Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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The Queen of the Ice, 1903.

Comedy is not the only place in which the winter climate and Canadian culture meld. It abounds in literature. With poems and stories detailing Canadian winters, the country’s cold vast landscape is a source of wonderment, and inspiration to writers who travel throughout its length (and width).

It inspired Canadian novelist and poet George Bowering to write: “This is a country of silent wind piling drift snow in Rocky Mountains, trenches of quiet death, lonely desolation.”

Bowering is far from being the only writer to note the cold openness of the vast Canadian landscape. Early British settlers wrote about their first experiences coming to Canada and noted with horror how Canada’s winters set the country apart from the more forgiving British weather. Writers would lament Canada’s frozen, frigid, and inhospitable terrain.

Many failed to foresee that Canada could ever be a developed nation, much less one to which native Brits would flee. There might be lots of open land, but how could it be valuable if it was covered in snow for much of the year? Early accounts of British writers encountering Canada in the late 1700s included their lament that this was a land rendering inhabitants “void of thought” and impairing mental powers. This unforgiving, frigid landscape would drive people to drinking, gambling, and ultimately breaking down. The moral fibre of society would collapse under such conditions. Winter of such ferociousness would destroy humanity.