No plow? No problem. Get a shovel.
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
This year, winter came like Mother Nature flipped a switch. We were having a chilly New England late fall, with temps in the 30s, and then, whammo! came snow, ice and blasts of arctic air, making it feel like it was 2℉. I can dress for the cold, and Waldo comes equipped with a sable birthday suit, but the worst of it is the ice. Watching Waldo do a four-footed river dance on the stuff is amusing (he hardly ever falls), but my bipedal stance is significantly more metastable. It makes walking over a sheet of mirror-smooth frozen water pretty close to impossible, without doing an unintentional limb-flailing, death-defying aerobatic maneuver, resulting in an unavoidable hard, wheels-up, uncontrolled ground-pound, with the potential for serious damage.
In Marlborough, the city plows the rail trail up to the Hudson border. This has always happened, albeit a day or two after the storm is over. Although not perfect, that helps quite a bit, as long as the plow isn’t forced to remove snow that has been deposited over a pre-existing sheet of black ice. In that case, the only hope is for some salt, which is sometimes laid down (they try to avoid adding salt to the forest environment). Once we get to Hudson, the trail is a never-plow zone and we sometimes have to turn around because the conditions are so bad. Usually, though, I can find a narrow swath of “white” ice (signifying that it contains air and will crush when stepped on) that gives me enough traction to avoid a fall.
After the last snowfall, someone made a somewhat serpentine, two-foot-wide path through the inch or two of snow accumulation left behind. Surrounding that was some white ice, and foot and pawprints, smashed into clear ice, that was marginally walkable. I was curious about what and how that path was made. There were no tread marks on the sides, that indicated a snowblower, nor any piles of snow resulting from snow being blown. The thing is, it went on from the beginning of the trail to only a few feet shy of 2¼ miles, just past the Hudson border.
Thinking about that yesterday, as Waldo and I were but a mile from the car and the end of our walk, a man passed us going the other way. “It looks like the plowman got lazy and could only do a narrow path,” I said to him, trying to be clever.
“Oh, no,” he answered. “I did that with a plastic snow shovel.”
“Damn!” I said, in awe. “That’s a helluva lot of work. It’s almost 2¼ miles long!”
“Yeah, my wife thought it would be a good idea.”
Talk about honey-does!
“Well, thank you. It makes the walking a lot easier.”
“You’re welcome.” He nodded and continued on his way.
You know, there are people out here who truly love this place and are willing to go out of their way to take care of it. There’s the elderly couple who maintains the Covid Garden. Even the city put up a sign, encouraging people to make and maintain a rock garden. I know of one man who carries an empty shopping bag to hold the garbage he picks up, as he walks along, that thoughtless people have left behind. And I have been known to pick up dog poop, that wasn’t left by Waldo, to reposit in the trash barrels the city puts out on the side of the trail. These acts are not done merely out of a sense of duty, I believe. I think the motivation is based on loving what we share and enjoy. After all, what better way is there to actively love something than to take care of it?
That was yesterday. Waldo and I didn’t go out on the rail trail today. Winds in excess of 20 mph dropped the affective temp well down into the single digits. What killed the idea was when Waldo bit at his feet as we walked on the apartment grounds, doing the poop and pee loop. When he does that, it means he’s growing ice between his toes and it really hurts (I can attest to that because I know what it feels like to grow icicles on my mustache). It’s also true that it snowed a couple of inches last night. That’s just enough so that, if the trail isn’t plowed, the pre-existing ice will be buried out of sight and hard to avoid. Sigh.
I wonder if the plowman came along and decided that the shoveled path was good enough.
The no-plow, no-shovel zone in Hudson.