-----Palm Trees

FTLComm - La Ronge - October 25, 2000

Tuesday morning we witness a rather spectacular arrival of a new day as the sky was painted from an amber to the plum you see at the very bottom of the page. The picture above was taken at 0800 in front of Churchill School while the one on the right a few minutes earlier from in front of PreCam elementary School. As I took the picture at the top of the page I thought if I didn't know better those scruffy jack pine trees could look like palm trees. The

remarkable thing is that at

that hour of the morning I was only wearing a sport jacket, no parka or mittens Tuesday. This unusally warm weather is not that unusual. Twenty years ago we were about to spend our first winter in the Yukon at Watson Lake and the house we were in had a great fireplace. So it was a family outting to take the pick up out to a place where there had been some logging and pick up some of the left overs that we could use for firewood. Elsie Rollie got a great kick out my efforts because we did not have the tools for the

job and I used a skill saw to

buck the small pieces into suitable lengths. But what I remember most about that process was that it was late October and we had already had a lot of snow but it was hot. Yes hot, not warm, but hot and I got to experience Yukon black flies for the first time. Tuesday afternoon I was surprised to find myself outside getting some exterior shots of the school for the newsletter and by then I was no longer wearing the sports coat but was wearing a short sleeved shirt. Many people and the fowl of the air were all predicting an early winter and a short fall. But alas, those of you are yerning for a real, "normal" winter you will be disappointed. The past two winters have been the warmest in recorded history and this one can only be as difficult as it was three years ago and that was pretty mild. Weather and climate patterns are very slow to change, the gradual warming we are experiencing has happened many times before and has a cycle. Certainly scientists have been pointing out the signs of global warming and the possible catastrophic consequences of this eventuallity but in the short term things are gradual. I really enjoy our personalisation and protestant gloom when we have weather like this. Folks will say, "Oh, we're going to pay for this." There is a certain next year country acceptance that things balance out and if it is warm in some part of the year it will be equally as cold in another. This is not based on any varifiable climatic or weather pattern it is strictly an attitude that stems from seeing the unexplained and unexplainable and seeking some rationale for the manifestations of a complex water and atmospheric combination we refer to as weather.