will be over really quickly this year”, I say to myself. I see a few buds but not any flowers.

Mar 14: The local community of Coldwood wins the flower count contest for the fourth year in a row with 64 million blooms. Who makes this shit up?

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Mar 25: I can finally detect blossoms on the cherry and plum trees that grow along many roads. It is indeed a beautiful sight. Daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths have made an appearance in the local parks. Despite being late, there is feeling of spring in the air. I can relax. Just one more thought is on my obsessive mind. “What if it gets too warm this Summer?”

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Steamroom

I have a love-hate relationship with steam rooms; love the steam, kind of hate the room. Having been a tile setter and home renovator for a few more years than anticipated, I know what a good grout line looks like. I know what a poor one looks like too. That’s why visiting steam rooms is a strange experience to me. While I aim to be in a semi-meditative state for 20 minutes or so, my eyes promptly scan the walls to find imperfections in the grout lines. Is my glass half empty again? Yes, and I’m very aware of it, like that itchy spot on my back, always appearing with the start of the dry winter weather.

 

Outside, the temperature last night dropped to an unhealthy -34 degrees. Yes, Celsius that is. After a few days on ongoing clouds, nasty breezes and several inches of snow, this morning blue skies paint the mountain landscape with a soft brush. A mysterious mist hangs over parts of the slowly waking valley. For a few minutes, the scenery I observed through the window encouraged me to go outside, face the elements, and take some photographs.

 

Visually, I am attracted to vapour in the form of mist or fog. The spectacle that I am particularly drawn to is the mist that rises from creeks, lakes or rivers. “Steam fog” forms when cold air moves over relatively warm water. I say relative, because even in summer the water around here is frigid enough to give you an instant nipple burn. When cool air mixes with the warm moist air over the water, the moist air cools until its humidity reaches 100% and voila, fog forms. This type of fog takes on the appearance of wisps of steam rising off the surface of the water. Where I live, this phenomenon typically takes on a noticeable appearance when the temperature of the air is lower than -20 degrees Celsius.

When the temperature drops this low, the sun sits at the horizon and the wind turns silent, the world appears surreal. Parts of the creeks and river look like appealing hot springs.  Fortress sized flumes of steam dance through the orange morning light. One moment, the steamy curtains form an impermeable wall to the photographer’s eye.  Seconds later, like a curse lifted, the castle wall magically dissipates enough to get a clear view of the surroundings. Trickling sounds play a rhythmic baseline. Ravens crook and plonk from distant veiled trees, discussing the morning news. Despite the cold it’s a dreamy experience, being immersed in nature at the dawn of a spectacular blue bird day.

 

Mindful at -30, I’m scanning my body and breathe in deeply only to find my lungs shrink on the impact of arctic air. I’m very aware of my quickly numbing fingertips, palpitating toes and large ears poking from the narrow space between my toque and neck warmer.  I have already ceased to feel my frozen nostrils. Frost is building itself an ice palace on my eyebrows. In the middle of the numbing cold, with the battery of my camera thinking slowly, I dream myself back into the comfort of the steam room I visited only the day before.

 

The impermeable steam outside is not unlike clouds I encountered upon entering the room yesterday. Contrary to outside, the air temperature in the steam room was so high that I immediately sweated like a Dutch cheese in the afternoon sun. The steam was hot enough to burn the skin. The misty atmosphere kept a surprise as to how many naked people actually sat in the room, only to reveal them in full glory when the watery dust settled.  So I decided to keep my mind focused on slowly breathing, my eyes fixed on the tiles and crooked grout lines.

 

For some ten minutes I kept my composure, while my heart palpitated in an overly heated head. That was all I could handle. My prune-like and heat-drunk body waddled over to the showers to inspect the grout lines there. Not a bad job actually. Then off to the pool, where I aimed to swim one lap to satisfy the repetitive “you need to work out” bug in my head. I swim like a snorkeler on safari. Tiles are all I see. I end up finishing the night counting tiles, thousands of white ones and one long black line on the pool’s floor.

