Only 145 KPH

I am invaded by an earworm. A line from Fred Eaglesmith’s song ‘Wilder Than Her’ courses through my cranium: She’s a summer storm; I’m a hurricane. Hurricane Dorian—much diminished from the monster it was for the poor Bahamians a few days earlier—tore through Nova Scotia Saturday and Sunday. The biggest Cape Breton gusts were a mere 145 kilometres per hour, enough to topple trees, knock out power to eighty per cent of households, and keep us awake the whole night. But that is small beer compared to the 300 kph maelstrom that engulfed the Bahamas, leveled entire communities and left a death toll nowhere close to being fully counted all these days later. How do we even imagine three hundred kilometres an hour?

On Saturday Jan and I spent some of the day battening down the hatches—raising shutters, moving indoors everything that might be blown away, filling the woodbox, et al—before hunkering down for the show. The cabin withstood the ensuing winds without trembling. Now 48 years old, the building demonstrated it is sufficiently well made to withstand winds of a hundred kph or so. Not everything on the land proved as resilient. I walked our road the morning after—winds still howling—to find the road strewn with branches and parts of it paved with blown-down apples. Egress was obstructed by a big birch across the road. Later in the day I fired up the Stihl and commenced the task of reducing the tree to firewood.

We count ourselves lucky. We have only a minimal need for electric power and Dorian left our solar panel in place: I rely on it to power the laptop I use to keep Peregrinations readers informed of what we get up to at Big Bras d’Or. Friends and neighbours aren’t so lucky. I am co-owner of a generator I use in summer to run the power tools of my workshop. Pal Stuart Squires has it the rest of the year. Stu came down Sunday afternoon to retrieve the machine he needs to preserve dozens of chickens stored in his freezers.

The simple life we enjoy at the summer dacha reveals its advantages in the wake of a hurricane. Three days after Dorian blew through town a hundred thousand Nova Scotians are still without power. Our three rain barrels are full: we needn’t worry that a powerless pump can no longer supply the water essential to daily routines. We needn’t try to make our way to town in search of fresh fruit and vegetables that may not be available as a result of the storm: we still have a bounty of blueberries, blackberries and chanterelles, the best of all mushrooms.

But what of the luckless Bahamians? The climate scientists tell us that hurricanes as powerful as Dorian—or worse—will become ever more commonplace. Doubtless it is only a matter of time before a future cyclone delivers to Nova Scotians some facsimile of what was visited upon the people of Grand Bahama and Abaco last week. Meanwhile the man Americans elected as their president in 2016 asserts there is no such thing as climate emergency, and the menace chosen by Brazilians to lead their country burns the Amazon, convinced it is more important to produce beef than oxygen.

Catherine McKenna, threatened with physical harm by climate-change deniers, must now be accompanied by a security detail as she discharges her duties as Canada’s environment minister. Young Greta Thunberg is reviled for telling us we must all do our bit to reduce the human-induced threat to the atmosphere.

I share Greta’s aggravation with those who say ‘there is nothing I can do’. Nothing? Beef production is a huge producer of greenhouse gases. Can we not reduce or eliminate our demand for steak and hamburger? Can we not consider ways of clustering chores requiring a trip to town in order to reduce consumption of fossil fuel? Can we not occasionally walk rather than drive to a nearby destination? Or, gasp, go by bicycle?

During our walkabout around Dalem Lake yesterday we crossed paths with a woman recently immigrated to Boularderie Island after 31 years living in the Yukon—long enough for her to be struck by all the significant changes in weather patterns she has seen in that time. What will she have observed after 31 years in Cape Breton?

My dear old Mum, fretful about the world her great-grandchildren will inherit, announces she is grateful to be 95, and won’t have to endure the future herself. I am hard-pressed to debate her.