When Winter Looms, Wet Coast-Style

Rain’s slamming Vancouver sideways, as heavy winds batter windows and fill me with dread about the day’s errands to be run.
Days like this, the so-called simple life of living without a car feels like punishment.

Photo by me, November in Vancouver, 2009.


It’s true Wet Coast glory on a stormy morn like this.
You cannot run, you cannot hide.
Living on the Pacific coast becomes a chore this time of year. It cuts into me. The endless oppressive grey is the bitterest tonic to swallow for the seasonally-affected, like myself.
Endless rain’s like inertial dampeners for the soul. Slows the pulse to a dull echoing thud.
Today’s sky is deep grey, lacking of any definition. Just a mass of smooth charcoal oppression stretching between horizons.
It’s part of who we are, here, though.
There’s something about the rain that, when you’ve been in Vancouver or on this coast long enough, becomes a part of what you exude emotionally and how you absorb the world around you.
All the Sufi mystics will tell you the height of joy we feel for life can only be measured by how much we have suffered.
If the same is true meteorologically, my Vancouver brethren know a sunny day’s glory better than any one, any where.
I’ve long thought the climate in Vancouver to be almost a psychological aspect of who this city is. We’re bipolar. Full of life and passionate in sun, bitchy and isolate in rain.
It’s not like we’re the most populated region in North America, but look at the prolific serial killers we’ve had between Seattle and Vancouver — the Pig Farmer Willie Pickton, Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and child-killer Clifford Olsen.
The darkness affects some people a lot. It can fuck with the sturdiest of minds when it’s going on three-plus months of 65% darkness, oft-filled with cloudy skies the other 35%.
The rain, the wet, the isolation, the wind, the chill.
It’s a gruelling place to be come the doldrums of winter.
Early explorers up the coast called it a special dreary kind of hell when the rains began.
I’ve lived in the Yukon, and even with less daylight and Arctic-like temperatures, it was a far cheerier winter — sunlight came nearly daily, and the snow blasted light everywhere.
Days like today in Vancouver, I feel like I’m living in an Edgar Allen Poe tale, with bleakness around every corner.
Fortunately, I’m literary, so that kind of works for me.
Until I step outside.
I sometimes wonder how much where we are is who we are. Much of this town makes me ponder who that makes us. Takes a strange breed to suffer through most of nine months of being a battered duck just to enjoy a brief summer.
Yet, I stay. Like so many others.
It’s hard not to love this part of the world, despite the bleak and endless grey that finds us so easily.
I might’ve found the Yukon a cheerier place in the winter, but my heart dropped through the floor when I saw a sunny day picture of Vancouver’s summer in passing on television that spring, and weeks later my soul felt a blanketed peace when I got caught in the first rain I’d felt in 11 months, since arriving in the Yukon.
I may bemoan the cold, wind, rain, and endless oppressive air, but this is who I am, too.
A Vancouver chime-rattling windstorm, the endless drizzle or pelting rain, and the mottled variations of grey will always, always evoke home and comfort to me. It’s visions of blankets and warm beverages, soft crackling lights, heaters groaning in the night.
It’s Canada, Vancouver-style.
And as much as I hate the idea of leaving and plodding through this for the better part of my day, I’m already enjoying the idea of getting back home again.
Because that’s winter, Vancouver-style.
And that’s why we have warm beverages, fluffy slippers, and breathable waterproof raingear.
Whatever it takes, Wet Coast-style.

2 thoughts on “When Winter Looms, Wet Coast-Style

  1. Sylvia

    You make me nostalgic for Vancouver rain and I’m here RIGHT NOW. It didn’t rain today though. haha “I’m literary so that works for me”

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