A lot of snow has been falling this winter. Here in Ludington we’re at 55” and counting for the year, with another 5 or so having fallen last night. I’m always impressed by the work plows make here, probably because the plow trucks have all sorts of blades and options. They have blades in front, blades on the belly of the truck, and even blades on the sides that can be raised and lowered like wings to expand the width of the truck and capture snow in the shoulder, turn lanes, or just in a wider swath at once. To plow large paths of roads across an entire town, this is an efficient means of doing so.
Individual people have all sorts of ways for dealing with the snow, too. Some people have ATVs outfitted with plows. Seems every guy with a truck owns a plow. Snowblowers are everywhere, too.
I’ve largely resisted the snow blower and paying for a plow because, it seems to me, if you’re going to live in “the Michigan Snow Belt”, you might as well be comfortable with the snow.
Getting back to my notions on “What is a good tool?” I tend to view mechanized plows as fast, but very damaging. They often rip up so much snow they dig into the ground, harming tree roots and potentially exposing burrows and ground nests. The humble shovel, like a rake, puts me a little closer to the earth. That feels like a good thing.
Yesterday I saw someone driving a specially equipped tractor with a plow attached that had a lighted cab. I imagine, too, it might have had heat and A/C since he wasn’t wearing gloves or a coat. It maybe had a speaker and no doubt a dozen other little creature comforts. “Look, they made a tractor for people who don’t like tractors,” I thought.
Or put another way, a tool built for people who presumably like or chose or want to work outdoors for a living has been designed to insulate people from being outdoors. Given the cost of a tractor, this is not something a person buys on a whim just to shovel their driveway. You can’t hand wave that away as “A reasonable thing people use to clear their driveway four months of the year.”
One of our neighbors has a big CAT earthmover with a big bucket on the front. It looks like it might have been built during the Cold War. He uses it, best I can tell, to move piles of soil from one spot to another. Sometimes leaves. Rarely anything else. I don’t know how this man has it, or why he ever thought he needed it, or how he acquired it. That’s none of my business. But it belches a lot of smoke and exhaust and produces enough noise we can hear it in our house, which becomes my business. And it seems to have no purpose other than to invite him to go bumming around in it to pass the time.
A friend of ours was out shoveling his driveway yesterday after the fluffy snow had hardened into thick chunks of ice. He was hacking at it until someone came along with a truck and dropped a plow to push it all in one swoop. But the result was a mountain of snow piled up at the end of the driveway so tall they couldn’t safely pull out on to the road. To solve the problem caused by the fast, “efficient” plow, they used…a shovel.
These things are so curious to me. We’ve got people reaching for bulldozers to push leaves around. Snow blowers and ATVs the size of small cars with wind screens and cabs designed to keep people out of the outside. And an entire region of people spending vast sums of money on equipment to reduce their need to be in the place they choose to live. I frequently see people with snowblowers struggling mightily to get them oriented in the right spot or wrestling them up banks and drifts. All of which doesn’t seem all that much better than a sturdy shovel.
I imagine people considered a flamethrower, but given how hard it is to buy at the local Ace Hardware, they settled instead for equipment that’s 3-10x larger and significantly more expensive.
