The Chinook
(a view from "The Other Side" - Dec. 25/05)
Here they call it the "Pineapple Express". But in the North, when he came howling from the west, from the Pacific ocean, pushing clouds through the great mountain passes, and for a moment breaking up the bitter contest between the harsh North wind and the bitter South wind, we called him the Chinook. The wind that for a brief moment in time, changed the face of our world. The warm wind that came at Christmas more than at any other time.
From temperatures as low as minus 30 and 40 (I'm using the Fahrenheit scale - can't get used to that unnatural base ten one called Celsius) the winds would race in, usually during the night and we would wake up to a world of water in temperatures around +50, sometimes even higher. We would see expanses of shallow waters, shining even in the grey skies, shivering under the relentless winds. The snows that had piled up to maybe 3 or 4 feet would be gone, except in protected gullies, or in great drifts. These would just become covered with a glaze of ice up to one inch thick.
Evergreens would bow and sway and the music of the wind through aspen, willow, cottonwood and birch - well, I have no words to describe the beauty of it. Roofs dripped steadily and icicles dropped from every exposed edge. You could hear the water trickling around, looking for tiny cracks in the frozen ground. Most of the melt would remain above, creating miles of natural ice rinks in yards and fields, in ditches and even on the less traveled "gumbo" side roads. (Graveled roads were crowned so the water would run off - and besides even the odd rock is not good for skate blades!)
I experienced many such passages while growing up in the Peace River. And yes, I must admit these do enter my small list of "good things" that happened there. Certainly, the Peace River country would have been better left to the bears, moose, deer and caribou, and the wandering tribes of indigenous peoples. White man technology only made the land harsher and meaner. What has become of it now, I don't know and do not wish to know.
The Chinook - he shows up here too, lasts longer and is often warmer than in the Peace. A kind of Spirit of Christmas - of ancient days when man accepted his relationship with nature, and kept a respectful pace with it. A reminder, in these short, sunless days that earth is willing to bring forth new life through a renewal of things.
And so it is today, here in Chilliwack some 60 miles from the gulf island passages and approximately some 100 miles from the open Pacific ocean. It rained heavily all night and this morning the West wind was howling through the evergreens and the great cottonwoods in the park behind our house. The temperature is up there - not sure how high, but unseasonably high. I know that the rain has swollen the Hope river and I can feel the beckoning to take out the kayak. I shall wait though, get myself attuned to the music first. A day, maybe two, and I'll head out to the River to see what's to see. If the winds hold or return, I'll encounter the great waves and go dancing among them. Ice or waves, what does it matter in laughter?
The Chinook is a gift of nature to those who live in the Pacific Northwest and on the western edge of the Great Plains. Like the passing star that announced the birth of potentially great change, he calls us to stop our technologically driven madness and recall the days when as a people we sought, not so much to understand, but to "fit in" with the ways of this world.
But the star kept on going, after a brief stop over an unknown location in space/time. It had pointed the way and had to move on to other places. The people of earth, for the most part, saw little and heard nothing. Within a few years, it was business as usual. Or almost. As the Chinook leaves ice upon the frozen ground, the star left a gift charged with potential. The gift grew, touched many lives, expressed difficult, dangerous and hope-filled thoughts. As children don skates and come out upon the great expanses of ice, some to travel, some to play, so did the child-like follow this gift and try to hear what was being expounded with little stories called parables, and periodic demonstrations of power based in a love they had not seen before.
But those who rely on roads to move goods for stores, feed for cattle, or logs for mills, hate the Chinook. He makes surfaces treacherous to commercial traffic. While children fly over the ice, laughing, those who rely on commerce sit in their offices, shops and garages, and curse the weather. Eventually of course, they win. The ice gets broken and covered with sand or gravel, or it melts on the high surfaces, allowing traffic to move again. The children put away their skates.
Those who have never learned to laugh will always miss the gift. Oh yes, they will give each other gifts, colourfully wrapped and for brief glimpses may even provide a selfless instant of happiness in another. And that's the problem with everything, isn't it. The Chinook comes, then he is gone. Time is measured, not in long spans, but in moments. Few there are who learn the fine art of stringing those moments tirelessly into a string of pearls, unbroken, into infinity.
Hold on to the moments you have shared with others today. Hold on to them, not to the things in your hands that came out of the wrapping. For if life is not entirely made of such moments, that which is not is truly a waste. Who would parade around in a string of pearls with many large gaps of missing pearls along the string? Yet how many strut about in such, unknowing? And how many admire them, unseeing?
From the Chinook Wind, who also comes from "the Other Side"
Erin WilloWitch and Sha'Tara EarthStar
Janet
Sage
Love Tinka
Best regards,
Leland