mcc on art, art history et cetera: Beauty in Nature: the 2013 Ice Storm

Butternut tree.

It's been a difficult, and busy, few weeks. Not because I get caught in the consumerist Christmas craze, or because we have an intensive social life during the Holidays, but because this year we are having a particularly hard winter. This means clearing huge amounts of snow, taking longer to get to and fro anywhere, being housebound at times because the roads are treacherous and, occasionally, spending sometime in the dark. No electricity: no heat and, oh no! no Internet.

For some, specially for my South-American friends and family, this may be hard to believe but, in Southern Ontario, these extreme circumstances are rare. However, this year, the wintry time has proven to be a challenging one.

A street in Port Hope, ON.

So far, the event of the season in Ontario has been the Ice Storm of 2013.

An ice storm occurs when the atmospheric pressure is low and two slow moving and drastically different, temperature wise, systems collide. In North America the phenomenon takes place when the warm Gulf air meets the frigid Arctic air. This could happen anywhere in a territorial stretch from Northern Texas to Newfoundland.[i]

Just a couple of days before Christmas, temperatures verged around the freezing mark when the storm began. By now, it is well known that hundreds of thousands of people were affected by the storm in some way. Some had a very hard time with no electricity for as long as two weeks. I cannot fathom the consequences for all the animals and the environment around us.

I do not mean to make light of what was true hardship for so many people and all sorts of creatures, but, as with many things in life, there was a dichotomy here: this very difficult event was also one that produced some of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. I leave you with some images I captured in Port Hope and Mitchell's Corner on Christmas Eve.