Zen in the art of Snowblowing

I love snowblowing. I know that I love it because I get up early to do it. I stay up late to do it. In the middle of the night, I get up, just to look at the driveway to see if it needs blowing. I hope people will come over so I'll have an excuse to clear the driveway. I long for winter appointments so I can snowblow early to get out on time. I love the freedom that having a cleared driveway affords. The freedom to go anywhere I please no matter how crummy the weather. It is empowering. It is dangerous. It is affirming and masculating. Few things in the modern world compare to the primal futility of being out there when it's snowing 4 inches an hour, blowing that driveway. It's sort of like blow-drying your hair while you're still in the shower. Yes, I love snowblowing and, even more, snowblowers, and it has come to my attention that people in warmer climes never experience the mechanized wonders first hand. How empty must be their winters.

Picking out a snowblower is easy. They all work identically and equally - that is to say that if it has snowed enough to use one at all, it has already snowed too much for it to work acceptably. All snowblowers work simply by gathering snow and ideally flinging it somewhere else. Therefore, choose your snowblower by color and don't worry about how much it costs. The repairs you and others will make on your snowblower over its life will easily dwarf any amount you initially spend on it. Additionally, you will need to have a home for your snowblower. A medium sized barn should do. You'll need this to hold the tools, spare parts, gas cans and ice cold beverages that are required for normal use, maintenance and frequent repair of the brutish machines. A snowblower is a primitive beast, and you will revel in nostalgia as you purchase things from a by gone era when people used to work on their cars. Things like sparks plugs, starter fluid, and all but forgotten devices called "wrenches". If your small barn is heated, you'll need a refrigerator for the ice-cold beverages. If it's not heated, you can chill them in your hand.

The term snowblower, while wonderfully descriptive, is wholly inaccurate. The tiny crafts do not blow snow at all. And snow is just one of the substances snow blowers don't blow. Wind blows snow - hardest, when you're snow blowing. Snowblowers lob, rather than blow, the things they encounter. And they will lob rocks, twigs, pets, bolts and even parts of themselves up a chimney-like chute, bound for who-knows-where. Amazingly, though the snow, gravel and small animals are mixed and stirred together, they become desegregated the moment they leave this chimney. Thus, the thick slush and large snowblower-breaking- stones tend to land right next to you, ready to be re-blown on the next pass. These stones sometimes require two or three passes to break anything and I guess this is the way they get a fair shake. The smaller stones get thrown clear, into the yard, where they wait patiently for summer to repatriate the driveway through the shattered glass of your windshield. This is usually after the lawnmower has noticed them and, in concern uncommon to lawn implements, decided to help out. "Oh, look little stone. You've lost your way. Do not worry. It is I, lawnmower, who will return you to your stony nesting ground. Plus, I know a shortcut. Now hold tight and head for the car." Blammo! Lawnmowers tend to have the edge in muzzle velocity, but for sheer brutality, snowblowers are the kings.

Any other materials that have made it up the chimney, usually require immediate medical attention. Snowblowers are rife with safety features. Despite this, every person who uses one for any length of time eventually loses a finger. With luck, this will only be a finger of a glove or a lesser-used finger like a pinky. But, because the chimney becomes clogged with detritus with every few feet of use, and because of the trust engendered by the built-in safety features, you will break down and clear that chimney with your hand. At this point the idle blades will whirl to life and you will lose a finger. This is known as a freak accident and it happens to every snowblower operator. Your owner's manual will have instructions for producing this situation. These should be memorized and pondered carefully as you search through your lawn for your finger.

One safety feature is a clever little device called a shear pin. Shear pins are glorified bolts that are designed to break. Their invention went something like this - Problem: "Dogs getting caught in spinning blades of blower" Solution: "We'll make these tiny pins that break when there's an obstruction - They'll shear off when put under x pounds of tension and will come to be known as a safety feature." So, rather than shred the dog into ground chuck and fling him out the chimney onto the lawn, you can just maim him and take him to the vet in a blizzard to have them put him to sleep - after you're finished blowing the driveway, of course. All parts of a snowblower are designed to break under certain unreasonable loads, so you should not be disappointed when this happens. After all, it is the operator's fault for exceeding the design specs and if you consult the owner's manual, it will tell you that you shouldn't have done whatever it was you did. It will also tell you that you can avoid this problem in the future by not doing it again. I have broken starters, cords, clasps, bolts, springs, gears, chains, cranks, and switches. No part, however, seems to have been designed to fail so well as the shear pin. In one 18 hour marathon of snowblowing last month, I broke and replaced 12 shear pins which is the primary reason the marathon took 18 hours and is in part a tribute to a truckload of large stones left over from some home project that got dumped in the driveway. It is amazing the lesson in principles of friction that you learn when blowing snow. It seems that small grade gravel and sand provide traction for your car and therefore are acceptable things to have in the driveway. Large stones, however, get coated with ice and form giant frictionless Teflon globs. Parking in this substance is akin to parking on overgrown tapioca pudding, except that this tapioca pudding snaps shear pins like toothpicks. Highway departments have learned this lesson and this is why they sprinkle sand and small pieces of rock salt on frozen roadways instead of boulders. I've learned my lesson, but the rocks themselves don't appear convinced.

