If you lived here you would be home by now.

Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening.

Toronto isn’t the first city I’ve lived in on this continent. About nine years ago, I spent a summer in New York City on Bunac, working for minimum wage in a bookstore and surviving on fruit juice.

In my first day in the city, I was jetlagged, and woke up at 4am. I had to attend an ‘orientation’ meeting at 9.30am, where Bunac would tell me, “Welcome to NYC! You won’t be able to afford to feed yourself! LOL! Have a happy summer!” But that was a long time away, and I was too excited to explore to stay in the hostel. So I hopped on the (24-hour) subway to check out where I would be working.

You know the story. It’s one most first-time vistors to New York tell.

I got the express train instead of the local train.

I was led miles astray as I helplessly watched my intended stop zoom past. When I did manage to exit the train, I ended up – I still don’t know where – completely lost in a forest of skyscrapers.

I walked three blocks from the subway stop. It was 6.30am. It was sticky. I felt a drop of rain.

“Oh,” I thought. “It’s just early morning drizzle. I’ll keep walking.”

Then:

THOOM!
KESPLEEEEEEEEESHHH!

I reeled. It was if somebody had poured the whole contents of the Hudson River out of a window above. I was absolutely drenched. And it didn’t stop. Every few seconds, I became doubly and quadruply soaked, until my drenchedness level disappeared off the graph exponentially. I started panicking, running uptown and downtown and crosstown looking for shelter between square blocks like a drunken bee trapped in Tron. And as it was early morning, none of the skyscrapers would open their lobbies.

I got back to the hostel in time for the orientation, and attended looking exhausted and wet, like I had swum from Southampton. But I had learned an important lesson early.

This all a lengthy preamble to that lesson, and it is one I want to repeat here: in this timezone, you must not fuck with the rain.

Here is Toronto 48 hours ago.

Photograph by LeBrown James on Flickr. Licensed by Creative Commons 2.0-by

That’s a shot of Toronto from the east being nailed by lightning. Tons of it. For three hours. It was like having Thor’s paparazzi outside your door. Not just any old lightning, no sirree.

So, I am British, and I am talking about weather. The British are supposed to be famous for talking about the weather. What can I say? It’s a sitcom construct at best. I think we could at best be commended for talking about the weather when there’s so little of it. For a proper conversation, you need proper weather, and for that, you need to come to Canada.

There’s a TV channel called the Weather Network here. You would think a Weather Channel would be an absolute no-brainer in the UK, but they tried it and nobody watched it. Here, it’s been running for 20 years.

Look! Look at all the information they give you on their forecasts. (This one is for Edmonton, AB, but it’s the same wherever you are in the country.)

Ceiling? What’s that? (It’s how high the clouds are). Relative Humidity? Dewpoint? These are all technical terms. And a vital part of the weather forecast is the polar jet stream. Whole summers are decided on what side of the polar jet stream your city falls on.

This paragraph is for my British readers. Do you remember isobars? They looked like thumbprints on the camera lens. They represented contours of pressure. But they were abolished from mainstream forecasts some time ago. That was about the limit of technical weather knowledge we got in the UK. I bet you never even noticed they’d gone, had you?

Let me show you why weather is serious business in Canada.

Where would you get any of that in England? The stakes are just higher. You can’t argue with me here.

The thing is, where I come from, “sun” means it gets a little bit warm in between clouds, “rain” means that it’s cloudy and a bit drizzly, and “snow” consists of six flakes of ice, albeit six flakes that shut down a major capital city for 24 hours, losing £1bn. And did I mention, some clouds?

But I am in North America now. I never knew what weather was until I came here. Sunshine is supposed to last for days, melting roads, causing major fires. Snow lasts all winter, completely changing everyone’s behaviour, inspiring new ways of doing things from sport to urban planning. And as for rain… well, if you’ve been in Toronto in the past two days, you already know what rain is.

Have a happy summer.

Related links

Japanese bombing of the US during WWII using the jet stream
The Weather Network Song: A tribute