Remember Ken, the guy who loved winter? The guy who would would cheer every time there was a blizzard and just generally spread totally unwelcome joy on everyone with every centimeter of snow?
Yeah. That guy died.
He died tonight, shovelling the driveway for the fifth and by far most difficult time this season. You could hear the sound of his death. It sounded remarkably like the shovel that snapped in his hands as he tackled the oft-cursed mound of plough-snow left like a titanic pile of guano at the foot of the driveway.
Winter-loving Ken's last word was, predictably, an expletive.
Meet the new Ken. This Ken detests snow. While he shares with his predecessor a strong dislike for summer, with its searing heat, soaking humidity and sticky ickiness, he wouldn't be at all disappointed with perpetual autumn. He'd still like the nights to plunge below zero--the better to cuddle you with, my dear--but he'd very much like it if he never saw another flake he had to shovel.
Old, winter-loving, crazy Ken awoke this morning to about ten centimetres. The shovelling went pretty well, all things considered: less than half an hour. It was invigorating, actually. It woke me up. Strictly speaking, the driveway did not need to be shovelled. Not really. But a lesson from my stepdad has sunk deep into my winter fibre.
Many years ago, in the middle of a storm at least as bad as the one that hit us today, I arrived home from school to find John busily shovelling. (John did everything busily. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the man built things and tore them down every night, in his sleep.) I asked him what the hell he was doing (well, I didn't use hell--a hell was as bad as a fuck, in that household), given that I could hardly see him in the blowing curtain of snow. Why shovel when you're just going to have to come out and shovel again, I asked. And he replied, "better to shovel four inches three times than a foot once."
I didn't believe him, of course. Three times the work just didn't appeal to a lazy boy like me. So the next time it snowed a foot...which, by the bye, used to happen with much more regularity... I let it accumulate before going out to whisk it away.
Oops. Should have listened to Mr. Smartypants, there, Ken, you idiot.
So, lesson learned, I've been shovelling this driveway religiously. There's a sense of pride in it...I can pretend it's my driveway, even though it's really the bank's and will be for an ungodly number of years yet. And I can look up and down "my" driveway and say, there's a job well done.
It took me two hours to get home by bus today...four times as long as normal. And once I got here I was confronted with, you guessed it, that mountain of misery at the foot of the driveway.
I was going along pretty well, there, for a while. There was at least twenty fresh centimetres, drifted in places to nearly twice that, and it was wet snow, too, but I was managing. I got the driveway cleared from the car to the sidewalk. Then my mood started to sour. I haven't got much sidewalk to clear--maybe ten or twelve meters--but damn it, this shouldn't be my job. Every city I've ever lived in (and that includes the booming metropolis of Ingersoll, population seven thousand or so) has sidewalk plows, clearing every sidewalk in town immediately after any snowfall. Waterloo has sidewalk plows, but they only use them on sidewalks adjoining city property. I wrote city hall about this once; they responded rather snottily that sidewalk plows would necessitate a huge tax increase. Don't get me started on the things this city has seen fit to waste tax dollars on since I wrote that letter. Anyway...
The short stretch of driveway from the sidewalk to the road was brutal. It was very deep, packed very hard on top, and full of slush on the bottom. And my little plastic shovel wasn't built for this kind of snow, obviously. Without any warning at all, it snapped right where the shaft meets the blade. I actually fell over it, it happened so suddenly.
Ever tried using a garden spade to clear a mountain of snow?
I have, and I can report that this is not something that works very well. On the plus side, it does bite right down to asphalt and it's a lot more sturdy than a plastic shovel. But on the other hand, it's a lot like using a teaspoon to dig a hole. It sucks, in other words.
New Ken was born in that moment where the shovel met the snow and said "no thank you". And "no thank you" is exactly what the new Ken has to say about snow.
No comments:
Post a Comment