snow plow

Soft sounding words.

Every year I forget the racket that is the reality of that process. It is six a.m. and the first of the snow plowing is being done in the lane behind my house. There is nothing soft or quiet about plowing snow. The metal blade of the plow scrapes pavement and knocks hard against every bump and crack in the road. Tree trunks are scraped, grarges and plow blades collide, it is not at all exacting. It is not really neat although the finished work always does give an impression of neatness.

The snow plow sounds like a series of small car accidents. It sounds like heavy machinery scraping against cement, which is, I suppose, exactly what it is. It lasts for around 20 minutes in most cases.

It sounds alarming.

The tendency, on hearing a snow plow, is to wake up and see what is wrong. It hits at the same anxiety centre as a fire alarm if a little less urgently.

It is one of the few sounds of winter that one never becomes accustomed to and it nearly always occurs before it is time to get up and well after bedtime. I understand this - when else would you do it? There cannot be cars on the road, after all. But the banging, as it smacks into things and the sound of things whamming out of the way, the dragging, the scraping. It is usually well into February before I can return to sleep again on a night after it has started.

Perhaps this is why people from this part of the world find winter so taxing. One of the reasons anyhow.

Not too far from where I live there is a snow dump. Those of us who didn't grow up with this reality seldom think of it but snow has to go somewhere. If it doesn't melt, it can only be pushed aside once or twice before the volume becomes too much.

In Ottawa, as in most northern cities, the snow is heaped into big open trucks as the plow continues on its way. Later, the trucks go to the snow dump and contribute to a huge pile of snow. By January, it looks like a frozen version of Ayre's Rock - same loaf shape and everything.

In the summer, the bus passes by the spot where the snow dump was. It is a large, empty plane, like several football fields. (we get a lot of snow) It reminds me of an Aztec Plaza and you can see spirals of sandbags about six or eight feet in diameter, marking holes in the ground where, I presume, the snow melts and drains. I don't know why they mark in spirals but they do.

We are close to the river, I suppose the melted snow drains into the current. All that salt, the grit, the fresh water snow - all that winter, marked by sandbag spirals like some reference to the movement of the galaxy. It's memorable.

The giant dump seldom melts completely before June. At the end of the season it really does look like rock, there is nothing white or frozen looking about it. Yet, it is still snow, still melting, still a part of winter carried well beyond spring.

Today, real winter begins.