Joe McWilliams
On an average January day around here, you will have, say, a -25C wind chill. I walk to work most days, and though it takes me less than 15 minutes, I dislike freezing my exposed flesh, so I cover my ears and my hands. I do this because, as everybody knows, at such temperatures, frostbite can happen within three or four minutes.
Or do people know this?
Apparently they don’t, or else they don’t care. Because every day I see:
- Young women wearing ripped jeans with plenty of exposed skin;
- Women wearing calf-length pants and no socks, gloves and with also nothing on their heads. Usually, but not always, their kids are better dressed for the weather;
- Kids, by the dozen on their way to junior high and high school, some with no decent jacket, many with nothing on their heads or hands. Some of them are really freezing, in spite of their efforts to not show it;
- Vehicles warming up outside houses for up to half an hour (or more), so the owners don’t have to acknowledge the cold for more than 10 seconds at a stretch. Most have been started from the comfort of the kitchen, reducing that already brief brush with reality;
- Forests of baseball caps, the preferred year-round headgear of Canadians (the further north you go, the more popular they seem to be). No matter how cold it gets in these parts, tough guys prefer to wear their old baseball cap to anything that covers the ears.
One very cold morning recently, a guy driving a forklift passed down the street. He was wearing a ball cap and clearly suffering, but was too proud or stubborn to put up his hood.
One result of the refusal to acknowledge and dress for the weather, of course, is that people aren’t able to spend much time outside. Thus, all the vehicles idling for all those accumulated hours with no one in them.
If you add it all up, there are probably millions of dollars worth of energy going up in carbon monoxide every winter. Why? Because we want to pretend we’re living in Vancouver?
Fashion has a lot to do with it. It’s uncool to cover one’s ears, unless you’re skiing. Even ice fishing people try to avoid the tuque if they can.
Women who feel they must go sockless to work when it’s 30C below are bound to find ways to avoid venturing outdoors. Likewise, everyone else whose ears haven’t already lost all sensation.
So, what we have is an indoor culture developing, driven by our desire to look a certain way.
What I think is really interesting is that along with this mass denial of winter is the trend toward warmer winter weather. Everybody talks about how it isn’t as cold as it used to be.
Maybe there’s a connection? The Transcendental Meditation people claim that if enough people get together and meditate, it can change the social and political climate of a country.
If that’s true, maybe all this concerted winter-denial by Canadians is affecting the weather. If so, we’d better slow down on it before the ice caps start melting.