This week I have a few thoughts to share about the Atlantic Provinces.
Hurricane Fiona aftermath
I am astounded (not really, disappointed is a better word) that there are still people in urban areas without power in this region following Hurricane Fiona. I am seeing reports, for example, that there are still people in Charlottetown, PE (Prince Edward Island’s capital city) without power. Residents are saying they’ve been without power for 9 days (and counting). In an urban area.
I know that lots of people are working hard to restore electricity and I don’t fault the workers - it just seems like we should be beyond this. I have to make myself remember how many trees were uprooted by the winds, how many power poles and power lines were felled, and how many buildings were damaged.
I remember a storm that affected my home province several years ago where my parents lost power for more than a week, living out of town 10 KM away, in the home I grew up in. Living in town and connected to one of the more secure power segments due to my proximity to a commercial area, my family was only out of power for a day and a few hours. That longer outage wasn’t fun for my parents or their neighbours but I can somewhat understand the delays because they were living in a rural area - they are rarely given the same priority as a more densely populated area and there could have been multiple power lines down along the way.
Really think we should be running all power lines underground, though.
Traffic (and the lack thereof)
On those days when I have to work at “the office”, it’s a 38 KM commute. I can be in my work building’s parking lot within 25 minutes of leaving my driveway. There are three traffic lights near my home in my town of 5,500 people in Western NB. They rarely slow me down much because there are never more than three cars ahead of me - if any - when I’m waiting at the light, on those occasions when the light isn’t already green. Most of my commute is highway driving and, while there are other vehicles on the road, there’s plenty of space between us. The only things that slow us down are road construction, accidents and bad weather.
I was in Toronto for work a couple of weeks ago. On the day my colleagues and I had to return home, it took our taxi at least 25 minutes to drive 5 KM on our way to the airport and then at least 15 more minutes to get the rest of the way there. So many vehicles trying to take the same streets and highways - “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes”, as Sting once wrote.
There are a few places in Atlantic Canada where you can get snarled up in traffic several times per day: St. John’s, NL; Saint John, NB; Moncton, NB; Fredericton, NB; Charlottetown, PE; and of course, the Halifax Regional Municipality, NS. Every large town or city will have occasional traffic woes. It makes sense, these are more densely populated areas and there’s a lot of vehicles travelling the roads at peak times.
Most days I’m grateful that I don’t live in one of those places, though I do enjoy visiting. I don’t know what I would do if I had to endure bumper to bumper traffic on a daily basis. I’m grateful for a work commute that is longer than I’d like but very low on stress.
The coming of the colours
There are a lot of trees in New Brunswick: probably more trees than people as 84 - 85% of the province is forested. This is the time of year when the deciduous trees run through their colour cycle: many of their leaves shift from green to red/orange/yellow to crusty brown to lying together in a multi-coloured coat on the ground over the course of a few weeks, the result of shortening, cooler days. This cycle will repeat until the land and air are too barren and poisonous to support trees: hopefully that won’t happen for a long time.
From my living window I can see two trees in particular. The trees are less than 20m apart and they are approximately the same height (at least 8 m tall). I think the trees are the same species, probably maples. I assume that they were planted at about the same time. One still has a lot of green leaves with some red leaves on one side, the other’s leaves are almost completely red with orange, yellow and even a few green ones still resisting change.
It’s a beautiful thing to see the colour change unveil itself slowly, much like the waxing and waning phases of the Moon. If we had two Moons would they experience different phases? Probably. Not that you’d want them to be too close together, though.
The fact that two similar trees standing close together can have different experiences while experiencing the same cycles is a marvel to behold. The truth is in the details of the light that hits each tree, the soil, water and so on - no two trees will have exactly the same experience.
I doubt anyone intended these two trees to be metaphors for humanity. And yet…
I have definitely become spoiled by my work-from-home commute (living room to home office!). Until we moved here four years ago, I drove into a major city most days. We drove through that city yesterday on our way home from a trip. We even stopped there for groceries. Do. Not. Miss. It. I found my tolerance for that level of congestion (and for mean people in the grocery store) has greatly diminished. Perhaps that’s a sign I’m getting closer to senior citizen status?🤣
I know I’ve been in Miramichi too long, because I get offended by having to wait any amount of time, or getting stuck behind a few cars.
One of the things that’s really been bugging me about Fiona: we knew it was coming. Why wasn’t there more prep, such as setting up comfort centres before and sharing their addresses when people have power, setting up funds for people, and so on. It’s all been very reactionary, to what we knew several days in advance would be a huge storm.