Friends warned me before I moved to Canada that Ottawa is the world's coldest capital next to Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia. But I had spent three years in Michigan which isn't exactly the Middle East. Besides, I reasoned, buildings and cars are heated and warm clothes protect you well. It took me only a while to discover that Michigan is like the tropics compared to Canada. Canada and nature have lived in a love-hate relationship for ages, since long before Canada became a country. Determined to survive in the bitterly cold and harsh land, Eskimos - now called Inuit - built igloos for shelter.
Erected with thick ice, the round structure protected them and their animals from ice, cold and snow. They ventured out to hunt and returned with food and hides. So life went on in grim simplicity with mere survival the main goal of every living being. Then man started to harness nature to serve his needs and wishes. He built sophisticated homes, heated them to provide comfort, used potent weapons to hunt, carved roads atop rugged mountains, built a civilization that provided a normal life, a flourishing trade and recreation that uplifted the spirits. He sailed over oceans and flew high in the air. In many ways he mastered nature and arrogantly defied nature's many whims. But nature has a way of letting people know that it can unleash death and destruction through storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes, landslides, erupting volcanoes, extreme cold or searing heat. It provides water for sustenance and yields fruits and crops for man and beast. Nature is benign, as well as cruel, man's friend as well as foe, reliable and yet unpredictable. This year's severe winter in Canada again portrays man and nature in a savage struggle. Experience tells me that nature's frown eventually turns into a friendly smile and life becomes enjoyable again for those suffering misery. Occasionally, though, we have to put up with nature's wrath. Central heating, comfortable transportation and warm clothes do make winter easy to bear. People also skate, ski and play ice hockey. They have winter festivals where they build ice sculptures that seem to rival the Taj Mahal.
Still, people with money and love for the sun say, no thanks, and fly south. Not being bears, who hibernate in the winter and wake up when spring arrives, they seek refuge in warm places. I remember some years when winter chilled the bones. In 1970-71 more than 14 feet of snow fell and came up to the roofs. The Ottawa Citizen distributed certificates, signed by Mayor Kenneth Fogarty, saying proudly that the bearer lived through all that snow. That was nothing compared to the ice storm of 1998 in Ontario and Quebec that toppled electricity wires and pylons and kept people shivering in the dark for weeks. Our home was left without power for days and my mother had to shift to my sister's place where the wires are underground and electricity was not disrupted. Canadians had experienced nothing like it before. This year, however, winter hit across a broad swath that covered most of Canada and large parts of the United States, including as far south as Florida and Alabama. In Ottawa it got as cold as at the South and North Poles. In Manitoba, and parts of Ontario, the media said - wrongly - that it got as cold as it does on Mars. I was grateful that I am retired and do not have to wait for the bus at quarter to seven in the morning. The bus stops are not heated in Ottawa and the bus shelter in our area was removed entirely after it had been repeatedly vandalized. Carleton University students, who went to the Antarctica for research, enjoyed balmier weather than in Ottawa. Normally I get handymen to remove snow from our roof because it becomes heavy and bulky. This year so much snow fell that in mid-December we had to get the ice removed from our roof. This year Ottawa had it relatively easy. It is Toronto and the Maritime provinces that bore the brunt of the devastation. Flights were cancelled and people were stranded at the airports or inside planes. Ice toppled trees and electric wires and more than 600,000 people in Toronto alone shivered in the dark, or moved to shelter or with relatives to survive. Billions of dollars were lost to the economy. Many people could not even escape to warmer climes because the airports were closed. Even if they had gone, they would have found freezing weather in many places in the south. In Karachi, Pakistan, the temperature dipped to 4 degrees. Quetta was as brutally cold as Ottawa but lacked amenities, even gas. Cairo had snow flurries for the first time in 100 years. Yet some people in Ottawa went camping, some dipped in the frozen water for fun and some who like living on the streets refused offers to move into shelters. Among 200,000 applicants worldwide, 8,243 Canadians applied for a one-way mission to Mars. Nature is hard to fathom, but man even more so in many cases.
— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.
