Funny Weather

Observing the changes at a glacial lake on Vancouver Island throughout the year, Naomi Racz is unsettled as the usual seasonal patterns are disrupted

Words: Naomi Racz

Spring

It’s an early spring day, still jacket weather but much warmer than it has been, when I first see Comox Lake. My husband, Spencer, and I, and our toddler, Clara, have been living in a village not far from this body of water for a few months, but it has been a cold winter—frosty mornings, snow-muffled days, and nights so crisp and clear that the stars looked as though they too were ice. On this chill spring day, the beach is almost deserted, except for a woman and two young children huddled on a picnic blanket. The campgrounds are closed too, the paraphernalia of huts and washrooms shuttered. We sit at a picnic bench by the water for a while, eating fruit and snack bars and swigging from our water bottles—droplets of lake water. Though not from this lake, which feeds the larger towns around us; towns that, due to logging, are often under boil water advisories.

Refreshed, we wander along the lake’s sand and gravel shores and snap pictures of the rocky, forested hills that surround it. There are still patches of snow on some of them. Unseen, beyond those hills that become mountains is the glacier that feeds the lake. I’d caught my first glimpse of the glacier just a month before. I hadn’t known there were glaciers on Vancouver Island, let alone one mere kilometres from our home. But there it was, glimpsed from a residential street in the nearby city, nestled among the jagged peaks of the Insular Mountains—a smooth cap of ice. It looked solid and immutable, but my husband told me that it would be gone within the next few decades and his words churned in my stomach like glacial moraine.

Summer

A few months after our first visit, we cycle down to the lake again. The campground is open now and RVs line the beach, while up on the hills around the campground, brightly coloured tents can be glimpsed through the trees. The water level is much higher than I remember, the spot where we picnicked now submerged. At the end of June there had been a heatwave that saw temperature rise to 40°C, almost 20°C above what it “should” have been at that time of year. Within a week the snow on the mountains was all but gone, the glacier sad and diminished. When we tried to leave the house, Clara became subdued, hot and clammy in her stroller. We spent most of our time inside with the AC on. The news headlines sent me into a spiral of panic: towns experiencing never-before-seen flooding due to extreme snow melt, beaches of baked-alive mussels, fruits rotting on the vine.

For three consecutive days the town of Lytton, BC experienced the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada. On the fourth day, I woke to headlines announcing that the town had been destroyed by wildfire. Residents had run for their lives as the flames advanced, while helicopters fighting the fires in BC were being grounded because their engines were malfunctioning in the extreme heat. I watched my daughter play and wondered: what future awaits her?

I feel the mountain’s store of winter as I wade into the lake, leaving Spencer and Clara on the shore. When the cold water hits the small of my back, my instinct is to turn around and head back to the warm, dry picnic blanket. But I carry on, feeling the water run up my back and touch the base of my neck. My arms and legs tingle, my heartbeat races. I lift my feet and feel myself falling. For a second, I’m suspended, cradled by the water—a body within a body. Then, I emerge.

Autumn

At the end of summer, as the first cold nights start to turn the leaves yellow, we take a different route down to the lake—along one of the many old railroads that criss-cross the valley, across a dried-out riverbed, and down a deeply rutted path to a beach made of coal tailings, the cast-offs of the coal industry that laid the railroads and tore open the land. The sun is dipping towards the hills when we arrive at the lake shore. Clara immediately heads off down the beach and Spencer follows her. I pull on a pair of swimming trunks and strip my top half down to my sports bra.

The beach we have been swimming from all summer is in a sheltered cove, tucked away, with its back to the vastness of the lake. But here, on Coal Beach, I feel exposed to that vastness. I wade in, ignoring the impulse to pull away from the cold. Though it is not as cold as it was and, after a long, hot summer, it no longer makes my limbs tingle or my heart pound. I shade my eyes from the sinking sun and scan the hills, then wade still further in. Up to my neck in lake water, I lift my feet and drop my head under. Suddenly, I feel that vastness. I feel how large this body of water is and I feel too that something deep within it might reach out and pull me under. I feel how, in the blink of geological time, it wouldn’t matter. I am small and insignificant and wonderfully so.

Late fall brings with it an “atmospheric river” of rain and although we have stayed dry in our little village below the mountains, I am glued to the news again, watching as communities sheltering those who lost their homes to wildfire are flooded, watching as desperate farmers try to save their animals from land that was once a lake and that is trying to be a lake again. Watching, too, as my daughter splashes through puddles and turns her face to the sky to taste the rain.

Winter

On Christmas Eve, in the dark crucible of the year, when Christmas feels like a necessary inconvenience for the light and distraction it brings, we wake to 10 inches of snow. An Arctic outflow has brought cold weather; colder than it “should” be at this time of year. For the next week it snows on and off and temperatures plummet to -16°C at their lowest.

Mid-week, between Christmas and New Year, it snows heavily again, adding a few inches, although it’s hardly noticeable atop the snow we already have. Temperatures still haven’t gotten above 0°C. The lake begins to ping in my mind, and I feel its gravitational pull. I wonder whether it has frozen over and imagine that great expanse of water with a skin of ice and snow. I want to see it, must see it. I want to drive down there, but the road probably hasn’t been ploughed that far out. Spencer searches online and finds Instagram photos taken that morning of grey, open water. Still, I want to be within its orbit.

We bundle Clara up in layers of snow gear and strap her into the hiking backpack. We head through the village, past houses iced in soft, sugary snow and garnished with icicles. We dip down a road and into the forest, the line between village and woods as abrupt as a fence. The tree branches are still thick and heavy with their loads of snow. The forest floor, too, is white.

We walk along a logging road for a short while before taking a side trail called Mama Bear. The sun is out for the first time in days and it’s a balmy -1°C. I’m sweating under the weight of the toddler on my back. And the trees are sweating too, the sun dislodging their snow in powdery showers that catch the sunlight and glisten. I half expect to see Mr Tumnus wandering through the trees. It’s as though we have slipped through a crack in time. While all around us North America is experiencing a record warm December (and wildfires are burning in Colorado), we have been gifted with Arctic air, with this glimpse of a perfect winter.

The trail winds through the forest and I make slow progress on the uphill parts. Eventually we reach Coal Creek Historic Park. From here, if we were carrying on to the lake, we would take a trail through the park and then walk along the shoulder of Comox Lake Road until it ends at the lake. I feel its tug, as though I have become tidal. But we turn away, as the wave crests and falls, and head for another trail. More and more trees are shaking off their snow as the sun reaches its zenith, barely cresting the forest. A tall pine lets loose its snow shower on us and Clara and I laugh as the powder dusts our hats and coats.

[First published in Issue 2 of Fieldfare]