In Search of a Snowfall

I have harboured a long-time desire  to witness a snowfall. It made me go up to Auli – a Himalayan ski resort at an elevation of about 10,000 feet and sub-zero temperatures, in end December of 2010, only to witness snow coming out of snow cannons, for skiers who had booked slots a couple of years in advance. It was like tooth-paste on a mountain slope. 

I have seen “fallen snow” in so many places across the world, but never a snowfall. Thus when events finally made it possible for me to visit Canada during the last week of November the following year, I was thrilled. We were to go to Winnipeg (the city where Winnie the Pooh was born) to meet a customer. I read up some sites on Canada and started dreaming about snow and snowfalls…. I also borrowed some stuff from colleagues who had been there before – a monkey cap (yes, for the first time in my life !!!), gloves and a Papa Grizzly jacket. These jackets are meant for the Canadian winter and I can find no other expression to describe them…

The route was Kolkata – Dubai – Toronto and then a domestic flight from Toronto to Winnipeg.

The Dubai – Toronto leg was all of fourteen hours in an A380 aircraft – my first on that plane. (The A380 does provide one with a very different flying experience, but that is another story.)

If you lay the surface of the earth on a flat Euclidian plane, then the contours of the sunlit area form a parabola. (I do not know why that happens and if you can’t figure that out, ask Euclid – he was the fellow who said it…).

Our flight path to Toronto from Dubai followed this parabolic contour; one-side of the plane was always in the sun, the other in darkness. We flew straight up north from Dubai, over Iran, the Caspian Sea, the Russian plains,  then in a wide curve over Sweden, Norway, crossing the Norwegian Sea north of Iceland, past the southern tip of  Greenland, then over the Labrador Sea, Newfoundland and Quebec province, finally landing at Toronto.  We actually did not turn south – we went straight across the globe and Toronto came in our path. (That is where I guess Euclid gave up in sheer desperation and 3-D geometry was born…)

We flew above dense white clouds for the entire area from north of the Caspian Sea till the southern parts of Quebec province, I really could not see anything down below, except for a few frozen bodies of water amid green grass that were visible through some holes in the clouds over Newfoundland. The cloud cover slowly dispersed as we started our descent towards Toronto. All I could see were brown fields with grain waiting to be harvested…. The whole of the Canadian plains seemed to be divided into large rectangular plots in myriad shades of brown. Not a speck of snow anywhere.

We landed in Toronto around two in the afternoon on a Monday, where the outside temperature was a healthy eight degrees Celsius with a wind chill that made it seem like four. Got out of Terminal 1, had a smoke outside, took a sky-train to Terminal 3 for the next leg of our flight.

Snow ? Where was the snow ? And the cold ?

At Terminal 3, I met my first home-grown Canadian – she was the security person standing at the check-in counter. An elderly lady in police uniform, with a walkie-talkie; she asked if I had any liquids, explosives or firearms in my baggage…. Then looking at my sealed baggage still with the tags from the previous flight and my stunned expression, she burst out laughing. “I know it is silly, but I am still required to ask you that firearms question,” she said.

“And what if he says ‘yes’ ?” asked her colleague, another security officer, a tall lady with sparkling eyes. “Oh, then I would like to run and leave him to his designs,” said the first one, and we all burst out laughing. A far cry, indeed, from the typical security folks we come across in most airports of the world…

We took off for Winnipeg at around six in the evening. It was pitch-dark and I was unable to get a window-seat. The stewardess greeted us saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the flight to Honolulu, Hawaii.”  There was a gentle chuckle from the crowd and then she explained that we would need to refuel at Winnipeg on the way…. Some more Canadian humor.

The air-hostesses were quite lady-like and smiling but after observing the calm insouciance with which they picked up pieces of heavy cabin luggage and swung them into the overhead lockers with one clean sweep after another, I decided against becoming too friendly with them. (I generally steer clear of visibly strong women given my delicate build, like a bottle-gourd on a diet – a survival skill honed through nursery-school skirmishes with female class-mates….)

As we were coming in to land at Winnipeg, I was thrilled to see snow everywhere…. The airport was covered in a white sheet of snow…. Wow !!!! They said that the outside temperature was minus eight degrees Celsius, with the wind chill taking it to minus fourteen !!! Aha !! I was beginning to feel happy finally. My colleague assured me that “snowfalls were round the corner"….

We got out of the airport terminal and had to walk to one corner of the building to have a smoke. By the time I lit up and had a couple of puffs, my ears had fallen off and I was wearing a couple of cold metal tubes in place of jeans. All the stuff I had brought from India for this weather was still locked up in the suitcase. About five or seven puffs later, the cigarette simply fell off my frozen fingers into the snow. We rushed into a taxi – and warmth, and reached our hotel some time later.

All hotels in Canada are non-smoking and “if someone spoiled your room by smoking, then they would charge you, as the room-owner, five hundred Canadian Dollars for operation cleanup”.  That meant every time we wanted to have a smoke, we would have to go out into minus fourteen degrees and do it. Pretty challenging thought, that. But the snow made all the difference – it had snowed over the weekend before we landed and everything was beautifully white.

I switched on the TV for weather forecasts and then my hopes began to fade. They said it would not snow in Winnipeg for the next few days. The next morning the temperature was around zero with the wind chill taking it to minus four. We went about our business and then for lunch at the “Concourse”….

All major buildings in downtown Winnipeg are connected by a vast network of underground tunnels that house supermarkets, post-offices, food courts and what-not; one does not need to go out into the wintry cold at all, unless one is going home. These are known as “Concourses”.

As we were chatting up some people from our customer’s office, my colleague mentioned that I was desperate to see a snowfall and one lady said, “How sad, the weather is unusually balmy for this time of the year..”

“Balmy ? Balmy !!! Balmy ???? The Webster English Dictionary says, balmy means mild, summer-like, warm.  At zero degrees, with a wind chill to make it minus four, she calls it “balmy” ? And then it dawned on me - she was speaking Canadian !!!! Definitely not English. But that cognitive Canadian balm was yet to embalm my conative Indian yearning…snow…??

For the next two days, the TV kept saying it was snowing here and there, all over the place – Johnson, Halifax, Polson, Bolson, His son, Her son, St. John’s, St. Peter’s and half of the apostles’ towns, but not in Winnipeg. The weather turned steadily warmer and the snow kept melting off the streets. On day three, we had walked for about a kilometer to the office and I was actually sweating. Yes. I. Was. Sweating. The Papa Grizzly jacket had become useless.

And just to let you know, while the rest of the world has snow, the Canadians have it in three flavours – flurries, snow and ice pellets. All those places around Winnipeg got their fill of flurries and pellets, while the snow kept melting off the streets of Winnipeg.

These Canadian weathermen, so unlike their colleagues at Alipore in Kolkata, are dreadfully accurate – I wished they got hit with ice pellets.

We took the plane out of Winnipeg and back to Toronto on Wednesday afternoon. The flat lands of Manitoba State, of which Winnipeg is the capital, were still covered in snow. And the flat lands around Toronto still had crops waiting to be harvested. Toronto was a “balmy” thirteen degrees with bright sunshine (that’s “balmy” in English not Canadian). As we planned to leave Toronto that Friday, the TV forecast snow for Winnipeg the following Monday. And snow for Toronto as well, the day after.

Having witnessed first-hand the early Canadian winter, I have decided not to believe anyone any more. Late November in Canada is just like late November in Kolkata. Only colder. And more windy.

Meanwhile, my search for a snowfall will have to wait some more – for another time, another place.

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