Foreign tragedy causes comparison - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Watching the earthquake and landslide in Nepal last week - waves of dirt and ice smashing over buildings - reminded me what a gentle world we live in here in Huron County.

 

As this is written, more than 750 bodies have been found and 4,000 remain missing, including 30 Canadians. Frantic relatives of the Canadians are blaming our federal government for not being more active. 

 

It’s hard to see how any government half a world away could prepare to rescue people in the dangerous world of Nepal. We’re just not used to it. The 2011 Goderich tornado was an intense F3 tornado. One person died and 37 more were injured as a result. Yet, if you go into Goderich 15 years later, it’s hard to see the effects. At Benmiller, inland from Goderich and in the storm’s path, you can still see trees that were flattened.

 

Prior to that, the big storm that people remember was when Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto in 1954, with winds topping 124 kilometres per hour, and 81 people died. I remember the late Pierre Berton talking about trying to get home to his house in Kleinburg during the storm.

 

But other than these rare exceptions, we live in a quiet corner of the world. This summer we’ve seen forest fires across northern Ontario, Quebec, the prairie provinces and British Columbia, leading us in southern Ontario to live with smokey air for a few days.

 

I wonder if we’d be as free of forest fires if southern Ontario was covered with trees as it was 200 years ago. As I look out my window in the former McGowan settlement, I think of the land our ancestors inherited. It’s hard to believe the pioneers faced a tree-covered landscape and had to clear the bush with only an axe. The goal was to clear five acres of trees a year, planting around the stumps and leaving the roots to rot. Slowly, year-by-year, they cleared the land.

 

When I see the men harvesting soybeans in the next few weeks, I imagine what the original farmers would comment if they saw the size of the tractors and combines that quickly harvest the crop in a few hours.

 

We live in a remarkably changed world. I remember my father spending much of the winter in the bush cutting trees with a chain saw. The trees were hauled to the house, then cut into blocks with a buzz saw and stored in the woodshed. Later we heated with oil in our space heaters. (Ironically, the farm is now owned by Mennonites who likely heat with wood again.)

 

When we moved to our farmhouse, there were seven doors in the kitchen, in part to carry heat from the kitchen range to all corners of the house. On the hardwood of the kitchen floor there are burn marks where coals from a stove that cooked meals for early residents fell on the floor. From the time we moved in, 51 years ago, we heated with an oil furnace. For the last 16 years, we’ve had ground-source heat, heating the house without burning any fuels. I wonder what people who heated with wood would think of that?

 

So, we’ve lived a much calmer life for a century than the people in Nepal, a country more famous until now as the home of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. Every year, hundreds of people visit Nepal to attempt the climb of Mount Everest. I remember Sir Edmund Hilary who, on May 29, 1953 successfully climbed Mount Everest, the first  European man to climb the mountain.

 

Since then, 340 people have died trying to repeat Hilary’s feat, with 200 of the bodies not recovered because the mountain is too dangerous. 

 

Yet, such are the crowds attracted to Nepal that there has been a building boom underway. Who knows if the recent tragedy will discourage that? Such a different world than Huron County. In fact, I know of local residents who travelled to Nepal to climb the lower levels of Mount Everest. Huron County - safe Huron County - was boring to them.

 

But “boring” Huron County is the result of hundreds of years taming a wild world. The land wasn’t even settled by European settlers until an agreement was reached with Native peoples who used to hunt and fish here. At the back of the farm our house was originally part of, is a stream, a tributary of the Maitland, that I sometimes wonder if Native people explored.

 

Europeans cleared the land and built log houses. Only in generations did they get around to building substantial houses like ours - and yet I see many similar houses being demolished and replaced with modern houses.

 

The landslide in Nepal lends comparison to the gentle life we lead in Huron County. Still, we need to be aware of the bravery and hard work by our ancestors who created the peaceful world we live in today. We are so blessed by the modern world they have given us.