Fortune good and ill

Do you have grievances? By golly, I’ve got some! One of the grievances I’m cultivating at the moment concerns the radio weather forecaster who announces, almost every day, that we have a certain percent “chance for showers,” rather than a chance “of” showers. Drives me nuts. How can someone in a position of meteorological authority fail to understand the difference between opportunity and probability?

All I am saying (with apologies to John Lennon) is there’s no need to give showers a chance. In the absence of some loopy geoengineering scheme like cloud seeding, the rain will fall, or not fall, in accordance with atmospheric phenomena that are beyond our control (but somewhat predictable, in the short term).

Sadly, none of Canada’s main political parties had a campaign platform that included strong statements on this matter. I would estimate there’s a zero percent chance that the recent election will bring about any improvement in the use of prepositions.

Perhaps I could find some comfort in joining an online chat group in which likeminded folks lament how poor syntax is related to the general decline in public discourse and political thought. (Is it cause or effect? Oh my, this is rich ground!) But as for changing the world, we wouldn’t stand a chance. The airing of grievances generally reveals a lot about the aggrieved, and relatively little about potential remedies. To state the obvious, there is not much to be gained by throwing in one’s lot with a tribe of aging English teachers and cranky copy editors.

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The election, unwisely called in the midst of a pandemic, brought forth a veritable feast of grievances for Canadians to nibble or gorge upon – but I am determined to believe that the ugliness and the craziness was mostly confined to the margins. (Although we should not ignore what happens at the margins, it’s important to recognize the difference between people who are truly marginalized by their circumstances and people who merely enjoy propagating marginal views.)

Now that it’s over, can we please enjoy autumn in this relatively peaceable and prosperous land? The Maritime provinces have had a humdinger of a growing season. My garden, and presumably many others, got off to a great start due to the warm weather in June, and those frequent showers kept everything lush right through the summer. Along the trail where I sometimes ride my bike, the feral apple trees were loaded with fruit, eventually littering the ground, leaving tire-smooshed, sun-fermented pulp that imparted a cidery tang to the fresh fall air. So I was not surprised to hear that commercial orchardists in this region have been predicting a bumper crop, though production is expected to be down in Ontario and Quebec.

In the Prairies, drought conditions have made this an abysmal year for many grain producers. Some written-off fields of barley and wheat were cut and baled as feed for cattle, but stored forage is still in scarce supply. A recent estimate puts Western Canada’s hay shortfall at about four million tonnes.

The Hay West program, administered by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA), has received pledges and contributions from many farmers in the Maritimes, where good hay crops continued into the autumn. With producers in Central Canada also contributing, some 40,000 bales had been offered by mid-September. The initiative was launched back in 2002, when a similar situation arose due to dry conditions in the Prairies. The program is operated on a break-even basis, with recipients paying 10 cents per pound, and various funders chipping in to help cover transport costs. It would be impossible to make up the entire shortfall, so the priority is to support breeding herds, especially in areas hit hardest by drought, to help maintain cattle numbers over the long term.

“The Hay West program is an amazing example of the kindness of farmers and how farmers across Canada, despite their many differences, have each other’s backs when true disaster strikes,” wrote Mary Robinson, president of the CFA, in a recent update from the group. “It’s incredibly heartening to see the response that we have from those farmers that have been more fortunate this year.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere else in the world. We’re talking about hay being transported thousands of kilometres from the East Coast. It’s comparable to hauling goods overland from Amsterdam to Aleppo. (Or from Cork to Ankara, or from Copenhagen to Casablanca. Isn’t this fun?)

The New Brunswick Cattle Producers launched a complementary program called Cows East, which could cut back on trucking requirements by bringing the livestock to the feed, taking advantage of good pasture as well as stored forage. Western ranchers can get a fair return if they wish to reduce their herds, or they could just board out some of their cattle for a year, then reacquire them and continue those bloodlines.

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This summer’s drought and extreme heat also resulted in a terrible forest fire season, with more than four million hectares burned – well above Canada’s 10-year average of about 2.6 million. The smoke spread far and wide, even leading to hazy skies and air quality advisories in the Maritimes – reminding us, if we still needed reminding, that we all share the same atmosphere. As they have done before, the Atlantic provinces sent professional firefighting crews to help out in B.C., Manitoba, and northern Ontario.

Be it hay or fire hoses, the assistance is reciprocal, flowing in either direction, depending on need in any given year. That’s a big part of what it means to belong to a country, and it is ultimately more powerful than perceived regional and political divisions. These things are important for practical reasons, and also for the sake of our collective consciousness. If we cannot maintain a sense of belonging, and a sense of perspective, we haven’t a hope. This is something to bear in mind during the harvest holiday we celebrate as Thanksgiving.

Among people who are devoted to personal wellbeing and contentment, there is a lot of talk, these days, about practising gratitude. It makes good sense, because a sense of gratitude is the opposite of a sense of entitlement. It’s a useful reminder that instead of being true to ourselves (whatever that means), maybe we should get over ourselves.

I do try to communicate to the people in my life that I appreciate them, but I’m not so good at that nebulous sense of gratitude. What I feel instead is an acute awareness of having been incredibly fortunate, so far. The idea that some people are lucky is pure superstition. You can be favoured by chance for a long time, and then something can happen that causes it all to fly out the window.

This is playing on my mind lately due to recent news of illness and mortality around the periphery of our household. (Not a trend, but a random uptick.) For some, bereavement can be so profound that there is no good fortune, before or after, that would remotely compensate for the loss.

“There but for the grace of God,” we say – an expression widely (but not definitively) attributed to the 16th-century English church reformer John Bradford. He reputedly uttered the words upon seeing criminals being led to execution, expressing not only the feeling of being fortunate, but the recognition that any of us, under different circumstances, could have deviated from the path of virtue. (Bradford’s preaching got him locked up in the Tower of London, and his luck really ran out when he was burned at the stake in 1555.)

The expression was secularized in a 1966 love song by Paul Simon, who sang, “And as I watch the drops of rain / Weave their weary paths and die / I know that I am like the rain / There but for the grace of you go I.”

Even if we don’t count our blessings, let us appreciate that they are mostly ours by chance, and that they are meant to be shared. Feast well this fall. DL