Vancouver’s got a chilling secret and I, for one, am going to put a stop to it.
Every winter, when the rest of the country is plunged into a deep, dark cold that will freeze all of your nose hairs into one super nose hair, Vancouverites chime in with our own version of the Canadian cold.
Our version goes something like this: it’s a damp cold. It gets in your bones. It’s hard to shake off the chills even after you come inside.
I grew up on the Prairies and have the frostbite scars to prove it, but I’ve been living in the Vancouver area for more than a decade now and I confess to indulging in the “damp cold” theory myself. Then came Christmas 2017. My family decided to drive to the Prairies, where they were entering a record-breaking cold snap. Our first stop was an overnighter at a quaint little Rocky Mountain resort perched on the edge of a stunning, glacier-fed lake. At least, that’s how the resort looks in the postcards. When we parked our car and unloaded our bags, things were feeling a little more dire. By that I mean it was –31°C.
As we unloaded our luggage and waited for the shuttle bus to whisk us from the parking lot to the lodge, we looked back at the cars and noticed that all of them were plugged in. All except for ours – a West Coast kid, our little Nissan was born without a block heater.
At the resort we were surprised to find that our stay in the lodge was not a stay in the lodge at all, but rather at a cabin that could only be accessed by foot, through a frozen forest, around a hellishly steaming bog, and over a soul-crushing mountain pass. Well, at least that’s what it felt like. Looking back now I’ll grudgingly admit that it was actually a short walk up a hill, and the steam may have come from a hot tub. But it was –31, a temperature at which the simplest of outdoor tasks are tinged with the knowledge that if things go a little bit wrong, the Earth will kill you, quickly.
Inside the cabin there was no television, which wouldn’t have mattered anyway because there was a power outage. That meant that the room’s central feature, a massive fireplace stocked with logs and a bit of kindling, would serve as the night’s sole source of entertainment and heat. This made the oft-repeated questions from my children all the more pointed as I tried to build a fire: “Daddy, when can we cook the marshmallows? Daddy, where did the flames go? Daddy, why is there so much smoke? Daddy, why can’t I feel my toes?”
Luckily, the one thing that worked really well in the room was the phone to the front desk, and in no time a guy was at the door with another big bundle of kindling.
At the end of it all the fire was roaring, our car started the next day with just a bit of whining, and we were off to spend a week in Alberta where every trip outside included a “minutes until you die” clock. Other parts of the country were even colder.
We made it back to Vancouver without losing any limbs, and the next day I walked to work with a sweater and light jacket.
Was it a damp cold? Did it get into my bones? No! This was balmy, and you’ll never hear me say otherwise again.
You want to know cold that really gets into your bones? Stand inside your freezer. Then remember this: compared to the rest of Canada, your freezer is warm.
Andy Prest writes for the North Shore News.
