Digging Snow

Winters in NJ don’t really have a normal. They vary wildly from one year to the next: sometimes autumn-like and snow-free, sometimes bone-chilling with serial blizzards. You never know. This one so far has been a potpourri: days that were randomly balmy and icy, sunny and overcast, rainy and snowy. This past Monday was snowy one. 30 inches (76 cm) of wet and heavy snow fell, which housebound me more effectively than covid. The fellow who plows my driveway had mechanical problems with his truck thereby keeping my 200 ft (61 m) long driveway nearly impassible until late last night. Prior to then, I decided to dig out portions by hand shovel: particularly the wall of snow and ice piled up at the driveway entrance by passing municipal snow plow vehicles as well as the snow dune in front of my garage that had been augmented by snow sliding off the roof. At least in an emergency I might have been able to get my truck out of the garage and down the sloping driveway to the road even though it never could never make the return trip back up.

 

There is, of course, a risk to this. A Quebec study of 128,000 hospital admissions for heart attack over a 30 year period found a direct correlation of snowfall accumulation and deaths. A snowfall over 8 inches (20 cm) meant a 34% rise in heart attack deaths. Nearly all of the additional casualties were middle-age and senior men – in other words me.  But I have shoveled many materials over many years. My very first real paying job was with a shovel: spreading gravel on a construction site at age 16. So it would be fitting to go out with a shovel on a nonpaying job – a life arc of sorts.

 

Snow varies in weight by density, but wet snow of Monday’s variety typically weighs 20 pounds per cubic foot (318 kg per cubic meter). Doing the math on the area and depth of the driveway and walkway sections I shoveled, the total is a bit more than 12 tons (11 metric tons). I suppose I could dig out some more just so I can sing along with Tennessee Ernie Ford, but I don’t think it’s worth it. Mr. Ford was singing about coal, of course, but I do generally use a coal shovel for digging through deep snow; it is sturdier and better balanced than standard snow shovels. Anyway, the snow plow arrived eventually. I’ve contemplated acquiring a truck and plow of my own, but they are too pricey for the number of times they are useful unless you intend to conduct a side business plowing driveways. I still had to clean up, again with a shovel, after the plow, which is normal.

 

Recognizable shovels of all kinds in all parts of the world have been around at least since Neolithic times. Possibly earlier. Every structure more permanent than a tent needs a foundation, even if it is just leveled earth. Before you can build you must dig. Specialized snow shovels are older than one might think, too. A 6000-year-old one has been found in a Russian bog. The blade is carved from an elk antler. The archaeologists who studied it say the blade was tied to a wood handle. It wouldn’t have been much good for shoveling anything tougher than snow, but for that purpose it is surprisingly suitable. Shovels suited to harder digging had to wait the arrival of metallurgy, but making shovels was one of the earliest uses of metals besides weapons and jewelry. Different types for different tasks appeared quickly and the designs haven’t changed much in thousands of years. The ancient Roman Army’s entrenching shovel doesn’t look much different from the current US Army entrenching shovel except that the former doesn’t fold. In the War of Independence, George Washington’s troops used cast iron shovels made by John Ames in Massachusetts: much of the time for snow removal during the tough winters of the war years. The Ames Shovel Company, founded in 1774, is still in business.

 

I haven’t counted them (and I don’t wish to go out to the garage and barn at the moment just to do so) but I estimate that I have at present a dozen shovels, give or take a couple. I used to have more, but some were so old that the handles split and it wasn’t worth fitting a new one. (My father was a builder, so I still have a barn full of hand and power tools plus dozens of boxes of nails ranging from brads to 60-penny spikes.) Three of the shovels are snow shovels – four if you count the coal shovel.

 

Digging is so ingrained in our consciousness as a way to get at the bottom of something that “to dig” means to understand – usually connoting “liking,” though it is possible to dig something you don’t like. In my youth the verb was used in this sense commonly and unironically. Nowadays it tends to be used as a deliberate affectation: aping a beatnik speech pattern that is no longer current. Yet the meaning is still understood. Sometimes when we understand what someone tells us, we still reach for the metaphorical shovel: sometimes to deal with metaphorical snow, and sometimes for something else.

 

Barry McGuire – Why Not Stop And Dig It While You Can