 

For some odd reason I figured I had time to shave myself this morning before braving the elements. Maybe I thought it was important to make a clean impression on the hard core outdoor enthusiasts I would encounter at these temperatures. After all that shaving effort, it turns out my face is not even visible this morning. I am currently disguised well enough to rob a bank. The shave was quick, but not clean. My razor-blade nipped me, of all places, in the nose and a steady stream of blood flowed from my nose until a ball of toilet paper finally plugged the eruption. Now, in the numbing morning cold, the cut has started bleeding again. I am smearing blood all over my gloves and camera.

 

My skinny office fingers are covered in specially selected thin gloves that stretch over my fingers and wrist like a second skin. The gloves are only a millimeter or 2 thick, perfect for handling camera buttons, as working a camera with thick gloves is like trying to type a text message with oven mitts on. But even with the technical blood-covered gloves from the outdoor supply store my bony tentacles inside quickly move outside of their intended comfort zone. My fingers get so numb, there’s no camera handling to be done, I might as well be typewriting on a cutting board. However, it’s a glorious middle-earth morning and I tend to make the most of it for a few more moments by attending to the shutter button with my knuckles.

 

“Oooooh, my god”, I cry out loud.  It’s five minutes later I find myself back in the car, defrosting all near-dead parts of my body. It takes an eternity for the car stop stuttering. Shifting gear is a smooth as smearing frozen peanut butter on a freshly baked bun. It doesn’t matter. This morning has been a good, tough and short exercise in inhabiting uninhabitable conditions. It was a useful lesson in seeing what was right there in front of me to appreciate. I drive home using my teeth and elbows. With new respect for my northern compatriots, I slide into a warm bath at home. Steam slowly fills the room. Condensation builds on the tiles. The grout lines are perfect. I finally relax.

 

 


 

Mind’s eye opener

Things aren’t always as they seem. You can look at a painting and see one thing, and it will be all you see until someone points out something you never noticed before.  There are artists who specialize in deception and optical illusions, giving paintings surreal 3D effects or letting images spin while they really don’t move at all. I find it fascinating. On a smaller scale, pretty much in the backyard of our home I witness optical illusions too, hidden treasures in photos and landscape scenes. Faces hidden in rocks, old wise men disguised in trees. I don’t go purposely looking for them, but sometimes an image surprises me and makes me wonder what else I have missed.

 

My curiosity about the “invisible” world didn’t show up overnight. I started with a simple well-known logo that was highlighted in an educational video while I worked at The Banff Centre. image fedexThe FedEx logo is something we all encounter on the buses driving around town and nothing seems out of the ordinary. Five letters, F.E.D.E.X, that is it. That is until someone pointed out to me there’s an arrow between the last E and X. Not a huge revelation by any means. What is huge, is that the arrow is all I see now, on every package, on every van and even in Tom Hank’s Castaway. Whoever pointed it out to me, thanks very much, but not really.

 

It was an interesting discovery that kind of faded into the background until I recently took a photo that brought the whole experience back to light. A close-up of some ice crystals on a frozen creek seemed a nice enough macro shot, but while observing my mosaic of photos at home, all I noticed was a glaring eye staring at me, like father winter was keep a close eye on me.

Despite the image being composed of some feathered crystals called hoar frost, all I see, time after time, is the eye. My brain is relentless and stubborn. It loves the route it just discovered and is determined not to veer off for a while. I wonder if it’s the same route as the FedEx van drives every day.

 

The big revelation lies in the question what else I have missed in life. What crosses my path every day and haven’t I noticed? What is it my mind chooses to see and what is it, even right smack in front of me, my brain chooses to ignore or label as something it has already encountered a thousand times?

 

On many occasions I tried to change habits or behaviors that didn’t serve me, tried to flick the destiny switch in my life. I decorated the kitchen cupboards and walls of our house with fluorescent sticky notes, reminding me of my newly intended behaviors, encouraged by the common concept that it only takes 3 weeks to make a new behavior your own. As I often found, the new behaviors didn’t last. Like the supposedly sticky notes, they eventually stopped sticking.

 

What if changing a behavior was as easy as seeing the arrow, seeing the eye in the snow and never going back to the old routine. What if an eye opener constructed a new freeway in our brain, like a freshly paved autobahn that whole of Germany has been waiting to use. Can one experience, one encounter with another human being, blast you into a permanent new awareness, cause the bridge to old behavior to crumble behind you, disappear into the vast open space of underutilized gray matter? I do not have the answer, but it sure is an interesting question.