One Snowflake in a Blizzard

It’s easy to feel isolated on this Backroad when a heavy snowfall dumps a foot-and-a-half of snow overnight making our road impassable for several days, and an Arctic outflow sends the temperature plummeting to –11 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 with wind chill factor). We have no telephone lines, no cell phone towers, and our emergency battery/hand-crank radio receives only one station, CBC Radio One. When we turn on the radio and hear nothing but static, we know the power is off in Kitwanga, knocking even CBC off the air. So much for the emergency capabilities of our radio to keep us informed! Our satellite connection to the Internet is our lifeline, our connection to the rest of the world out there… especially now. After the big snowfall, I strapped on snowshoes to trudge a short distance to our satellite dish to dust off the accumulation of snow. I stepped onto the snow and immediately sank 18-inches into the soft, powdery stuff. My progress to and from the cabin looked more like a ploughed trench than a snowshoe trail. But we got back online and I uploaded new postings to our two blogs. It is times like this that I begin to wonder if anyone is even reading what Bob and I write. Are we just throwing words into the wind? The communication pipeline is filled with news, entertainment, information of every sort, millions and millions of websites, chat rooms and personal blogs. Unless someone posts a comment or sends an e-mail, we have no way of knowing if what we are putting out there is worth the effort; or if our words are lost, only to accumulate on the Worldwide Web with all the others. Not unlike one small snowflake in a blizzard - a blizzard of words and images.

... P. L. Morningstar
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