One hot summer day at the salvage area of the dump, a dust devil suddenly appeared.
A dust devil happens when it is very warm and some air on the surface gets hot and starts spinning around furiously. There are itty bitty dust devils that look harmless enough. They look like tiny little tornadoes, cute but not dangerous.
However, as they get bigger, they get a little fearsome and this one was growing in size.
It was weaving all over the place and started to pick up dust, debris, pieces of paper and a disposable coffee cup. I thought to myself, when it starts picking up books and sofas, I am out of here!
It lasted for a minute or two and people were certainly taking notice. Then it just disappeared as everything it had picked up fell back to earth.
In the right places under the right conditions, they can be several metres across and reach one kilometre in height. I have never seen anything that big, the one at the dump was big enough. You see them in town more often than you do in the bush, but they can occur there as well.
One day I saw something moving down a big hill of outcrop. Then it went into the trees and made a tremendous racket as if some big, angry beast was crashing through the trees down to the lake. It burst out onto the water, went about 30 metres and collapsed, but it left me startled. I tried to wrap my head around the spectacle and decided that it was just a medium-sized dust devil.
If the weather channel did a weather version of who’s who in the hinterland, they would certainly have to include dust devils. They are a little like whirling dervishes. They spin around and jump into the air. Sometimes I call them nature’s dervishes, just because I like the sound of the word dervish.
Now, if you think dust devils are scary, when they occur in a forest fire, they have taken to calling them fire tornadoes, which they really aren’t, if I understand the weather jargon correctly. Dust and fire devils go from the ground up, whereas tornadoes are much bigger things that start in the clouds and then sometimes touch down on earth. Similar, but also different in scale.
Sometimes I get the impression the news media view weather as entertainment, and they go out of their way to sensationalize it as much as possible. Unfortunately, when the dust devil appeared at the dump that day, it was before cellphones, so no one got a video of the mayhem and destruction. Otherwise, the national news would have picked it up as “Dangerous Dust Devil Strikes a Blow Against Salvaging at the City Dump,” causing mayhem and chaos as salvagers ran for cover.
On June 17, 2014, Yahoo News reported that a flaming raven caused a power outage when it landed on a power line near Bluefish Power, just north of Prosperous Lake. Presumably the raven wasn’t flaming before the incident. However, it apparently burst into flames, then fell to the ground and started a forest fire. It’s a pity no one caught that on video because I am sure it would have gone viral.
We live in an age when most people have cellphones and if something dramatic happens, someone will probably film it. So, you will just have to take my word for it that dervishes do appear at the dump occasionally and that raven occasionally get fried on power poles, and this has led to forest fires.
That might go good in a tourist brochure: come north and see the dust devils and flaming ravens. A new chapter for Hinterlands Who’s Who.