We’ve been lucky in Tumbler Ridge for the last few years. With the exception of the current situation, we haven’t had a major cold snap for quite a while.
Indeed, old timers on Facebook were saying they couldn’t remember the last time it stayed so cold for so long, positing that it hadn’t ever been this cold for this long in the 35 years they’d been here.
To be fair, February 3, 2019 was the coldest February 3 ever, hitting -38.5 at the closest official weather station in Chetwynd, and when they update the stats, February 4 (the day the paper is getting sent to press) will probably be a record breaker, too.
Still, I thought it a funny thing to say, because I seem to remember -30 for a week or two being the norm a decade or so back. As I write this, it has been below -20 for the last three days, with tomorrow expected to warm up to -18.
Indeed, I remember one year (I don’t remember which year, but I do remember I still had the old Escort Wagon, which we had when we moved here in the early 2000s so, um, early 2000s?) driving along Willow at -40 or so, and the shocks were frozen so stiff that I hit a pothole and the engine stopped. Dead. In the middle of the road.
Turns out I jarred the car so hard that the fuel shut off switch flipped, and shut the engine down.
And there were many days when I was working for Peace PhotoGraphics in Dawson when the Jetta Diesel that me and my then-brother-in-law wouldn’t start because the diesel had turned to gel, which happens when the temperature hits -30.
Indeed, I remember the days when going snowshoeing at -30 was just what you did, because if you were to wait until it was nice (like, say, -15 or so) you might be waiting a month.
It was on one such snowshoe trip down Quality Creek to visit a set of inverted dinosaur tracks that had been discovered that I went through the ice.
“Oh, crap,” I thought, as I started scrambling out of the hole. “I’m dead.”
But I managed to get out without getting wet and turned back to look. Turns out it was so cold that the entire creek had frozen solid, and I had just happened to fall through an air pocket. No running water to be seen, much to my good fortune.
Yup. Tumbler Ridge can get really really cold in February. But it can also get pretty warm.
Picking on the same pair of days, the warmest Feb 3 ever was in 2011, at 7.9 C. The warmest Feb 4 was 9.7 C in 1984.
Actually, I probably shouldn’t say “ever”, as the official weather station has only been in Chetwynd since 1983.
Before that, we have to rely on our memories.
And our memories? They’re not really very reliable, it turns out. While I’m pretty sure that I went through the ice on a frosty hike down the creek, I can’t verify that what I remember is what actually happened, because the mind isn’t like a video camera, recording everything onto the hard drive of our brains.
Instead, memories are more like recipes. There was 1 cup of freezing cold, a dollop of snowshoeing in the winter, a helping tablespoon of abject terror and this one special moment that the brain has actually stored from that event. All the other pieces come from analogues. From similar experiences. Instead of remembering that exact experience, the brain has a framework and fills in the blanks with the bits and pieces of the whole.
Richard Mohs has this to say about the process over on howstuffworks.com:
“What seems to be a single memory is actually a complex construction. If you think of an object — say, a pen — your brain retrieves the object’s name, its shape, its function, the sound when it scratches across the page. Each part of the memory of what a “pen” is comes from a different region of the brain. The entire image of “pen” is actively reconstructed by the brain from many different areas. Neurologists are only beginning to understand how the parts are reassembled into a coherent whole.”
Still, this is something that happens to other people, and not to us, we tell ourselves. We believe this so strongly that some people justify their faulty memory by claiming that we come from an alternate universe.
Seriously? Yes.
In 1985, Nelson Mandela died in his South African prison. The nation mourned. It was on the news.
It never happened. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and was president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and he died in 2013.
Yet here are many people who believe he died in the 1980s. So many that it has given rise to a new line of pseudo-scientific musings: the Mandela Effect.
If you think the Berenstain Bears were actually the Berenstein Bears (with an E), or that Looney Tunes was Looney Toons, you, too might have come from an alternative reality.
Or, you know, your memory is just playing tricks on you.
Because our brains are unreliable narrators of our lives. It likes to make us the hero of the story, when we were at best the sidekick. It likes to tell us that, when we were young, it was -40 from November to April, and we had to walk uphill in the snow every day.
One last quote, from Craig Good, a filmmaker at the California College of the arts and a contributor to the Skeptoid Podcast:
“We are a story our brain tells itself, and our brains are motivated, skilled, pathological liars.”
