This summer Ian Brown explores how Canadians are reclaiming their lives from quarantine, whether it’s the thrill of a haircut, the risk of a hug or a chance – finally! – to jump in a pool again.
The way to identify a serious swimmer in Toronto during COVID-19 is to determine whether she or he has a secret pool plan.
For instance, on this sweltering, swollen afternoon at Christie Pits – a rambling, city-run outdoor public swimming pool in downtown Toronto – Zahur Surve is quietly churning laps in the lane reserved for the deep-end test.
That may not sound like a genius move, but it is. Over the course of a broiling non-pandemic summer day, Christie Pits can handle 1,200 plashing patrons. It’s like swimming in a mosh pit. But since cash-strapped Toronto’s outdoor pools opened June 20 this year, no more than 40 physically distanced patrons can swim at any time. And they can swim for only 45 minutes before they have to leave, as the pool is cleared and its “high-touch surfaces” are swabbed and sterilized, whereupon a fresh twoscore of sweaty supplicants are admitted.
In other words, public pools in the largest city in the country are operating at a quarter of their capacity. Versions of this recipe for civic fury are in place in every province except PEI.
So, Mr. Surve, a 50-year-old who peels off 100 laps three times a week, pops by the pool two to four times a day, and swims his quota in batches in the lane the lifeguards keep clear to administer the deep-end test – a length of crawl for any kid who wants to rocket off the diving board.
Mr. Surve isn’t alone. Louise Garfield – renowned producer, choreographer and performer, 66 – roams the reopening city to find an empty lane to lap in. “Did you ever watch The Swimmer? With Burt Lancaster?” she asks, meaning the strange 1968 flick in which a suburban stud named Ned Merrill swims home from a party, hopping from private pool to private pool. “That’s me.” Since reopening, she has waited an hour in 35-degree heat to swim for 45 minutes. “Sometimes I get in, and sometimes I don’t.” She has her best luck when it’s raining.
Failing that, she has a backup plan. “My ambition is to get an invitation to Drake’s ginormous pool. And I would be willing to sign a waiver of liability.”
As COVID-19 ebbs and resurges through a hot summer and a nerve-racking reopening, swimming in public pools beckons as a simple balm. (New COVID-19 cases were up again this week in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C., mostly among 20- to 40-year-olds, mostly owing to private indoor gatherings.) Alas, in a pandemic, even a quick dip is a complicated plunge.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “there is no evidence that COVID-19 can be spread to humans through the use of recreational waters.” But pandemics and water have a history. Parisians swam and bathed in the Seine until cholera came along in 1850. At their peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio epidemics killed or paralyzed half a million people, and emptied swimming pools until it was demonstrated that chlorine killed the virus. According to Katherine Ashenburg’s beautifully readable The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, the Black Plague arrived in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, and turned people off washing and bathing for the next 400 years.
Pandemics change a society’s habits. But water, and bathing in it, speak to ancient human longings – for forgiveness, for pleasure, for transcendence, for relief. They don’t call it the deep end for nothing. These days, in a virus-worn city that’s already $2-billion in the hole, the struggle to keep public pools open and safe stands out sharply against the good fortune of citizens who own a private one. The town is full of envy.
Drake posted a video of his new backyard pool in Toronto’s Bridle Path neighbourhood at the end of May, while shut-in Toronto wilted in a late spring heat wave. “Hope everybody in the city is just enjoyin’ the beautiful day,” he added. He made his money on his own, so he got off lightly for flaunting his privilege. The pool is roughly the size of the North Atlantic; he’s on record saying he wants to own the largest residential pool in human captivity. He already has an indoor pool (you can glimpse it and his home in the video for his song Toosie Slide, but his outdoor plunge, he claims, is even bigger than Kanye’s.
A private pool is the ultimate luxury in a pandemic summer. Your correspondent knows this because he spent part of a recent afternoon in a private pool on the striking property of another luxurious home in midtown Toronto. Your correspondent cannot tell you where the pool is because one of the conditions of getting to swim there, after asking to be invited, was that he not reveal its whereabouts.
