Yesterday

South of St. Anne-de-Sabrevois, Québec. What you can't hear is the howling of the wind; what you can't see is how fast the snow was moving across the flats.

It was not pleasant outside the car. We stopped twice so that J. could take pictures (I took these from inside!) In places where the plowed snowbanks were higher - around the height of the car - the snow was blowing off the top of the bank in a swirl that went up and over us and the other cars on the road like a huge wave. Although I've lived in snow-country all my life, and have had to deal with blowing and drifting conditions, I've never seen anything quite as dramatic as what we saw yesterday, on the vast flats of cornfields in southern Quebec. It was like a movie of a sandstorm in the Sahara.

The second time, not far from the border, a police car drew up beside us within five minutes. In polite French they asked J. to please move on because it was "too dangerous." They were right that the whiteout conditions were dangerous, but they were also predictable and local: if you parked, as we had, where there was a house or barn or a row of tall, old poplars to break the wind, the snow wasn't drifting and blowing - and the wind was absolutely  steady from the west, so it wasn't going to swirl around and change directions. But that was OK; we were happy enough to move, and as the police car took off ahead of us, we watched it fishtail down the road. The windows were dark in the school windows, and we passed several local roads that were in the process of being closed.

Across the border, we stopped for coffee in St. Albans. An older man in a snowmobile suit was gesturing excitedly to anyone who would listen in the line of people filling up their mugs with Green Mountain coffee at 8:30 am: "The worst conditions all winter!" he exclaimed. "You should see it out there on the back roads!"I wondered if the ice-fishing shanties on Lake Champlain were all blowing across the frozen surface, with fellows like this one slipping and sliding after them, balancing an armload of pails and tip-ups and six-packs of beer.

Comments

[Dave]

My kind of weather! I'm jealous.

[Scott]

I drove that road in similar conditions a few years ago. It's wonderful! Like being on another planet, as being in Quebec so delightfully and often is.

[anasalwa]

beth,
I'm glad we are out of it, for now.

[Bill]

Funny humans.

Tip-ups? This puke had to study that one. (Did you know Missouri is the puke state?)

Beth you make me think of the darn'dest things. Ice around here is something you break through. Was it "Middlesex", whose author I can't even at the moment recall--Eugenides--that's it I hope, who wrote of two brothers in a Cadillac at night driving out on the ice of Lake Michigan toward open water, one to commit suicide by driving on, the other to save himself by bailing out onto hard, still ice?

You post on a bright morning, I think of night.
You post a picture of night, I think of sun.