Days of Snow, Man of Ice
Your humble correspondent versus the bomb cyclone
Saturday
I didn’t bring my boots inside. That was my first mistake.
Snow has been falling for a day already, but of course it has. The bomb cyclone, still a novel and not-overly-threatening concept, is just getting started. My car is in the back of the house — that will turn out to be my second mistake — so I exit via the back door rather than tromp down the length of the driveway.
I dash across the backyard in my low-top Cariumas, unlocking the car with the key fob in my pocket. A few hurried attempts to pry open frozen doors eventually yield success and my quickly-dampening feet propel me back inside. The snow is about halfway up my calves, leaving my pants blotted with moisture. Not too bad, considering. Tomorrow is Christmas and I have every expectation it will proceed as planned.
A month ago I didn’t even own boots; the snow back home in Pittsburgh barely even registers after growing up here in Buffalo. I bought a pair of Timberlands over Thanksgiving for use in a mid-winter roadside emergency of my mother’s imagining — typically involving me abandoning the car to trudge miles down the interstate. My own imagination struggles to incorporate such a decision, but it will be easier in a few days.
I change into dry socks and return to my holiday routine, which is to say, finding odd jobs around the house that my mother either can’t do or would never care to do. Closets to reorganize. A decade’s worth of World Wildlife Fund calendars to stuff in with the recycling. A similar span of old greeting cards that she’d never permit me to throw out, but which can at least be arranged into piles rather than scattered over the furniture of my childhood bedroom.
She’s not a hoarder, I don’t think. The house is mostly clean and she donates old junk all the time. It’s memories she has trouble letting go of.
Cleaning things, sorting things, fixing things is my way of reminding myself who I am now.
Where this house is concerned, I have no such problems. No matter how many times I return to this space it brings with it the pull to regress, to revert to the antisocial teenager I was instead of the antisocial adult I’ve grown into. Cleaning things, sorting things, fixing things is my way of reminding myself who I am now, of shaping the experience into one where I’m the adult and it’s her, more and more each visit, who needs to be looked after.
The snow keeps falling, but the house is warm and we have nowhere to be. We’re watching an old movie that evening when the carbon monoxide detector starts chiming, forcing us at last to reckon with what’s unfolding outside. The furnace’s exhaust vent, we conclude, must be clogged with snow.
Let me say that again: The furnace. Is clogged with snow.
Her snow shovel is nowhere to be found, so we call the neighborhood handyman whom she insists absconded with it and he and I clomp through a series of backyards, the snow well past my knees, to dig out the vent. Or more accurately, he digs it out while I stand nearby and watch. It’s hard to get to and I don’t know my way around like I used to.
Sunday
My mother’s driveway is a narrow canyon between her house and the next one over, and near the back end, the next morning’s snow is maybe four to six inches deep. At the front end, and most everywhere else, it’s more like two feet. As I assess the situation, the rituals of Christmas begin to drift downward on my list of priorities, their position usurped by the ability to leave town on Tuesday like I’d planned.
With a brief interlude of sun holding the snowfall at bay, I quickly get to work clearing my car. After the furnace debacle, the handyman lent me a heavy metal shovel known as a pusher — you can guess what it’s normally for — but since the snow is fresh and light I do most of the work with my mother’s large plastic rake; it proves very effective at scooping and flinging large volumes of powder, just sticky enough to span the tines, out of my way. And so the pattern commences: clear a few feet of ground along the circumference of the car, then as much of the top of the car as I can reach, then re-clear the ground of whatever fell off the car during step two. Move down a few feet and begin again. Short recess to open presents. Resume.
I haven’t lived here in over twenty years, and truth be told, I miss shoveling snow. There are certain types of work — vacuuming, mopping — where doing them properly means you barely notice any difference afterward. Shoveling is my favorite kind of work, because when you step back you can see every last drop of effort staring back at you. Energy and time and sweat transformed into short-term infrastructure.
By late afternoon, the car is mostly cleared but the driver’s door is still frozen shut, so I sit down in the passenger’s seat for another rest. I reach across with my keys and start the car with no undue fuss, the engine blissfully unaware of what’s been transpiring above the hood. I let it run for a little while to exercise my aging battery, sitting there with the radio and heaters on as a reward for my labors. On the other side of my windshield, the snow has resumed falling.
Monday
I wake to find several more inches have come down, replacing what I’ve cleared and reinforcing what I haven’t. My car isn’t going anywhere regardless, so I leave it be.
From extensive past experience I know that the woman across the street, whose daughters I grew up with, keeps a keen eye on the neighborhood from her living room windows. I started in the back in part to postpone her judgment, but now that I have some success under my belt I proudly walk the green plastic rake out front and set to work on my mother’s car. The same impulse that drove me to organize her closets insists now that I assert my capabilities to the rest of the block, even as I labor to free myself of it. That I draw a clear line between the boy they remember and the man whose Ford Escape appears in the driveway a few times a year.
When the time comes for a break I wander off in search of functional commerce. I’ve been out of the house for hours already, but after three days “out of the house” is no longer sufficient; I need to get as far away from it as I can stagger.
I lumber around for an hour or two, scaling peaks of hardpack at every corner and hoping the sidewalk on the other side has been cleared. I find a looted convenience store, an open but picked-clean Walgreens, and finally the great expanse of Delaware Consumer Square, entirely closed yet dutifully cleared of snow just the same. Three blocks away, an abandoned car on my mother’s block remains all but buried.
