I think most people's idea of the prairies is barren and dry grasslands. If they were airlifted into our neighbourhood this month they would have a hard time orienting themselves. Oh, we have grass - that much is true - but at the moment it's lush green grass, and it harbours a mosquito population that is right off the charts.
It's much closer to the mark to describe the prairies as a place of extremes. We can have bitter, bitter cold in the winter and blazing heat in the summer. Likewise, dry in any season is not uncommon, but we can also get tons of snow in the winter and plentiful rains in the summer. Then there's this year - I think we passed "plentiful" a couple weeks ago, and are now well past "soggy".
We travelled to Dauphin, Manitoba last weekend for a family wedding. It's about a 4 1/2 hour drive northeast of here and the whole trip showed us water laying in the fields and ditches. There was crop under water and fields too wet to seed or spray. Due to family circumstances (our daughter-in-law went into labour) our trip took us into Winnepeg the next day to see a gorgeous set of twin boys born seven weeks early but doing very well. As we travelled east it was hard to believe that the land just kept getting wetter and wetter. There was field after field where the farmers had driven through the mud trying to create a run-off path for the water with the tracks of their tractors. If it had worked I'd hate to think of how much water had been there when they started. There was still water laying everywhere, but now it had a double set of ruts every 100 feet or so.
And the mosquitos! Public Health agencies have been educating us for years about the dangers of having stagnant water laying around for mosquitos to incubate in. With West Nile Virus a proven threat on the prairies we've heard even more about it lately. I wonder what they think we're going to be able to do about it - if there was a way of getting rid of the excess water, the farmers would have done it long ago.
The other aspect to prairie weather is the force it's delivered with. In the winter it's blizzards - cold, howling winds, and blinding snow that can go on for days, and in the summer this is the place to see thunderstorms second to none. I'd never given this much thought until, a few years ago, I was talking to a girl I went to school with who now lives in B.C. She was home to visit her parents and was so happy that her teenaged daughter had had the chance to witness a thunderstorm the night before. She said it was something she really missed, living where there was lots of rain, but seldom any storms. I'm sure I would too - I love the noise and the light show of a big storm. I guess prairie poeple are of the extreme nature too.
1 comment:
Jocelyn;
One thing that Canada and the U.S. have in common is weather extremes on the prairies. Really the only truly bone-dry places that I can think of here that are naturally so are the great deserts of the West.
It sounds like you all have really been taking a severe rain hit. I wish you could send some of that our way...it has been over a week since we've had any rain, and even then it was just a shower. We had a very wet spring, but the lack of water of late has caused the price of corn (the staple around here this time of year) to start going up.
One thing about the wet spings we have had over the last several years is that, while they have severely delayed the planting season, they have also insured that water will be plentiful for much of the summer, even during dry periods. That's a relief to anyone who remembers the drought of 1988...a disaster which it is said in these parts was "biblical." From March until August, there was NO rain...none..The soil became so dry that no one's crops came in...The Ohio River even appeared as though it were about to run dry. What made it worse was that the drought was so pervasive that nearly every county in the state enforced rigid water consumption standards for the entire summer in order to prevent the reserviors from drying up. I remember attending a ceremony that year in which some first nations people came to the town square in my home town to hold a rain ceremony. The Drought of '88 was something no one who experienced it here will ever forget, and I think the general attitude here from people on and off the farm of that after that experience, too much water is easier to deal with than not enough. We've never had a summer like that one since then.
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