When a shear pin breaks, the snowblower immediately lets you know by pretending to behave normally. Unless you've broken the shear pins on both sides, it will continue to gather snow from the unbroken side and will even keep firing snow into the air. Your first inkling that you might have a problem is usually when it appears that snow is being plowed on one side rather than eaten. Because of the stresses produced by this phenomenon, you may find that you can no longer snowblow in a straight line. Some newbies to snowblowing have walked in circles for hours before realizing they had encountered one of these lifesaving drawbacks and blown crazy conch shell patterns in their driveway. It's easy to see how it can happen. When you suspect that you've trashed one of these little jewels, the first thing you must do is to confirm that it has, indeed, saved the dog again. This brings up another clever, but unfortunate, benefit of the beasts. In order to see if the blades are still spinning, you must go to the front of the snowblower while it is in operation. This seems easy until you consider that to do this, you need to hold down the lever which engages the blades, which is in the back of the snowblower. Unless you snowblow using the buddy system or have arms double the length of any human's, this situation necessitates that you circumvent the safety feature. I have found that the best way to do this is to remove a glove and cram it over the handle, engaging the whirling blade mechanism, in reckless violation of the owner's manual's cautions. Now you can confirm that, sure enough, it's broken.

Snowblower repair is made troublesome by the fact that certain tools needed to make said repairs work poorly under conditions of extreme cold. Chief among these are your fingers. Because of the previous step of removing your glove to confirm disrepair, one hand is already, well, not warm. For me, this is my right hand (I'm a rightie). Despite the fact that I know I'll need it to hammer out the sheared part of the shear pin, I always use my right glove, and thus start out every repair with an ice-cold right hand, which I use to chill beverages. After clearing the accumulated glacier of compacted snow from the incapacitated maw of the machine, you are faced with the challenge of aligning the quarter inch hole in the now freely moving circular blade with the worthless metal slug that used to be a shear pin. This cannot be done if both shear pins have broken as the only clue to this location is the other, still in tact shear pin (if both are broken, you will need to move South). The most obvious method of removing the broken metal chunk is to pound it out using a new shear pin and of course, a hammer. There is less than one inch of clearance between the head of the new pin and the eager blades of the snowblower, so instead of taking a good smack at it, you usually bash it with the force of a barely audible whisper. So, instead of the rhythmic tounk! tounk! tounk!
three strikes it's out noise you should hear, the noise resonating throughout the barn is a frenzied tic-thud-tic-thud-tic-thud.

The issue is clearance. Removing the pin takes about as long as parallel parking in a space 5 inches longer than your car. It is at this point that you realize that obvious and good are not synonyms and that the most obvious method of parallel parking your shear pin has resulted in stripping the threads off, such that the nut that was supposed to hold it in place, won't. Luckily, you have many, many extra shear pins, sold in packs of 2 for $7.94 at very, very few hardware stores. The great thing is that once you finally get the pin replaced, you can regain composure by heading straight back into the blizzard to walk back and forth over the frozen driveway. Simply tighten down the nut using an appropriately sized socket wrench and a pair of Robogrip pliers and you're back in business.

On the positive side, snowblowing is not very demanding cognitively, so one option while you're making the circuit is to meditate. However, because the engine driving the blower is rupturously loud, some form of hearing protection is required. The form I use is beer. This allows me to Zen out, and enhance my calm. I am not the only one who has reached this conclusion. Last week, when I went down to the corner gas/mini-super-convenience-fill-up-quick-stop-express-mart to replenish my own meditative supplies of gas and beer, I noticed that others had those items on their shopping lists. In spiritual brotherhood, one of my compatriots in line to pay for his beer remarked "guess I'm not the only shmuck who snowblows drunk". Indeed not, my friend. And, though it is with considerable chagrin that I leave five empties in a snowbank in the morning, hey I blew the driveway, what are you bitching about? It is unprecedented for me, however, to purchase beer that is "Just for me". To think, "this is my beer, because I am blowing the driveway." Perhaps this is how much of the world works, but for me, this is unique to snowblowing. It's almost as if I'd dare anyone to raise an issue with me. How many beers have I had? I don't know, how many shear pins have you changed? Though no one has actually raised the issue, I am very ready to defend my beer and myself.