I return to the house, hands empty but arms rested, and finish off my mother’s car to the hypothetical awe of unseen neighbors. Later, I go out to give my own car a quick brush-off and find that the key fob isn’t working. Only the driver’s door has an actual key lock, so I wedge myself into the narrow cleared space and manage to pry it open. The battery, so self-assured just yesterday, is now dead.
Tuesday
While today’s task, the driveway, is in one sense the most basic, I saved it for last for good reason: each scoop of snow will have to be carried to the back of the house, farther and farther as I progress, and hoisted over a five-foot fence into the yard next door. Our own yard is harder to get to, and with dozens if not hundreds of trips in my future, every avoided step is precious.
The weather has officially shifted and the snow has begun melting a little, which would be a good thing it if didn’t make the remainder heavier and more compacted. The small community of tines at the end of the rake begins to rupture as one after another snaps and abandons its post for slushier pastures.
As a lingering ache, no longer resolved by a night’s sleep, creeps further and further along my limbs and through my core, I enter what you could call the bargaining phase, clearing only as much snow as I’m certain I can’t drive through and hoping the rising temperature will lend a hand with the rest. The path is already there, I remind myself, I’m simply removing the superfluous material.
Meanwhile, word of my dead battery disperses throughout the neighborhood gossip network, and the handyman’s father brings news that one of my childhood friends who still lives nearby — outside the range of the driving ban, since we’re right at the edge of the city — is available to pick me up from the Walgreens and drive me to a battery dealer. Before I know it I’m trudging back to the house with a new battery in my arms, feeling the acid slosh back and forth and marveling at the assemblage of people whose proactive concern made this happen. All to fix a car that has nowhere to go, for a man they knew twenty years ago but who now barely bothers to wave at them when he’s in town.
There’s something to be said for growing up somewhere.
Later, well after the sun has gone down and with the driveway about three-quarters done, I notice bright lights coming from the end of the block. I lope forward in time to watch a front loader turn onto our small street and make a beeline for the far end, leaving bold new ridges on either side of the street and a single lane of clearance between them. That’s about all that can be expected in an emergency of this magnitude — but it’s enough to give me a chance.
Wednesday
The sun is out in force the next morning, and people are emerging, some seemingly for the first time, to clear paths from their driveways to the two-foot ridge of hardpack left behind by the front loader like a dam holding the unshoveled tides at bay. I survey their efforts from my bedroom window and taste the prospect of freedom for the first time.
Thus far I’ve been intent on shouldering my own very literal load out there, but having already accepted help with the battery I’ve softened to the idea of assistance connecting our driveway to the road. I ask my mother to extend such a request to the handyman not knowing whether he’ll be available in an hour or five or not at all, but by the time I get out of the shower he’s already out there with, frankly, a much better shovel than the one he’d lent me. I decide not to hold it against him.
I’m no longer present enough in these people’s lives to maintain much of a preconceived identity; I am, instead, whomever I currently appear to be.
Beside him, wielding an ice chopper, is the woman from across the street whose eyes I had felt upon me on Monday. When I rush out to join them she confirms as much, saying that the amount of progress I’d been making had motivated her to work more on her own property over the last couple days.
It’s a nice little validation of my earlier aspirations, a reminder that no matter how well they knew me before I’m no longer present enough in these people’s lives to maintain much of a preconceived identity; I am, instead, whomever I currently appear to be. A concept that crystallizes into being every holiday season only to evaporate come January.
Between the two of them, alternately chopping and scooping, the path is mostly cleared already, but I wrest the ice scraper from her hands just the same and the remainder is quickly done. That just leaves the last quarter of the driveway — by now a layer of watery, dense material about a foot high; too heavy for the rake, too tall for the pusher. And definitely too thick to drive through.
Taking stock of the five-foot mounds of snow I’ve already amassed at each end of the driveway, I conclude that there’s simply nowhere left to put the rest of it. Nowhere, at least, that I have the time and energy to bring it to. That leaves dispersal as my best remaining option.
The temperature is well into the forties by now; it will breach fifty before the end of the week. Having spent my youth circumnavigating mounds of plowed hardpack that regularly lasted well into the spring, I’ve always said, only half jokingly, that Public Works should have a melting division, whose job it would be to fan out on warm days and re-scatter the snow they’d previously piled up in order to get rid of it as fast as possible. Usually that’s just an aesthetic concern, but today, suddenly, it’s existential.
I spend the next hour or so chopping the snow into wet bricks around the size of a box of wine, which I then raise in my gloved hands like offerings to Jack Frost and smash down onto the nearest clear area. Even my mother, who’d be perfectly happy to keep me home indefinitely, finally accepts that I’m getting the fuck out of here and assumes chopping duties herself for a time, wanting to grant my drive as much daylight as possible. Eventually the snow has been not so much cleared as decimated — reduced to an entropic starfield of ice chunks smashed and kicked into planetary systems of varying sizes and configurations.
Only now do I permit myself to pack and load my car. With my mother’s temporarily relocated, I fold in my side-view mirrors and make the careful backwards journey to the front of the driveway. New constellations crunch into existence as I go, belts of asteroidal slurry left in the wake of each pair of tires.
After saying goodbye, I back carefully into the clearing in the center of our street, leaving a lumpy, white trench of pure effort running alongside the house I grew up in — four days of my life carved into the terrain, declaring to the world that I was here. In a week or so it will be gone.
Next: Now that I’ve warmed up with some narrative nonfiction I’m finally dipping my toes into a piece of actual short fiction, loosely inspired by my experiences working in downtown Pittsburgh during the original COVID lockdowns. It’s been a tough nut to crack and may take longer to turn around than this one did but I’m starting to feel good about it.
