Winter solstice heralds new life
On the official calendar, 2015 doesn’t depart for another 12 days, when we will ring in the new year with the traditional noisy parties, countdowns to midnight, champagne toasts and bittersweet renditions of Auld Lang Syne. But on the other calendar, the one marked off in celestial measure by the sundial’s ration of light and shadow, the year ends with the winter solstice on Tuesday night at 8:49 p.m. That’s when the year in the northern hemisphere sinks to its lowest point, the day eight hours and 14 minutes shorter than at its counterpoint six months earlier. Darkness now covers two-thirds of the 24 hours on the clock.
In truth, the frosty boots of winter have been on the march toward Tuesday’s seasonal coronation for some time now. Writers have described B.C. as “this ragged place” after its stunningly beautiful coastline of reefs and islets, headlands and fiords. But it’s a place as ragged vertically as it is horizontally, a crumpled series of austere mountain ranges and lush, river-braided valleys, of high plateaus and steep canyons, gloomy forest and burnished prairie where the wind skitters cat’s paws across the grass.
Winter, when it returns each year, strides down the mountain staircase. Behind it a shining mantle of snow — in some places it is already more than 150 centimetres deep — cloaks the high country in ermine and diamonds. From Mount Washington, that brooding outlier of the Vancouver Island Range, to Hudson Bay Mountain at Smithers to Nelson’s Ymir Mountain in the Selkirk Range (named for the first of the Norse gods), the snow is deep and getting deeper. It drifts over the dens of hibernating grizzly bears whose hearts slow from 40 beats per minute to eight. Females that weigh as much as 300 kilograms will give birth in their long sleep to blind, hairless cubs weighing 0.5 kg or less, a scant 0.16 per cent of their mother’s weight. Beyond the warm dens, snow muffles the streams, their noisy currents already silenced in a locker of black ice. That same snow provides the winter highway for snowshoe hares and a canvas for the silent, snowy owls, the big-footed lynx and the fierce wolverines that reign over the winter landscape.
Yet if Tuesday’s solstice marks the official start of winter, it also marks the beginning of its unofficial end. To be sure, there’s more snow to come, metres of it, and the great storms of the season will continue to lash the outer coast. But deep in the gravel of those frozen, apparently lifeless streams, newly hatched salmon and steelhead alevins will soon begin to wriggle among the lightless interstices between the pebbles, waiting to emerge for the spring freshets that will launch a new cycle of life. And deep in the black soil of the south coast, the first stirring of new life will ease the waiting bulbs of snowdrops, crocuses and early daffodils. In a scant six weeks or so, the first of them will begin to gleam amid the winter debris of South Coast gardens and it will be spring that begins its march up the river valleys and mountain slopes, melting the cornices of blown snow that now adorn our glittering peaks.