Snowstorms howl, oceans roar

David Sherman

Back home, as they were getting walloped by 30 or 40 cms of snow, we were on vacation getting trashed by three or four thousand miles of ocean, give or take a thousand or two. The snow howls, the ocean roars. A snowstorm peters out and you shovel or get out the snowblower or hire a snow plow, the ocean doesn’t peter out. It’s moody, persistent as it is insistent. Good luck trying to shovel or plow or blow an ocean. It laughs at you.

A good ocean is endless, stretches to the end of the horizon and beyond. Snow comes in winter and maybe it teases us a bit in spring and fall. The ocean doesn’t tease. It’s in basic “don’t screw with me mode” 24/7, 12 months a year.

Winter in our home in the Laurentians, north of Montreal, has its good and bad days. Sometimes, as a long-gone comic said on TV a hundred years ago, “It was so cold last night I fell out of bed and my pajamas broke.”

Other days, it melts the snow in your ice-packed driveway so you have your own sea of slush. When you don billy boots to slog through the mush, the temperature plunges like a wave hitting the shore and your driveway becomes a downhill bobsled run. Unfortunately, you have no bobsled so you slide down on your ass or claw your way up with your fingernails.

The Atlantic Ocean has one temperature. Cold. In winter it’s cold. In summer it’s cold. If you’re brave or crazy, you toy with it. Taking a dip is exhilarating, debilitating and, if a rip tide doesn’t drag you to Africa, you will survive, though you will crawl back onto dry land considerably less of a man.

If you were born male, but there was a mistake in the factory and you were meant to be female, you can avoid pain and costly surgery by bouncing around in the waves for an hour.

Some fight the chill by sporting wet suits. There’s nothing like swimming against the tide in a soggy rubber suit, which, I have read, can be temperature adjusted by urinating in it. Probably best not to do this at home when cold in bed.

Of course, anything you wear when daring the ocean will turn into a soggy suit, including the one you were born in.

The benefit of a rubber suit, users of which qualify for a rubber room, is it can be dried painlessly. People hang them to dry from their car or van doors. Habituées of rubber wear seem to gather together in lots reserved for camper vans, the doors of which all look like dried out people are hanging off them.

Snow storms, as any Canadian will tell you, can be enjoyed with long underwear, a few sweaters, thick socks, a good coat, a hat and scarf to be forgotten the first time you wear them to a friend’s party or a restaurant. A storm can be enjoyed, even when gusts threaten to blow you back up the driveway you just slid down. Yes, there is the off chance the winds will dislodge a branch and turn your head into a baseball and send it a few hundred yards, so best slog through fields on snowshoes or skis. Snowshoes or cross-country skis and two-thousand dollars-worth of winter wear let you master the worst snow storm, unless it takes out a few trees and you with it.

An ocean storm? Forget about it. You can para-glide off a cliff and sail over the sea, unless the wind changes and turns you into part of the cliff.

You can surf or paddle board but the ocean can get rambunctious and turn you and the board upside down. When it’s you vs the board, the board wins, 10 out of 10 times.

The power and fury are best enjoyed from a balcony of a B&B a few hundred yards away. The bottom of the ocean is littered with ships from the last 5,000 years captained by men who believed their appetite for spices and other sundries, like slaves and colonization, could tame the ocean.

Unlike a howling snowstorm, the ocean roars. And pours salt in your wounds.

You cannot spend time within a mile of the sea without being doused in enough salt to flavour several supermarket roasted chickens. Its flavouring is insidious but with a little self-inspection, you will find salt seasoning your hair, your nose, your ears, inside and out, your naval and is right at home between your toes and in your eyes. And places the sun don’t shine. It flies in on those gentle ocean breezes but doesn’t fly out again.

There are no salt shakers on any tables in local eateries. You just scratch your face or shake your head and your dinner’s flavour is amped up.

Digging it out of your ears at dinner might not be in the best taste or interests of other customers but since you’ll never see them again …

The other constant of a beach that a snow storm cannot provide is sand. The sand is the magical residue of sea shells, Parrotfish dung and other sources and dates back several thousand to several million years.

Either way, it has a bipolar relationship with humans. It’s delightful to walk in, sculpt with, lie in or bury yourself in, as long as you remember to not fill mouth and nose.

On the other side, walking in it can inflame spine, knees or hips. It will bury itself in your sandwich and, like its sister, salt, find its way into your eyes and ears and naval and, of course, between your toes.

Unlike salt, however, it does not dissolve in water and no matter how much you wipe your shoes or feet, it will transform your shower, bathroom floor and even your room, into a mini-beach. It climbs into your bed looking for a cozy night’s sleep. It perhaps can be used to sandblast the salt from your skin, but it’s not a medically sound method of skin abrasion.

Like snowstorms, oceans have their awesome beauty, tinged with varying degrees of danger that, perhaps, only embellish their attraction.

And, now, with global warming, snowstorms are increasing and oceans are rising. How high, we don’t know. But, as God hinted to Noah before the biblical flood, according to Bill Cosby, “How long can you tread water?”