The big stories this past week:
• Vancouver Island Liberal MLA Michelle Stilwell wins wheelchair-racing gold at the world championships. Pollsters express surprise when pre-race favourite New Democrats place a distant second.
• Comedian John Cleese books an eighth night in Victoria. That’s three more than Christy Clark.
• Royal baby is named Prince George. Next one will be called Quesnel.
• It hasn’t rained for a month. Our weather is perfect. Victorians reach for the Prozac.
•
“It’s dry,” I said, waving my bush hat half-heartedly at a tse-tse fly that had found its way through the netting. “Too dry.”
She tried to laugh, but the sound that came from her parched, cracked lips sounded more like a croak: “Tell me something new.”
I shifted my weight nervously. The grass didn’t so much bend under my boots as grind to fine, golden-brown dust.
Dry? You could drop a furled umbrella (remember those?) down the cracks in the lawn, never hear it hit bottom.
“I don’t know how much more of this we can take.”
She had no reply to that, stayed as silent as Oak Bay after dark.
For it was true. It hasn’t rained in Victoria since June 27. Every day we wake up to a morning sunnier than Ed Bain on ecstasy.
The tourists have flooded back. Busker festival crowds have been huge. Last week’s art walk was straight out of a brochure. The deuce coupes pulled 60,000 to the Inner Harbour. Not a single tuba player drowned in rainfall during the Victoria Day parade. Our traditional June-uary, the driving sleet pounding Goldstream Park tents into submission, failed to materialize. This has been the most spectacular summer ever. Worse, there is no end in sight. Unused to perfection, we squirm.
At least they’re not talking about tightening our twice-a-week lawn watering rules yet. We take our watering restrictions seriously here in Bureaucracy-By-The-Sea (though not as seriously as the English vigilante mob that, in 2004, beat a man within an inch of his life for watering his lawn during a drought, only to find he had merely attached a hose to his bathtub drain). Being a government and military town, we tend to do as we’re told.
Or maybe obedience is a Canadian thing in general. (Old joke: How do you get 20 Canadians out of a pool? Tell them to leave.)
Here in Victoria, we don’t just vacate the pool, but pull the plug. It’s true. In 2001, after the south Island experienced its driest winter in a century, the Capital Regional District brought in watering restrictions that many called draconian. No filling swimming pools. No filling hot tubs. No power washing driveways. The legislature lawn went brown. Landscapers went out of business.
Did the City of Gardens rebel? No. Asked to hold water consumption to 40 million gallons a day, we cut back to 35. I’m not making this up.
Here’s my favourite water-restrictions story: Years ago there’s a tense scene with a bad guy holed up in a house with an arsenal of guns, blasting the windows out of neighbouring houses. The street has been evacuated. The cops are hiding behind their cars. I’m hiding behind the cops. You can see the shooter moving around inside.
Then, on the dot of 10 p.m., the door of the supposedly empty house next door swings opens. All of us — cops, bad guy, reporters — gape in wonder as the homeowner strides out, turns on his lawn sprinkler, then turns on his heel and marches back inside. It’s 10 o’clock, the city says he can sprinkle, and he’s going to damn well sprinkle.
But I digress, as is so often the case.
“It’s dry,” I said, “but not scorching.” The temperature was in the low- to mid-20s — Miss Congeniality weather, more pleasant than hot.
She grimaced. “You know what that means: Albertans.”
“Yes,” I said. “Other Easterners, too. Ontario, Saskatchewan, Vancouver … Once word gets around, they’ll pour across the moat.”
“Wait until they find out about our lack of flying, biting insects,” she said. “They’ll never leave.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Release some more tse-tse flies.”
