WILD WEATHER ON THE PRAIRIES
The weather on the Prairies can range from devastating to delightful, sometimes within hours. A photographic journey of these dramatic weather events in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba is featured in this new Postmedia/Greystone book. It highlights 200 photos, from the 1890s through to modern times, selected from the archives of the Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon StarPhoenix and Winnipeg Sun.
Weather on the Prairies is the tie that binds us, unites us and gives us something to discuss around the water cooler. On any given day, we can love it, hate it, or love to hate it. Whatever we think about the weather, one thing is certain — it defines us.
Coping with a particularly harsh day, for example, is a badge of honour, worn proudly by those who make their home on the Great Plains, an endless swath of prairie land with open skies and picturesque panoramas.
Some parts of the world possess climates that can best be described as “even.” They receive even amounts of rainfall, little variance in temperatures and predictable amounts of sunshine.
It’s a different case on the Great Plains, which stretch up through the central United States and into the Prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The region experiences extreme temperature fluctuations and unexpected weather events several times each year. Many words can be used to describe the weather here — harsh, severe, fickle. Boring, however, isn’t one of them.
At times, the weather becomes downright biblical in intensity. Massive floods sweep across the land. Wicked winds uproot trees, structures and people. Snowstorms bury entire communities. Fires roar across grasslands and forests.
The events don’t, however, signal an apocalyptic end of the world. Rather, they’re just part of the wild weather of the Prairies.
As a result, the four extremes of weather — wind, water, ice, and fire — influence how we work, how we play, how we dress, how we move about, and how we come together as communities.
It’s been that way for generations. Pioneers moved to the Prairies, with dreams as big as the unending blue sky. They found a land where the sun shone and rain fell — a perfect place to plant seeds for crops and new lives.
While the weather often smiled favourably upon these settlers, storm clouds could also loom on the horizon. There were years when Mother Nature would chose to be either overly generous or stingy with rainfall. Rivers could dry up, or flood. Winds could howl. Snow could bring any community to a suffocating halt. Lightning could strike, igniting a blaze.
The climate of the Prairies, which so often nurtured life, could also prove fatal . . .
Over the years, Prairie folks were occasionally criticized for their weather obsession. An American energy expert, working in Lloydminster in the 1940s, told a board of trade meeting that “Canadians suffered from an inferiority complex,” according to a Regina Leader-Post article on Feb. 3, 1947. “This was demonstrated ... by their tendency to over-stress the cold winter weather.”
The expert, Art Knight, made the remarks on the same day that the newspaper’s front page reported on how Saskatchewan was coping with almost five weeks of continuous blizzards. Ranchers and farmers had lost thousands of cattle and other livestock. Supplies and food in small towns had dwindled to dangerously low levels. Roads were closed everywhere and trains were snowbound for months; “weary railwaymen admitted defeat. . . The weather had won.” To those dealing with a harsh winter, an inferiority complex seemed to be the least of their problems.
It’s readily apparent, however, that people indeed dwell on the weather. Just look at our language. It’s infused with weather idioms and metaphors. People take a rain cheque or save for a rainy day. They throw caution to the wind or perhaps get wind of something. They steal someone’s thunder. Break the ice. Get snowed under. Chase rainbows.
The list of weather-related phrases that litter our language is a long one, but do Prairie people obsess over the weather more than others? That’s likely the case, says one Environment Canada spokesman, who notes that the agency’s greatest number of web hits comes from Winnipeg.
The Prairies’ deep historic and economic ties with agriculture also give rise to much weather talk and weather watching.
Prairie people discuss the weather to such an extent that English classes for newcomers often address the question of why the weather is such a hot topic.
Media outlets in Canada also reflect this weather interest. They published 229 per cent more weather stories in 2014 than did media in any other country in the world, says Influence Communication, an information-monitoring firm.
It also seems that Canadians take their weather very seriously. A poll from Goodyear Canada showed 70 per cent of Canadians paid more attention to their local weather forecaster than they did to their mayor. (As an aside, 22 per cent also said they paid more attention to their local weather forecaster than they did to their significant other.)
Without the weather, we may not have much to talk about at all, the joke goes.
So, why all the weather talk? For starters, people discuss the weather because it’s interesting. For both Canadians on the Prairies and Americans living on the Great Plains, the weather can bring wild swings of temperature and conditions from day to day.
Example? In Pincher Creek, Alberta, in 1962, the mercury rose from -19 C to 22 C in just one hour. Across the Great Plains, other interesting weather stories abound. A January day in 2015 saw Montana hit a temperature colder than that recorded on the planet Mars. A 1958 tornado in Saskatchewan picked up pigs from one farm and scattered them over another, five kilometres away. A 1936 Canadian heat wave led to the death of 1,180 people. And, a 1921 rainstorm saw frogs fall from the sky over downtown Calgary. When it comes to the weather, something is always happening . . . .
When extreme weather does turn disastrous, a common theme emerges. If the weather is at its worst, people are often at their best.
It’s part of Prairie people’s DNA. In pioneer days, an entire community would show up to help a farmer if a grass fire claimed his barn, house, or crops. When a large-scale disaster such as the 1912 Regina Cyclone struck, people from far and near opened up their hearts and wallets to help. “The splendid spirit of optimism — energetic optimism — is continually becoming more apparent,” the Morning Leader (a forerunner of the Regina Leader-Post) reported shortly after the tornado hit.
The tradition stands strong in modern times, too. When the Red River spilled its banks during a massive flood in 1997, the volunteers who fought back the waters numbered more than 75,000 in Manitoba, North Dakota, and Minnesota. When calls went out for help after the Alberta floods of 2013 and the Edmonton tornado of 1987, the responses were so overwhelming that thousands of volunteers couldn’t be accommodated.
When weather events of wind, water, ice, or fire intensify to catastrophic proportions, people come together to rise above the mud, ashes and debris that surrounds them to help friends, family, neighbours and strangers. This is the legacy of people of the Prairies. It’s how they’re born and raised.