I've had a Ray Bradbury short story "All Summer in a Day" on my mind these past few weeks.
The story is about a human colony on the planet Venus in which the sun shines only two hours every seven years. The protagonist in the story, a young school girl named Margot, moved to Venus from Earth only five years before, so she's the only one of her classmates to remember the sun. On the day the sun is to shine, Margot's classmates, jealous of her knowledge of the sun, lock her in a closet, and she misses the brief Venus summer.
I've been feeling a little like Margot these days, like someone locked me into a closet and I missed Squamish's all-too-brief summer season.
The weather has been on everyone's mind these days. Discussion seems to centre on the lack of sun, the relentless rain and the cold temperatures. But that's always the way it is. The weather - good or bad - seems to monopolize so much of our conversation.
I have a friend who moved to Squamish from central Canada fairly recently. He said that when he got here, the most overt difference between the two places is that in Toronto, discussion centres around the weather, the traffic and work, while in B.C., it centres around the weather, the traffic and play. He's found that in Squamish, once we get past the obligatory complaining, people like to talk about all the fun they've been having.
And although waking every morning to a grey, drizzly sky has been a bit hard to take some mornings, when I look back to the first three weeks of summer I can hardly say that I haven't played a whole lot.
I've been swimming in the lakes, running on the trails and cycling on the roads. I've sat with a couple of dozen people outside Bean Brackendale to watch the Tour de France in Republic Bicycles' display window. I've hiked and mountain biked. It's been a great start to the summer.
Everyday, regardless of the weather, I've been out doing something fun. And although I'd rather see 25 degrees and clear skies, it's really nothing I have any control of so I might as well just suck it up and enjoy what we have.
And judging from the number of people that I've been bumping into on the trails, I'm not alone in doing this. People are complaining, but they're also getting out and recreating, and why not? We live in a remarkable place with lots of fun things to do. Why not just throw on the raingear and enjoy it?
I'm confident that our summer will soon come, and that we'll have that stretch of great weather that always hits. Within two days of that starting, I'm pretty sure that I'll hear my first complaint about the heat.
But I know, too, that the trails and lakes will be loaded with people out having fun. The complaining is just part of the social norms that we share. It's our way of finding common ground. It's kind of like being locked together in a closet.
