St. Bernard, Nova Scotia
Denman Diary |
Another week, another storm or two...
There was snow on the ground most of the week, a result of a snowfall on Tuesday. Our house, being one of the highest on Denman Island at 300 feet above sea level, doesn't necessarily get more snow than other parts of the island, but it tends to stick around longer here.
The weather is still a major topic of conversation on Denman. Everyone is quite sick of winter: it is just so Canadian; not at all West Coast. We are used to "winter" being green, not white.
On Wednesday night, it was rainy and windy, but it didn't seem to be stormy, at least not by recent standards. On Thursday morning, however, we woke up, not to the sound of our clock radio playing CBC, but to the shrill beep-beep of our battery-powered backup alarm clock. Yes, yet another power failure overnight.
It turned out that one of our trees had come down just after midnight, according to the stopped kitchen clock. The tree was 100 feet tall, and fell from 15 feet inside our property line across 20 feet of unused road right-of-way, 16 feet of road, another 20 feet of unused right-of-way on the other side, and landed on the power line on the far side, snapping it at just about the same place that the neighbour's tree snapped it back in the December hurricane.
Preparing breakfast was straightforward, thanks to the generator, but, when Wendy left to catch the ferry to work, she encountered the tree blocking Pickles Road just outside our driveway. She quickly turned around to try to make it around the back road in time to catch the ferry, but that way was blocked by another tree. So, we ended up taking a weather morning. Wendy finally got the 11:00 ferry and worked half a day.
After checking that the breaker feeding the power line was off, and that both broken ends of the line had sprung back and were nowhere near the fallen tree, our neighbour Dave chainsawed the tree enough to clear the road. Later, once BC Hydro had arrived and repaired the line, I harvested the wood from the tree. At this rate, we should have no trouble obtaining all the wood we need for next winter without it costing us a cent.
In other news, I have a couple of interesting job prospects. Not wanting to count my bushels before they are reaped, I'll leave it at that for now, but please keep your fingers crossed.
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Copyright © 2013 Keith Walker
Last modified: 20-May-2013