I had so many plans for the Family Day long weekend.
As the provincial holiday suggests, I hoped to have quality family time. As you may know, I always call for getting away from home to get the best of my time off. Otherwise, house duties, simple routines, work and some boring daily little things like monstrous parasites take over the long-awaited weekends and turn them into other meaningless calendar dates.
So getting away every so often is a rule for me. Even following all recommendations and having the SHA safety measures in mind, I still found some options that would allow us to create new memories and come home renewed and happy.
I started putting plans together in early February. Soon, when the frigid weather wave covered the area and my two big outdoor pooches first became temporary and then permanent residents of the house, filling it with beautiful dog's smell, I got the first doubts. But even though dogs were never trained for the house, they quickly learned the drill and figured out that to stay warm, cozy and close to us, they had to behave. We built them a den in the porch, and they seemed to agree to accept it as their new dog house. I don't think they like it in the house that much, but I know they absolutely didn't like it outside these days.
Once dogs knew what to do in the house, I got back to planning the weekend. But it all came to an end when the little red light on our sewer system lit up bright red. The pipes froze. It took a few hours, many litres of water and a kilo of salt to get the system going again. The first time.
A couple of days later, the light came on again. This time it took us (and by us I mean my poor husband who was also frozen solid by the end of that project) over 24 hours to fix the system, thaw out the pipes and make it work again. The temperature hardly went above -30 C, and the wind made it even more extreme. The smell of sewer was the only thing that survived in that frozen air. It was tough, but despite all the challenges, a day later the little light was back to slightly shimmering, its normal state.
I surrendered and agreed to a staycation with dogs, blankets and 15 more seasons of Grey's Anatomy that I've never watched before. But the entire situation once again reminded me of how teeny-weeny and powerless we are in the face of nature.
We often feel that we conquered the world around us and are eager to explore and populate other planets, but the reality is we are now probably even weaker than we used to be in our relationship with the environment.
People that were populating what's now Saskatchewan came here with no technologies, furnaces and heaters, gas or electric stoves. They had the fire. They knew how to start and how to keep it going. They built shelters and they had furs of animals they could kill and skin with tools and weapons they made themselves.
They had each other, and they had nobody else to expect help from or to blame for the challenges. They had all they needed to survive these frigid deadly-cold winters.
People that originally lived on these lands were much tougher than we are now, but I tend to think that they also knew how helpless they were when moody nature changed. And they lived accordingly.
We, on the other hand, are vain and proud, which so often makes us blind. We live from day to day, often forgetting that we are not the ones controlling the world. We are so developed, that in reality, it makes us way more underdeveloped than our predecessors.
Most of us don't know how to start a fire, find our way if we are lost, provide for ourselves or find clean water. Some basic survival skills. We hunt from our vehicles using guns. Some people do use bows and arrows, but I don't think most of them would be able to make a good bow. We don't know anything about wild plants and mushrooms. We don't know how to read the signs of nature.
Not only have we abandoned some of this basic knowledge, we often ignore simple safety tips that could help us face nature if we are forced to. (Most people even don't find it necessary to throw a survival kit into their trunk when travelling on these cold days.)
We plan for our lives as if we were almighty. But quite often it takes nature to slightly move its pinky to ruin all our big plans.
