With a full-body moon tan and a couple of thousand pounds in my pocket, I spent the last year of my degree in Dunedin's spiritual homeland, Scotland. I was warned about three things before leaving for Glasgow; terrorists (I was there not long after a failed attack on the Glasgow International Airport), getting stabbed, and the weather. Only one of those things turned out to be warranted - I thought Dunedin was a damp place to live but Scotland gets the gold medal. Glasgow is a brilliant city with heaps of character, locals who are friendly almost to a fault, and about a foot of rain a week. Everybody in Scotland gets drunk. All the time. And having lived there, I can't blame them at all. Pubs are warm, dry, companionable and full of cheap beer. As the old saying goes, 'if you can't beat 'em...'
With a freshly-minted degree and the liver of a sour-faced geriatric, I returned from the northern hemisphere and headed to Australia to dry out. Knowing almost nothing about any Australian cities, I picked the destination with the cheapest airfare from New Zealand and landed in Melbourne. If you'd asked me about the climate of Australia, I would have told you that it is above 30 degrees Celsius for 300 days a year, with a couple of months of patchy cloud in the middle of the year. Not so. Melbourne gets a handful of extremely hot days in summer, and six seasons in any one day for the rest of the year. Oh, except for winter. Winter it rains. When I first arrived in Melbourne, the city was experiencing a severe drought. After five years of almost continuous rain, this was the best news I could hear. During my residence there, precipitations gradually increased to the point where I forgot the sky could have a colour other than grey.
And so we come to my current location; Westlock, in Alberta, Canada. Advertised as Canada's sunshine state, Alberta is a province of endless fields, oil sands and the Rocky Mountains. Westlock is the gateway to the first two of these. When we arrived at Edmonton Skydive in March, the entire area was 3 feet deep in snow. By late April, the snow had all but given way to a foot of mud, and by mid-May the mud had dried to a dust bowl full of mosquitoes. I hadn't seen rain in nearly 3 months until last night, when the heavens opened and the dusty road turned to slush. Today, we were treated to the most severe thunderstorm I have ever seen, with a torrential downpour that showed us where all the leaks in our house are (duct tape is a wonderful invention). The plane is sitting folornly on the tarmac, the bookings for all tandem skydives have been postponed, and the dropzone staff are huddled in the hangar waiting until the first case of beer can be cracked.
It is a universal human characteristic to have some kind of preoccupation with the weather. As a skydiver, we spend more time than most with our heads back and eyes fixed to the sky, searching for gaps in the clouds and the speed of the wind, but we are not alone. People of my grandparents' generation will shoot the breeze (so to speak) about the weather until your eyes glaze over and they fall asleep at the table, but even they don't hold a candle to the windswept residents of Alberta.
The climate of Edmonton and the surrounding area leaves a lot to be desired. From October to March, the entire region is blanketed in snow. Going outside with any extremities exposed is a hypothermia risk, anything of a botanical nature is long-dead and unless you drive a minimum of a large 4x4, you're not driving any further than the end of your driveway.
March to May, the snow gradually subsides and patches of grass peek through. Areas of poor drainage become bogs, and mosquitoes the size of F-16s ensure that you are always wearing an uncomfortably warm amount of clothing. The temperature jumps 25 degrees in a week, and suddenly it feels like summer. Once the bogs have evaporated, clouds of dust swirl in the wind and keep the car washes in business. Two days ago I scrubbed my SUV until it sparkled, only to cover it in dust and dead bugs by the time I drove the 6 kilometres home.
June to September, Edmontonions keep all their fingers and toes crossed that the weather holds long enough to get crops sown and harvested, livestock born and raised, gardens planted and admired, and a few camping trips to the mountains. Statistically, there is not a month of the year that has not snowed at some point, so it is not hard to see the motivation. Living in the area, I too find myself talking about the weather forecast with workmates, friends, and fellow skydivers, monitoring weather apps and checking radars with monotonous regularity. The beginning of May, we experienced our last* snowfall of the 2013 winter season. Behind dark glasses, I don't think I was the only one to consider shedding a few frustrated tears as the flakes landed and settled on our doorstep. Driving to work in a blizzard, I ended up trapped in the city by a complete freeway white-out. Welcome to springtime in Alberta!
I had to ask myself why I am so drawn to live in cities with terrible climates? Why don't I get an incredible compulsion to live in the Bahamas or the south of Spain? Part of it I know is my line of work, but I think that predominantly it is because I have met and bonded with some of the most delightful people and communities in the places that I have lived that I am not put off by the thought of half a year of snow/rain/mud/slush/insects. I am quite content to tolerate the fact that the first ten minutes of every work day will be occupied by talk of the terrible weekend weather or what my plans are for the tiny window of summer conditions that are forecast for the next three days. One of Adam's favourite sayings is "the place to be is where you are". It has never been more true. I love my life, rainstorms and all.
*don't speak too loudly, there is still a chance it could happen again!
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