There Is No Business Like Snow Business

This winter has been incredible for me, not incredibly good, but incredibly bad. I am getting worn out from shoveling snow and cleaning cars. It used to be storms traveled a different path and north of where I live always got the brunt of it. As a matter of fact that area was known as the Snow Belt. This year the snow seems to be following the eastern coast for much of travels and hitting areas harder than they used to be. We hear a lot of people saying global warming is a myth, these are people who don’t understand global warming refers to the average temperature of the Earth not the temperature in a particular area. I have to wonder how the winter season in my area has changed, because it seems to have more storms and snow spread over more days, but the summers and still hot.

When I think about the amount of snow fall when I was a boy, which was in the late 1940s I remember huge piles of snow. My childhood was spent in Brooklyn, New York. The New York City Sanitation Department used to hand out shovels to anyone who wanted to make 50 cents an hour shoveling snow after a storm. The Sanitation Department would open the sewer covers and men would shovel snow down into the sewers or pile it up on the curbs. It is a wonder I don’t remember anyone falling down into the sewers. I do remember climbing on the huge piles of snow however. The snow would be piled so high when you were on top of the pile you could look into the windows on the third floor of an apartment building, which we liked to do for some strange reason. I would say it made us feel like Edmund Hillary climbing Mt. Everest except for the fact he didn’t do that until 1953. Never the less it was great fun. Today kids would rather stay in and shoot aliens on their X-Boxes. I have a theory about this and it is that someday people will have no muscles, because of this. Nature has a way of eliminating things which are not needed.

A climatologist said we should not be asking the question of whether global warming is causing changing weather patterns because, “All weather events are affected by climate change, because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.” He went on to say not to let anyone tell you storms like the storms in Boston which were dropping record amounts of snow on the hapless city were caused by climate change. The storm were made worse by it because the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere affected it. I guess he knows a lot more about the weather than I do, but I know I feel like I have already shoveled more snow this year than for years past. It is bad enough to have to shovel, but sometimes the snow is so heavy, because it is saturated with ice and water, it is hard to lift Β the shovel.

Some of you may ask why don’t I hire someone to shovel the snow or get a snow blower and this is a valid question especially for someone my age. As far as hiring someone to shovel snow, there is just no one around here to hire. I got lucky once when four Mexican men came around and offered to shovel so I hired them. This was the first time in about 40 years this ever happened. As far as getting a snow blower, I purchased one two years ago. I didn’t need it last year when I got it so it sat until this year. Then we got a snowfall where the snow was up to my knees. I went to use the snow blower only to find out it was not put together properly. I had purchased it from Home Depot but it was assembled by a local store which sells blowers. I called them and they said I would have to bring it over. This is a 20 inch snow blower there is now way to get it there short of hiring a truck with a lift gate. So now I have a snow blower with power going to only one wheel not two. I can fix it when the weather gets nice and I can even use it for light snow, but it is impossible to use after a heavy snow storm.

Most of my friends moved to Florida years ago, but there are reasons I had to stay here, beside the fact I am within reach of my children. This is the first year the snow has really taken its toll on me and made me feel I might not be able to handle this next year. There is another solution of course and that is moving into a complex where I don’t have to shovel snow. There are certain reasons this would not work for me right now, so I am sort of stuck. There does come a point when people can no longer deal with heavy snow work and I have to face the fact I am reaching this point.

The good thing for me is the fact I no longer have to travel to work. I remember one day trying to get home in the snow when it was particularly deep. I made it to a town where I got stuck in a street with the snow over the hubcaps on the car. A police car was nearby and I signaled them for a push and as soon as they saw me calling they pulled away. I guess they were getting tired of helping stuck drivers. I managed to finally drive my little Honda station wagon out of the rut, but I had gotten stuck for about an hour. There have been some monumental snow falls in this area. One day after a huge snow fall I was reading the Daily News which I purchased from a store next to where I lived at the time. On the cover of the paper was a 1960 Volkswagen Beetle with a smiley face drawn on the windshield in snow. The car was buried in snow but for some odd reason the very front stuck out and I could see the license plate and was shocked to see it was my car. I went outside and sure enough it had stopped snowing and the smiley face was still on the car.

When I got to be a little older my family moved from Brooklyn to Queens right across from a very large wooded park. We kids loved to play in there because the woods were miles deep and a freight train ran through the woods. When it snowed we would build igloos and go sledding down the steep hill in the park. We would also shovel snow and make some money on the side. This is what I don’t see where I live now. Kids don’t seem to be interested in making money shoveling snow. I wonder why since it can be quite lucrative. Today snow is just a problem and not fun for a lot of kids anymore. When I was a kid it was something I looked forward to. It certainly is amazing how our priorities change as we get older. It makes me wonder how people who live in an area with snow all year around can put up with it? I wouldn’t mind it if it wasn’t for the fact I had to clear it all the time.

I may not be a specialist in global warming, or a weather man, but it seems to me things are changing where I live and in the years to come there is a chance we will get far more snow than ever before.