Snow Drifts and Mind Drifts

I have left my Christmas lights up, especially the ones strung through the bushes that line my 90-foot driveway. I say I am celebrating winter, but I am really resisting winter, for the streetlight’s beams do not illuminate the upper-part of the driveway, the part I see from the three dining room windows when, in the morning, I descend the stairs and turn toward the kitchen to make the first of several pots of coffee. The darkness of that view, the deep, implacable blackness of it, has always torpedoed my spirit. And so, this year, I have left up the Christmas lights, an aorta of multicolored luminescence entering and infusing the frozen-chambered heart of an Iowan midwinter night.

I headed into that night at 6:00 am this past Wednesday morning, bundled and layered, snow shovel in hand. Those celebratory-resistant lights revealed that the aerodynamics of blizzard winds constrained by the right-angled geometry of the house and garage had sculpted several drifted waves of snow that would need to be removed had I any hope of meeting my 8:00 am freshman composition class.

Now, I do own a snowblower, a hulking, gas-powered, eight-geared Craftsman 24-inch Snow Thrower, a gift from my wife Kathy--an act of mercy, really, prompted by her concern about the toll last winter’s frequent and punishingly abundant snowfalls were taking on my aging body. But fingers that fumble buttoning shirt cuffs should not be fiddling with complicated machinery at 6:00 am in the dim light cast by a garage’s overhead bulb, and, in any event, I would not risk waking up my neighbors, human and otherwise. Besides, there is that Puritan residue in me, that somber, sober, styptic voice that says exertion is good, is physically strengthening, bracing, edifying—a bit of saving grace to redeem the body from the sedentary drift of contemporary life. Still, the thigh-high size of those drifts would, perhaps, have caused even the most ardent Calvinist’s faith to falter. I remembered that the lowest circle of Dante’s hell did not burn. It was frozen. No fire. Ice. Well, nothing to do but settle into the labor and attack the drifts in layers, scoopful after patient scoopful, thankful, but only in a small way, for the shovel’s ergonomic handle.

Shoveling snow is a mindless task, and the mind minds being mindless; it craves stimulation, so, as I shoveled my mind wandered into wondering. I wondered about the impossibly perky young woman I had seen the previous week on a morning show showcasing the latest devices, manual and powered, for lightening the snow shoveling burden, her warning about heart attacks, and her claim that after just two minutes of shoveling heavy snow the heart hammers at such a petal-to-the-metal pace that it is liable, at any moment, to be pulled over and placed under cardiac arrest. I wondered if Emerson, who delighted in “the frolic architecture of snow,” had shoveled any.

I wondered about a Sherman Alexie story in which a group of boys, wanting to play midwinter outdoor basketball, soak the snow covering the court with kerosene and set it ablaze. I had no kerosene, but I did have a nearly full two-and-a-half-gallon gas can; however, I remember the house next door had burned down 4 years ago, and I remember the tear-streaked face of the owner, each tear lit by the light of the fire consuming his home, the first that he had purchased, and I decided that, while it may have a certain flair in a work of fiction, in the real world the inferno option was best put aside.

I wondered about the grunt, primal and somehow viscerally satisfying, that accompanied each lifted shovelful of snow and its being flung off to the side. And that caused me to wonder if the discredited “heave-ho” theory of language origin might, in fact, have merit, that language emerged from the sounds involuntarily emitted by the push and shoveness, the lift and toteness, of strenuous physical labor—a language of the body transposed to the brain, localized and made neural in the Broca and Wernicke areas.

And as I tackled the much more compacted drift thrown up on the driveway’s apron by a city snow plow passing during the night, I wondered why, with just two or three shovelsful left, the snow plow came by again, reconstituting what I had so arduously removed. The driver did slow his speed slightly, proving, I suppose, that he had a heart, a soul, but the upsprayed snow toppled the trash receptacle, spilling its contents, and I wondered how so often we seem to be holding a chance card unaware that we have rolled the dice. How often we are forced to improvise. I wondered if that was a good thing. I thought it was.
I wondered what would happen if Jesus should suddenly appear. Would he tell me that if I had a muscular faith I could command the snow to rise and remove itself, much as he tells his disciples, “if you shall say to the mountain `Arise, and hurl thyself into the sea’ it shall be done?” Would he grab the spare shovel and help, serene and self-contained, whistling a show tune perhaps? Would he comment on the Vatican’s decision to provide the Discovery Channel access to its exorcism files, or the blessing the Pope conferred on Facebook? Would he watch for a while, smile, then walk off, atop the snow, into the early morning darkness? Would I, one of the fallen away, fall back?

And I wondered, seriously, sadly, if, as the years pass, our lives announce our increasing humiliation—the debilities of age and the subsequent cultural neglect, the mad rush of befuddling technological gadgetry, the condescension of youth. Do our lives wither down to the concentrated space of a shovel’s scoop? Do we measure them with droppers, with tumblers and teaballs? Do we write them in six-point agate typeface? Speak them in a grammar of diminishment?

But no, I would have none of that. I was out for doing and being, not having done and having been. I had a job to do, and I did it; despite hands and feet that throbbed with cold, despite arms and back that muttered an achy monologue, I did it. Some hot coffee and oatmeal, and I was off to my class, where the students, hoping for canceled classes, were less than exuberant at my arrival. I felt good, though, felt vital, felt, somehow, victorious.