The Other Side of Winter II

A.V. Walters

Too windy even to bury the car!

Too windy even to bury the car!

It’s blowing and cold out there. It is snowing, but the wind is so strong, that it’s tough to tell what’s new snow, and what’s just being whipped around and redistributed. The usual storm pattern swoops across from the west or northwest. We look out and the snow is horizontal. We’ve noted from the national weather maps that in the center of the county, near where we’ll be living come spring, there’s a pocket of particularly heavy snow accumulation. One look at the winds today tells the story. All the snow from here ends up there. I see a Kubota in our future.

Without appreciable new snowfall (indeed some areas now have less than before) the driveway has drifted over and needs another shoveling. Rick has taken the laboring oar on snow removal. He maintains a beautiful driveway and paths through the yard. He’s learning to sculpt them so that the wind helps keep them clear, though in some places, drift, it will. I’d love to brag about his efforts, but since much of my family lives far north of here (and with really heavy snow) they’d just scoff. My niece reported on her facebook page the other day that she and her children are tobogganing off their roof. We just can’t compete with that.

Still, some things are universal. No matter where you are, everyone complains that, shovel as they may, they just hate it when the plow comes and negates their hours of work, filling in their driveways with road accumulations. Rick bemoans that it isn’t just more snow, plow snow is heavier and crustier. If you let it sit it will turn to a driveway-blocking wall of lumpy ice. It’s not an observation; it’s a conviction.

This past week our local weekly paper did a feature article on ‘the snow plow drivers of Leelanau County.’ It’s appropriate. Those guys (and they seem to be all guys) are doing a hell of a job keeping the roads clear in this record-breaking year. Now, in mid-January, our to-date snow-fall total is 152 inches, which exceeds the usual seasonal total. Only two weeks ago the paper quoted a local meteorologist as saying that we’d hit our 150 and then it would stop. Think again. Anyway, I had to laugh when the veteran snow plow driver stated that his pet peeve was when homeowners would push their snow into his road. (Apparently it makes for a rough ride.)