KAS
STONE
IN SEARCH OF WINTER
By the end of February I was sick of waiting. Winter, which I remember in my childhood used to
begin as early as November, now seems to delay its arrival until late January, and this year was
refusing to appear at all. So on March 2nd I threw my camera, my cat and a few provisions into
my car and headed north to find it.
First, some geographical context for my story: I live in the As it turned out, when I arrived in Cheticamp (where a
province of Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast. I spent rustic rental cottage was miraculously open in the off-
my childhood in its capital city, Halifax, and recently settled season), I found the same dreary brown I had just left at
on the south shore near the picturesque town of Lunenburg. home. But snow was promised in the forecast, so I settled
Having done much traipsing about during the intervening in, anticipating fine photographic conditions for my four-day
forty years, I am now content to stick closer to home – no visit.
hardship, as there is plenty of inspiration in the wild coastal
scenery and moody weather right on my doorstep. Here I Those four days stretched into nine. Clouds gathered, the
make my (very modest) living as a photographic artist. wind intensified, and the area was pummelled by one savage
storm after another. No snow fell at first, or, more accurately,
So, when I packed my car and headed north in March, it snow fell, but the wind snatched it away before it ever
was just for a shortish drive to Cape Breton to explore the reached the ground. However eventually it stuck, and during
dramatic coastal and highland landscape between Inverness my holiday several feet of it accumulated over the Highlands.
and Ingonish. Cape Breton, connected by causeway to Meanwhile the Ingonish coast heaved with sea ice, while
mainland Nova Scotia, sticks out into the North Atlantic over on the Cheticamp coast, wind speeds were clocked one
and is battered by weather systems that converge on it afternoon at 152 kilometres per hour – hurricane force! – and
from every direction. The Highlands at its northern tip are there I was, hiking along a clifftop trail, having the time of my
especially notorious for “bad” winters, so I was guaranteed life.
some snow. Or so I thought.
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