What your correspondent can tell you is this: The pool is eight-feet wide and 45-feet long. There is another shallow pool beyond its far end. “Is that a wading pool?” your correspondent said to the owner, who replied, “No, that’s actually a sculpture.” There are teenaged oak trees and ginkgo trees and sycamores and giant mature locusts and clipped box hedges and teeming crowds of hydrangea lining its edges. Being in the pool is like swimming within a green formal garden. It is impossible to feel hot or anxious there. The water is cold, but not as cold as your correspondent thinks it will be as he hovers daintily, arms high, on tiptoe, before plunging. He swims some lengths, climbs out, towels off, warms up until he is just fractionally hot and dives in again. He stays cool for hours afterward, even back at his own house as he launches Google Maps to try to count the turquoise pool jewels set across the top of the city. He wants to visit every one of them.
Late last spring, as Toronto’s city managers canvassed immunologists and the Lifesaving Society to figure out if and how the city’s pools could open safely but quickly, two requirements instantly took precedence: the need for physical distancing, and the need for maximum hygiene. “The way to achieve that,” Aydin Sarrafzadeh, the city’s manager of aquatics, was informed, ”would be to reduce your capacity.” The new safe pool number was 25 per cent of a full load, with breaks for hourly sterilization. Lockers were off-limits. Time in the change room was to be minimized: Swimmers would be encouraged to wear their suits to the pool and home again. The goal, Mr. Sarrafzadeh says, “is to ensure we can run the program and still make sure everyone’s safe.” Those objectives front an equally serious one – the role pools serve as a safety valve, especially in a steaming city frustrated by pandemic restrictions. Mr. Sarrafzadeh is a skilled public administrator, so he puts it another way. “We believe that our role is to ensure access for all citizens, especially those who are vulnerable or marginalized. The opportunity to cool off assists with everyone’s well being.”
Louise Garfield suffers from three agonizing hearing afflictions – including tinnitus and an inner ear balance problem. Swimming is one of the few therapies she can administer herself. “When I swim, I don’t hear the noise. And you don’t need equilibrium to move freely in the water.” She has lobbied Toronto city councillors to install a system that would let swimmers reserve a lane – a system Mr. Sarrafzadeh claims is in the works for indoor pools this fall.
But here is the strange thing: If you brave the lineup and make it into a straitened public pool, it’s fantastic. Forty people is nothing. You feel like you have the place to yourself. Maintaining distance is a breeze. “It relieves all of the stress of lifeguarding,” says Andrew, the young man manning the front door and handing out bracelets and taking down e-mails and phone numbers (for possible contact tracing). He’s studying politics at McGill. “But the fear for your own personal safety is higher.”
Denied a locker, people pile their belongings on the pool deck, like a community of beaver huts. The quiet is astonishing. The diving board is closed, but there’s more time to look around. One-piece bathing suits are big this season. “If you don’t start behaving better, we’re going home,” a women in her late 40s tells a small pouting boy: He keeps taking objects out of his mother’s purse and throwing them at strangers, and is clearly bound for a federal penitentiary. Pedro Almeida, who is 16 and in Grade 11, is practising headfirst cartwheel flop dives with his pal, Simao Soares, who is 13 and in Grade 8, but much taller. Two young women, Rene Lewis and Olivia Zagouris, also Grade 10, laugh at everything the boys say and do. It is hard to tell if the girls think the boys are hilarious or idiots, or both. I would go with the third option. You can watch this kind of action with great pleasure in an uncrowded pool while you try not to become infected by a potentially fatal virus. Then you can stand up and tumblesault into the no-diving diving pool and sink to the bottom, floating and resting and thinking and encased. Swimming in a river or the ocean, one’s mind is preoccupied with one’s surroundings, with currents and rocks and creatures of the deep. Whereas a pool is contained, and a city pool especially so, and sets us free to meander.
But our 45 minutes are up. Everyone stands to leave. No one is in a rush, except for Simao and Olivia and Renee and Pedro, who dash around to the front gate of the pool to find only one wristband left for the next 45-minute swim slot. “We’re all loyal,” Simao says. “No one wants to go.”
On the way home, I try to remember the things that bobbed into my head as I floated in the deep end: my father’s face, my daughter’s voice, my brother leaping stoutly off granite rocks into stiff Atlantic waves. Things I love and things I miss. I did not once think of Drake and his enormous private pool.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
