Shovel Ready
I’m learning how to shovel snow again. Only been about 40 years since my brother and I had a client-base in Northern Wisconsin where we’d clear the neighbors’ walkways every storm. We didn’t get rich, but it was a good lesson in entrepreneurial startups, even if we never got to the stage of hiring illegal immigrants, all those frostbitten Ontarians seeking a warmer, richer life in the country where glaciers have receded, willing to work for sub-minimum wages in subzero weather.
Snowblowers are standard equipment in most garages now, as ubiquitous as John Deere lawnmowers back home here or leafblowers in Colorado or pool skimmers in Southern California. Big, loud, clanking metal wormscrews powered to push through a foot or two of fresh wet snow and hurl it up to the mountaintops of all the previous snows where, sometime near summer, the dirty iceball will finally melt into pools perfect for skeeter breeding.
I won’t be here long enough, but if I stuck it out until, oh, March, say, the action moves up, way up, past the gutters and onward to the chimney and roof ridge. Long seasons of snow build up some serious tonnage on the roofs, so yeah, we shovel those too and not just to make Santa deliveries less slippery. Nothing quite as homewrecking or heartwrenching as a cave-in of rafters giving way under a spring avalanche….
By this point you can usually walk right onto the roof, no ladder necessary. Just find the right drift on a windward side of the hacienda and stroll, shovel in hand, right into a winter’s worth of glacial accretion. Good luck, though, figuring out where to shovel it to, Nevertheless, it’s a breathtaking view up there. Ten foot tunnels connect to the street, to the garage, to the neighbors, a beautiful white ant colony of winter dwellers waiting for the Great Thaw or Global Warming or just a retirement in a trailerpark down in Tampa where you might see, in the little metal shed off the porch out back, a battered old snow shovel, scarred and bent, a relic of another era, as odd as a mastodon on a leash off the clothesline pole.
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