Beach(es) Beat

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In the community of Corner Brook, Nfld., the snow starts falling in November and stops falling in April.

During that six-month span if it doesn't snow on the Monday, residents claim it will snow twice on Tuesday to make up for nature's oversight and by the time the last flake has settled on the ground in April, so much snow has fallen that Corner Brook has the distinction of being the second snowiest municipality in Canada.

I tried phoning the winner of this dubious honour to verify the facts but could not get through because the lines are down. Every winter about 450 centimetres of snow plops down on Corner Brook, which leads to the question, "How do residents cope with all that precipitation?" and the answer is they cope quite nicely indeed and I get that from a resident who has lived there for years.

Aileen Woolridge is a friend of ours who is in Toronto visiting her family and she says that basically the population just buckles down and gets on with it. This is in stark contrast to how we handle bad weather in Toronto.

We call in the army whenever it snows heavy, whereas in Corner Brook they call on their common sense and it serves them well.

There is a windshield scraper in every glovebox and every household has at least one sturdy metal snow shovel and an ice chopper and, of course, homes have freezers stuffed with food for those days when conditions are too bad to venture outside.

Householders regularly clear snow from rooftops and the city keeps sidewalks clean so folks can walk to their destinations on those days when driving is a bad idea. Young readers of this newspaper may be interested to know that schools never close in the winter there. They might open a little late, Aileen says, but they always open.

All the snow can make life difficult but there are plus sides as well as problems.

With all that raw material to work with, contests featuring snow sculptures are popular and for years the annual Winter Carnival has had a Viking theme complete with a mascot named Lief the Lucky. And every year judges select a Lieflet, a boy or a girl who is picked because his or her involvement in the festivities.

And there is another advantage to those harsh winters that would make southern Ontario folks feel more than a little wistful. In this part of Canada, the beauty that a big snowfall brings lasts only a few day before all that white turns black. Black snow is never seen in Corner Brook because nature applies a fresh white layer almost every day.

And one last thought: the snowiest winter in Toronto occurred in 1938-'39 when 207 centimetres fell on the city. Corner Brook gets more than twice that amount every year and you never hear a peep out of them.

Maybe we complain too much.