Still, you have to stay sharp. Because you might need to drive. Luckily, not far. For various reasons, my driveway has 5 cars in it. Most people only have one or two, but I have the extra challenge of coordinating a parking ramp full of vehicles with snow removal. In principle, its simple, blow one area, move cars, blow area cars used to be. In practice, all madness requires method and the cars need to be prepped before they are moved. This means that the snow that has accumulated on them must be either removed or otherwise dealt with. I heard a radio program once, which basically dealt with weather conditions in extreme northern lattitudes. In the course of the broadcast, they said that in some areas, it's so cold that they just leave their cars running all the time. This way, they don't have to worry about whether they'll start or not. Sort of like talking constantly to ensure that you're not losing your voice. This is the method I use. I start all five cars, and crank the defrosting mechanisms on the front and rear windshields. I guess my hope is that they will heat up to the point that the snow will melt and run away in rivulets rather than my having to blow it away. Or perhaps I'm hoping that the cars themselves will melt. This does incur the disapproval, if not the overt wrath of the cars' owners, because, though the cars don't actually move more than about 18 feet at a time, they do use fuel, sitting there, running. And, when you burn up a half tank of gas and don't go anywhere, fuel economy goes straight to hell. This week, I got no miles to the gallon. It has happened that I've left the car running all night, morning snowflakes bursting into steam as they near the red-hot windshield. Anyway, the old, melt and move method works pretty well if you plan far enough ahead, but sometimes you forget to start them, and you end up with a huge 30 inch ice cream sandwich on the top of your mother in law's car that, in good conscience, you can't leave there. So, you can either brush it off and blow it around with the blower or, provided you're not too deep in meditation, you can drive it off. Snow removal by the dragster method is a terrible idea and therefore, it only occurs to you after participating in another terrible idea, snow blowing. After enough shear pin madness, you're ready to go for a spin. After all, the car's been running for 5 hours, and is hotter than Hades. It's simple, just drive far enough and fast enough that the air whipping over the vehicle wipes the snow from the roof, hood, and windows, leaving the car looking as though vultures have picked it clean. Far enough is easy, about five miles. Fast enough however, is about 90 to 100 miles/hr and is not achievable usually in a blizzard or in your mother in law's car. So, through some unpleasant physics and realities, far enough becomes farther, infinitely farther. So, when you return, in failure, you still have a huge dollop of accumulated snow on the roof of the car and have not really done anything except make it darker. This waste of time is not a secret, but you do it anyway because, you never, ever, ever break a shear pin this way.

The hardest truth about snow blowing is that almost all of it occurs in a two-foot wide swath at the foot of your driveway. The uninitiated might think that this must be because it snows harder in this two-foot section. Perhaps that's what Northerners mean by Snow Belt. The truth is far less believable. Coincident with your snowblowing, area roadways are being cleared by particle physicists driving enormous truck mounted positron colliders known as snowplows. These gargantuan vehicles perform miraculous feats, pushing limitless piles of particles around, accelerating them until they create a plasma of nearly infinite density. These particles, known as "flakes" and the plasma is known as "slush", is so dense that nothing, particularly your car, can escape it, which is why you have to remove it from the two foot swath at the foot of the driveway, where the snowplow has put it. Slush has infinite density because the entire volume of snow from the road you live on has been compacted into plasma and delivered to the your personal nine foot wide Snow Belt.

Because I am not a particle physicist, I tend to consider this part of the job in a way that does not involve Special or General Relativity. Thus, I use the metaphor of peanut butter - frozen peanut butter. Thick, chunky frozen peanut butter made from huge prehistoric petrified peanuts, quarry stone, and ice. If you've ever tried to push start a car uphill, you'll know how disappointing it is to try to use a snowblower on peanut butter. That's why choosy snowblowers choose shovels. Instead of the bright fluffy white plume of cotton candy snow thrown thirty yards away, you basically move a thick brown slurry of crud three inches closer to your lawn. And, because you're blowing the same thick brown slurry again and again with every pass, it gets heavier and heavier, browner and cruddier, and breaks more and more shear pins until, you give up. You say, screw it, I'll just shovel. How bad can it be? The hideous reality is that this is the worst shoveling you could ever do, so the answer is, pretty damn bad. It's like trying to shovel water from one side of the bathtub to the other. Eventually, though, enough water slops out of the tub that you can say, enough, it's done.

Eventually you have either blown or shoveled things to the point where they are passable. How passable is up to you and for me ranges from barely to generally. It will, when I'm finished, be possible to access the mailbox, and there will be a clear, if not wide trail down the walk to the porch. All five cars will be able to exit the driveway and also enter it at least from the downhill direction. At this point, assuming the particle physicists don't return with another load of plasma, you are basically finished with the snowblower and may return it to its structure.

I know that this may not sound like the liberating experience I first described. But this is the American dream. I'm not shoveling snow. I'm bashing down the walls of wind blown tyranny. I'm not just out there, digging out my car. I'm snow blowing for America. And when I leave home in my car after that driveway is clear, I take a shovel, so I can determinedly shovel to park, then proudly shovel so the U.S. postal service can deliver my bills. Then I'll cram in an hour or so of patriotic duty known as work, before calling in to see how that driveway is. Has it snowed so much that I should leave early and blow the driveway again? I hope so. I'm only too happy to answer the call, and I could use a beer.