4
Weather
During the two brief periods when I visited East Tumbril before moving there, I would ask everyone I met about the winters. Not cold, they told me, not really cold at all, certainly never below zero. What about snow? I asked. Not much, they said, and never a real storm until January. It seemed too good to be true, because my friends in New Jersey seemed to believe that I’d be snowbound for half the year.
There had to be a catch, I thought, and continued asking.
The first clue came only two months before I moved in, when Jonathan and I drove up to Nova Scotia to start a garden and see if the heat had been put in; it came at the local diner three miles down the road. Talking with the owner, I asked again about the winters.
Not cold, the woman told me, not really cold at all.
Snow?
Not much.
“Good heavens,” I said, “it sounds even more temperate than New Jersey.”
“Well,” she added as an afterthought, “we do get some wind.”
I had found the catch.
My first taste of wind came early in October. The sun shone brightly, the wind blew from the southwest, and there were certainly no signs of storm, but I woke in the morning to find the beams of the house creaking and complaining like a sailing ship on the high seas, and when I opened the kitchen door a giant hand flung it wide, taking me with it. It wasn’t particularly cold, but although the thermostat in the living room was set at seventy degrees the temperature kept sinking ominously; for the first time I questioned its story-and-a-half ceiling. Outside, clouds scudded across a blue arc of sky, whitecaps raced, the seaweed I brought up from the beach had to be weighted down with a stone, but I felt healthy and hardy as I practiced leaning against the wind, all but tumbling to the ground when the wind suddenly slackened.
After three days the wind abated, leaving only a faint memory.
On November 1 I drove into town for groceries in a pouring rain, with lightning flashing across the sky. By the time I arrived home again, the sun was shining but the wind had risen and to my astonishment the waves in the harbor were sending spray high up over the Far Beach to actually embrace the lighthouse. This was something new. By eight o’clock in the evening the wind had reached gale force. I sat on the couch facing the window, a book on my lap, and tried not to notice how the couch and the floor trembled under me. A storm door blew open and had to be rescued; beams creaked and groaned; the wind sounded like a blast furnace as it burst around the corner of the house. I reminded myself that the house had stood there for 125 years, and this was comforting until I remembered the beams I’d asked the carpenters to remove, and the extra glass that had been added. The storm grew steadily worse as the winds increased—to 80 mph, I was to learn later. Salt spray blowing against the windows sounded like sand peppering the glass; doors rattled and I could see the picture window trembling under each gust. By ten o’clock the mirror on the wall over my bureau was doing a little dance step, the glass in the windows was shaking, and so was I….
Somewhere in there the phone rang, and it was Vaughn Nixon. “Quite a wind,” she said in her mild voice.
“It is, isn’t it,” I agreed.
“Your barn door just blew out.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Come over here if you’d like some company.”
“Thanks but I think I’d better stay,” I said, feeling that without my 120 pounds the house might very well blow away.
“Guess you won’t do much sleeping tonight.”
“You can be sure of that,” I told her, and hung up.
But human nature is perverse; this wind was something new and unknown to me, but one can be cowed for just so many hours. I had assumed that I’d stay up all night and keep the house under me by sheer concentration, but the noise of it all was exhausting and it grew tiresome watching mirrors dance. There came a kind of anger at giving in to it, so that I took a defiant and leisurely bath at midnight and then, feeling braver, climbed into pajamas and then into bed. I turned out the lights. The wind was still seizing the house and shaking it, slapping the roof and the walls with a brutal hand, whistling, then screaming, and at last roaring. It was no longer a graspable phenomenon, it was beyond rationality, it was too enormous to comprehend. “And so,” I thought drowsily, “to hell with it,” and fell asleep and slept like a child.
The barn door was nailed on again, and doubly secured, not to be blown out again until the Groundhog Day storm of 1976, the worst in a hundred years, but I had been initiated. I learned that a wheelbarrow left outside unsecured could be blown to the opposite end of the meadow overnight. To trace the lid of a garbage pail, carelessly unweighted, I learned to stop and think from what direction the wind had been blowing during the night, and then set out accordingly to track it down. Somehow I always did. I learned to open car doors very cautiously so that the wind wouldn’t seize them and rip them off their hinges. I learned how to lean against the wind when I walked. The wind during the winter months was simply chronic, like an asthmatic condition: always present, in varying degrees. In my kitchen on windy nights it adopted a roaring sound as it raced around that corner; if I disliked that sound I could move into the living room, where it whistled.
This also explained Clarence’s odd reaction when I asked him, upon my arrival, to please put my driveway on his snowplowing list.
“Well, now,” he said gravely, eyes twinkling, “I can’t say that’ll be necessary.”
“You must get snow,” I pointed out. “And I have a long driveway.”
“Oh, we get snow,” he said, nodding, “but I doubt you’ll need your drive plowed.”
And of course I didn’t; only once did I shovel any snow at all, and that was one day when the wind deposited it near my kitchen door, combed it and shaped it into an artistic crescent, and left it for me like a gift package. It snowed, yes, but I never knew where the snow went: it was swept away by the wind to other places, perhaps into the woods or on up to Halifax. Nor did snow ever drift down lazily from the sky, or down at all for that matter; it always snowed perpendicularly, on a slant, dancing across the meadows with the wind behind it.
When we first visited East Tumbril my son Jonathan said, “Have you noticed the way everybody talks about the weather? You’d think there was nothing else to talk about.”
Well, in a way there wasn’t. The weather was there, an integral part of life, elemental, unpredictable, and always, always dramatic. I could leave for town in a thick fog, reach Tumbril Centre to find the sun shining, and drive through a snowstorm before I reached town. When the sun shone it was dazzling, when there was fog it was wraithlike and pearly, drifting past one’s windows or sometimes following one up from the beach when it moved in fast; and then of course there was the wind. As I grew immersed in country life I, too, began every conversation with speculations about the weather; what else was more important? Even today I remain uneasy if the day ends without a complicated weather report and a complete marine forecast; I remain eternally braced for the unexpected now, which in East Tumbril was the norm.