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22
Dec
2021
Sunday December 5, 2021
After two weeks of reporting on B.C.’s floods, evacuations, washouts, and landslides, the CBC’s David Common was asked for his personal reaction to what he had seen.
He paused to think. I could see him collecting his thoughts, to avoid rambling or repeating what he had already said.
Water, he said. The sheer power of something that most of us take for granted.
Indeed, most of us do take water for granted. We think of water as benign. Friendly. Necessary.
This last few weeks, water has gone out of control.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: water, BC, McLuhan, floods
7
Feb
We had a mighty wind one night. It sounded like a freight train rumbling by outside – loud enough that I assumed the snowplow must be coming down our street, dragging its blade along the pavement.
But it wasn’t.
When I woke, I looked outside. No snow.
The house was eerily quiet. And chilly.
No power. No light. No heat.
And no phone. Not even the hard-wired landline had a dial tone.
Plus, the battery on my cell phone was down; I couldn’t recharge it.
No internet, no email – the cable modem needs plug-in power.
I thought I could at least have a shower. No water.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: light, water, power
16
Sep
2019
I stepped out the front door of the theatre last Saturday night just as the first drops of rain fell. The drops felt as big as marbles.
I ran for my car.
Then the rain came pounding down. Too much, too fast, for windshield wipers to keep up.
Driving home, I counted the gaps between flashes of lightning. Three to five seconds. Once, I got to ten seconds before the next flash.
Water coursed down the gutters. Tree branches, bent under the weight of water running off their leaves, thrashed in gusts of wind.
And I was not in the Bahamas. Where Hurricane Dorian had wreaked utter havoc earlier that week.
Tags: water, Hurricanes, oceans
15
Mar
2017
Towards the end of the cross-country ski season, a friend mused, “Does snow feel pain when I jab it with my ski pole?”
We all laughed.
“Why not?” she persisted. “Aren’t we all made of the same stardust? Everything in the universe came from the Big Bang. Whether it’s snow or trees or me, we all consist of the matter that was created 14 billion years ago. So why should I assume that I’m the only one who feels pain when I get jabbed with something sharp?”
A physicist will tell you that all matter is made up of particles. For convenience, we call them electrons and protons. But there are no exclusively human electrons and protons; no uniquely human quarks or gluons. At the sub-atomic level, water is made of exactly the same stuff as humans.
So why can’t water feel pain?
Tags: life, Snow, water, pain