My name is Joseph Smythe

My name is Joseph Smythe and I’m a Canadian, I was born in the first winter and I turned 19 a few weeks ago. I live in one of these communities I just mentioned. My parents managed to survive the very first winter by sheer luck, they took a vacation in early December to the Dominican Republic. The winter had already been a hard one so they decided to go warm up for a week before Christmas. Their return flight to what was the city of Toronto never managed to get back. They boarded the plane and were told that there was a snowstorm but they had been cleared to take off. No one though anything of this because these types of things happen when you live in Canada.

I’ve heard my dad recount the story, after about an hour in the air the pilot came on the planes PA system and announced that they had been diverted to Miami because the storm around Toronto wasn’t letting up and a second one was coming in south of it. The pilot neglected to mention that Washington was already under three feet of snow and more was coming it was like the old movie The Day After Tomorrow but not quite as bad. By that I mean there was none of the flash freezing and gargantuan snow fall that they showed; it took time.

The plane landed in Jacksonville, Florida in the end because the Miami airport was full and they were expecting even more planes. That’s where we started that first winter, Jacksonville. States of Emergency were declared throughout Canada and most of the northern states, planes were refused permission to fly there and to land there so my parents did what they had to, with a temporary visa to stay in the US my dad did what he had done each winter as a kid, he shoveled snow. This is how they were able to scrape by. Even then this first winter was harsh, over 15 feet of snow ended up falling in Jacksonville that winter which kept my father and eventually mother quite busy and able to survive. But this was the beginning of the mess. They never left Florida and they count their blessings every day that they survived.