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Dec 18, 2008

Shangri-la Apocalypse

Another email flickered in my office in-basket. They had been landing every few seconds like blackflies on a sweaty face. It was shaping up to be another mundane chapter in the weekly installment of the Mortgage Payment Blues where the sky is always falling and you’re always one computer glitch away from financial ruin. I open each electronic cry-for-help hoping it goes something like this, “Hey Pires. God here. I’ve just made a large deposit in your name to a Swiss bank account. You’re welcome.”
I would then be on the next flight to Bora Bora where I would belly up to Jonah’s Tiki Bar and order a multi-coloured drink served in a hollowed-out coconut.      
That message of deliverance never arrives. Instead, some poor, stressed-out technocrat is lamenting his inability to build the New Rome on a shoestring budget. But when I clicked on the latest email, this startling declaration shrieked from the subject line: Victoria is Under Siege! I imagined all sorts of dreadful possibilities: terrorists, foreign superpowers, tourists in Hawaiian shirts. I read on.
It turns out Victoria – that semi-tropical oasis on Canada’s Left Coast – was buried under a mantle of fresh, crisp snow. To most of us who begin January mornings by scraping layers of ice from our windshields, anything short of an avalanche would fail to herald even the faintest note of alarm. To residents of Lotusland, who prepare for winter by clipping a wool shammy onto their golf bags, it meant that the Apocalypse was nigh. The city is completely, and proudly, unprepared for such a catastrophe. For most of their lifetime, half a dozen snowplows lay anchored to the municipal lot like immense lawn ornaments. Since a mere dusting brings the city to a standstill, the plows are brought to rumbling life at the first rumour of snow. Now Victoria lay entombed under two feet of winter’s finest. Dispatching the feeble armada would be like emptying a bucket of sand one grain at a time.
 To my old buddy Ian – the author of the doomsday proclamation – it meant you can run from winter but you cannot hide. He grew up in North Bay and moved to Victoria several years ago as a refugee from the evil Ontario climate. From a very early age, he knew he was unlike the other kids. While his friends played hockey on the frozen expanse of Lake Nipissing, pretending to be Lafleur and Gretzky, Ian would cocoon himself in his room surrounded by travel brochures, dreaming of one day being a Gold Club Member at Ramon’s Surfside Hacienda. In our college days, he would join us for the odd ski trip. Most of us would climb onto the chair lift for what we hoped would be a day of injury-free skiing. Not Ian. He preferred watching us tumble down the hill in mushroom clouds of snow from the comfort of the chalet. 
Finally, as a young adult, he hopped on a plane and moved out west. Ian had found his Shangri-la. And he never let us forget it. He would phone me on the coldest, dreariest winter day in Ontario and regale me with tales of spending the morning on the golf course. And after sipping a few slow draughts on the clubhouse patio he had ventured to the beach for a quick dip in the sultry Pacific. I knew this to be a gross exaggeration. My few visits to Victoria taught me that even in summer, you had to scoop the ice chips off the ocean’s surface if you wanted to go for dip. And since Victoria’s prodigious winter rainstorms could sink Noah’s Ark, you needed a rowboat to be able play eighteen holes. But Ian had made his point; his favourite winter club was a seven-iron, mine was a snow shovel.           
His tale of woe elicited as much sympathy as if he had told me the country club was running low on oysters. And when I read the part about his having to reschedule his tee-off time until the following Tuesday, I had to pick up the phone. I called the port where he works and when he answered, I asked if it was the North Pole and could I speak to Santa Claus. His response turned the air around the shipyards blue. Surely, he would be fired for such a profane outburst. Not a chance. His four-wheeler was the only vehicle in Victoria not currently occupying a snow bank, and he was alone at the shop.   
We had a brief a catch-up session before I resumed my daily grind. The sky was still falling, the company was still allegedly staring down the abyss of insolvency, and Bora Bora was still impossibly distant. But at least I wasn’t in Victoria.