The roar of an approaching snowplow is a welcome sound in the Midwest. It holds the promise of being able to venture out with the car again after the latest snow. You’ve shoveled the walks and driveway. You’ve scraped the car’s windows and brushed the snow off its roof. You’re ready to go. But the roads in the neighborhood are treacherous to impassable. What you need is that plow, and here it comes!
When the great, lights-flashing colossus roars off again, though, what you’re left with is cleared roads and blocked driveways.
Oh, well, you think, nothing for it but to get cracking, and you set to work on the chunks of ice and compressed snow that block your path to freedom. How you accomplish this task is entirely up to you. The usual method is to scoop the chunks onto a snow shovel and push them either to the curb or up onto the lawn. A couple winters ago, however, people in the neighborhood got creative. There was enough ice and snow that what the plow left behind really gave folks something to work with, presenting not just physical challenge but aesthetic opportunity as well.
A lady on Georgetown sorted through her driveway’s chunks for the finest specimens and collected them. Then she arranged them around her yard in cairns. She and others build cairns out of stones, balancing them on top of each other in rough order of decreasing size until they form a stable and pleasing whole. The finished towers, while built of rock, look almost ethereal. The neighbor’s chunk cairns, not so much.
Mostly, it was a matter of scale and material. It’s hard to pile ice chunks very high without heavy equipment. And the chunks themselves were ungainly enough that, although the cairns were cleverly stacked, they did not look ethereal. Impressive, yes. Ethereal, no. The responses of passersby were more along the lines of, “That looks like a lot of work!” and “Hope they don’t fall down!”
Farther up Georgetown and across the street, other neighbors chose to go simple with what the plow left behind. In their case, that included shards of ice about an inch thick and pretty darn big. The homeowners merely stood the shards up vertically in snowdrifts near the street where one and all could see them. The ice caught the sun nicely, clear and angular and sharp-edged, prompting such responses as, “Wow!” and “Hope that doesn’t fall down!”
What our immediate neighbors and we got in our driveways was big chunks. Big, heavy chunks. Like unto boulders. I tried to move some with a snow shovel and failed; they were just too heavy. My husband and neighbors from either side of us, all of whom were also out shoveling, came to see what they could do. I was in favor of using a better tool to break up the chunks, but the assembled shovelers were enjoying the human-versus-nature aspect of boulder budging. Everyone was stronger than I was, and some of their shovels were stronger than mine, too. They broke chunks into smaller bits for me (and, pretty soon, for themselves as well).
Then one neighbor–a tall strapping man–cast aside his shovel and advanced on a particularly large chunk in his own driveway. Unaided by implement of any kind, he leaned down and grasped either side of the chunk. Then he threw it out of the way. We stood in awe. He threw another one, then another. Then he threw one across the street onto the island in the middle of our court, and a new winter sport was born: chunk chucking.
It looked like something from a Highland Games, like the caber toss or tossing the sheaf. It was grand. It was inspiring. Others tried their hands at chunk chucking, but the one who started it remained the master. The rest of us lacked the stature, the robustness and frankly, by then, the energy. The new sport, though, changed our perspective on the wake of the snowplow: if it’s really bad, then it’s time for neighbors to play.
8 January 2021