February 17, 2009

The Northern Man and His Snow Shovel

I love my snow shovel.

OK, I’ll admit that doesn’t exactly rank up there with Tristan and Isolde (look it up) or Rachel and Ross (see “Tristan and Isolde” or “Monica and Chandler”). But some of us are just prone to simple passions. And here in Michigan, from about the third week of December through the third week of March, a snow shovel is a guy’s best friend, the infantryman’s rifle, Zorro’s sword, Linus’s blanket.

Every Midwestern man knows that his snow shovel is his winter lifeline. Without it, he could get completely snowed in, trapped, unable to provide his family with any of the basic necessities of winter survival, like Doritos and beer.

Now I’m not talking about “snow blowers,” those gas-driven marvels that take the snow in my neighbor’s driveway and hurl it majestically into mine. We winter purists look at snow blowers with a certain amount of scorn, as in, “Where the heck do you suppose he got the money to buy that terrific snow blower?”

Over the years I’ve had many snow shovels. Some were flashy, with sexy names like Slush-Buster 3000, or Slop Chopper, while others were quiet, unassuming, even mousey. They had identities too, but I admit that I was often so coldly uncaring that even as I think back on the tender times we shared, their names escape me.

For those of you who have spent your entire lives in the tropics, trapped in the unending monotony of what we Northerners disdain with cries of “Oh yeah, well those jerks down there have to put up with hurricanes – occasionally,” a basic snow shovel is nothing more than a good-sized rectangular tin plate, slightly bent then bolted to a stick. The idea is that snow is relatively light, so you want a large surface area to pick up a lot of the stuff with each scoop.

The obvious theoretical shortfall here is that whole “snow is relatively light” thing. There are about three days in every winter when the combination of temperature, humidity, dew point, barometric pressure, wind chill, UV index and terror alert level are perfectly aligned, and on those days the snow is as light as . . . well, as the purest driven snow.

On every other day of the winter, the snow is only light relative to a shovel full of bowling balls.

Nevertheless, we gamely attack all sorts of snow with our slightly bent rectangular tin plates bolted to sticks. We scrape, grunt, chisel and chop, building satisfyingly huge mountains of snow on each side of the driveway.

Sadly, a snow shovel never really seems to last very long. In fact, with the slightest scrape across bare pavement, the front edge tends to peel back and mushroom, since the tin blade is just slightly softer than cream cheese. And once the front edge is really beginning to show the ravages of age, a guy just has to move on to a newer, firmer model.

In the past few years, the market has been flooded with “ergonomic” shovels, featuring handles that are bent to look just like the ones I’ve run over with the Dodge. This is to reduce back strain and to save wear-and-tear on tires.

With the bent handle you can push the shovel along like a little plow. It actually only moves one shovel-full at a time and pushes the rest off to the side, which basically accomplishes nothing. But it looks really cool.

So in the end we are true Northern men, wielding our snow shovels like swords of truth and justice, cutting a righteous swath of mostly-clear asphalt through the ravages of winter, so that we can go forth to provide our families with life-sustaining Doritos and beer. As we gaze down our cleared driveways between the hard-won mounds of piled snow, we swell with pride at our hard-working pioneer spirit.

That, or we’re just too stupid to move South.

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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