Happy Vernal Equinox!

Today in Northern Town marks a day, like everywhere else in the world, in which day length is equal to the length of night. (This is actually not quite true: day is longer by about 14 minutes. The wikipedia entry I linked to has a good explanation for this.)

Today the sun is up and doing its best to shine through an ice fog that settled over our town during the night. The fog creates a lovely bright hazy effect, causing the sunlight to scatter and refract more than usual on an otherwise cloudless day. Combined with the normal reflection of light from our ever-present snow, sun glasses are needed even if one is facing away from the sun.

Although our calendars mark today as the first day of spring, all you bright readers out there surely realize that the timing of spring will vary according to latitude, as well as altitude. This means that although the fruit trees are in full bloom down on Vancouver Island, up here in Northern Town, it is winter as usual; our spring won’t come for a few more months. Break-up probably won’t happen on the rivers until the end of May and the beginning of June will see the first flowers begin to bloom, pushing through occasional clumps of snow left melting in the shadows.

This morning it was -39C without a bit of wind to blow away the ice fog. Our forecast predicts a warmer weekend, with highs of about -20C. Community members are glad as there is a carnival happening in one of the nearby hamlets (in celebration of the spring equinox, as best I can determine) and participants won’t be nearly as cold as they might have been as they enjoy the weekend’s events.

ManNorth and I won’t be heading to Western Hamlet to watch the sled dog races, snow mobile races nor to join in a potluck or dance a jig at the community dance. We’ll wait for Northern Town’s own celebration to come in a few weeks’ time when we’ll likely watch some of the sled dog races down on the river.

Yesterday I had a meeting in this nearby hamlet and after the meeting was done, joined a co-worker who wanted to visit a relative who lived there. We were treated to freshly cooked whitefish (luk zheii) and I ate baked fish eggs, or ik’in, for the first time. Unlike caviar, they weren’t “fishy” tasting at all and were so rich that only a few fork-fulls filled me up for the rest of the evening. (Of course, the homemade donut I was also served helped too!)

I had a rather embarrassing experience just before the meeting when I used the women’s washroom facility after our long drive along an ice road to Western Hamlet. I didn’t think to look before it was too late and when I needed it, I couldn’t find the toilet paper, and so made use of a box of tissues that was sitting on the tank of the toilet. Unfortunately, a handful of tissues emerged with the pull of a single tissue and having inadvertently handled them all, I wasn’t about to try to put any back. All of them were added to the toilet whereupon I discovered that the toilet wouldn’t flush. I took the back off the tank, thinking that perhaps the handle had disconnected from something and discovered that the tank was almost completely empty.
I moved to the sink to wash up and realized that not only was there no water for the toilet, there was also none running from the faucet. As there were no warning signs up on the door to the washroom, I thought that the facility manager should be advised of the problem and so although embarrassed about leaving behind obvious evidence of use and not being able to wash my hands, I sought out the manager (who is also a council member) I had just met for the first time minutes before. I explained the problem and then was mortified to discover that the building “has no water”, and that this was known to the general public and it was expected that I knew this too. I also learned later that even if the water had been on, no one in Western Hamlet flushes toilet paper or tissues and that the wastebasket next to the toilet should be an obvious clue to this. (There was no wastebasket in the washroom I used.)

Sigh.

The reason I attended this meeting was simply to introduce myself to the council members. Although not for the reasons I’d intended, at least now I know that they’ll remember me.