Hilary Hanbidge. Location: Latitude, 47.6 degrees North and longitude 122.33 degrees West. Status: Alive.
"It's been pretty crazy," she says over the phone having just poured herself a glass of red wine.
Hilary is one of my best friends. She grew up in Ottawa before moving out West. Now she's married to an American and lives in Seattle.
Hilary's just survived Snowmageddon the nickname given to the storm that blanketed the Puget Sound region with what most Canadians would consider a thin layer of snow.
By Wednesday night, 15 centimetres of the white stuff had fallen outside Hilary's Capitol Hill apartment. Bars and restaurants were closed and so too were a lot of streets. Hilary, who only got one snow day off in nine years of school while living in Ottawa, says the whole experience has been pretty humourous.
In anticipation of the storm, Hilary's office cancelled work on Wednesday. In stores, people frantically horded water bottles and provisions.
"The ironic thing is I have a friend scheduled to fly out to Alaska tomorrow but she can't make it to the airport because of all the road closures," she says.
Hilary believes Seattleites talk more about the weather than Vancoverites and their snowballs are just that much smaller.
"They're pretty wimpy," Hilary says.
Sofia Parfitt. Location: Latitude 53.53 degrees North Longitude 122.41 degrees West. Status: Alive.
Sofia is my pseudo sister. She grew up in northern Sweden, vacationed in Canada and is now married to a Canadian and living in Prince George. When I reached her, it was -34 degrees Celsius on her porch.
Sofia comes from the land of saunas and ice swimming her ideal weather conditions consist of -12 degrees Celsius and a blue sky. The Swedes talk about the weather just as much as Canadians, she says, but Canadians tend to exaggerate.
If there's a wind chill factor, that number is instantly tacked onto the temperature creating a new, more extreme reality, Sofia says.
"Canadians are definitely more wimpy," she adds. "Sometimes they make you wonder if this is a northern country."
No matter where you are in the world, weather-talk is there. While Irish writer Oscar Wilde famously condemned the act as the "last refuge of the unimaginative," I don't mind it. But I have British parents.
Two years ago, a study in the U.K. indicated that the Tommies talk about the climate at least once every six hours. One in five Brits also stated it was an easy way to break the ice.
I think it all runs deeper than that. A hundred and thirty thousand years ago, I am sure that a meeting between cavemen clans went something like this A man jumps out of a bush to face another man who has just stepped out from behind a rock. Crouching, they examine each other, then one makes a move. He hugs himself, rubbing his shoulders with his hands and pretends to shiver. The other man nods in agreement. Spears are lowered.
A more upright variation of that greeting could be observed in the streets of Squamish during the -11 degrees Celsius conditions this week. After 130,000 years, it seems that weather-talk is very much the same.
