Push. Lift. Sling.

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 14, 2010

Push. Lift. Sling.

You have a lot of time to think when you find yourself shoveling two or more feet of snow from your 35-foot-long driveway. There isn’t much about shoveling snow that requires your concentrated attention; it is mostly a sequence of repetitive moves, the wintertime equivalent of mowing the lawn. It’s perfectly okay if you let your mind wander, because unlike using a snow blower you are not likely to face any major malfunctions if you don’t pay strict attention to the shovel. The worst that could happen is the blade falls off, and then you have a good excuse to quit. Which is nice.

Push. Lift. Sling.

So it occurred to me recently that snow inherently has a dual nature when it lands on a landscape in large proportions such as Chester County has seen in the past few days (a good 47 inches between Feb. 5 and Feb. 10, if you’re playing at home.) It can both obscure details of the landscape onto which it falls, and highlight others. The thought occurred to me as I made my way back to West Chester last Sunday along Valley Creek Road in East Bradford – a lull day in our storm cycle, as it turned out.

I travel Valley Creek Road almost religiously if I find myself having to get to Downingtown with time to spare. It’s a nice, windy, wooded stretch of road that crisscrosses a pleasant little stream, hence the name, and features some architecturally pleasant homes along the way. There are also impressive geological outcroppings of some stone or schist or rock that I can tell you nothing more about than they are impressive and outcroppings. But on Sunday, they were gone.

They were covered instead from bottom to top by a true blanket of snow, the kind of layer that would look magnificently tasty on a coconut birthday cake. Instead of the normal jumble of rock that lines the western side of the road, all that could be seen was a sheer face of white. It was as thought the snow had wiped the face of the rocks clean, the way an artist will use a putty knife to flatten and smooth out a piece of the landscape.

Push. Lift. Sling.

But on Thursday I drove along South New Street in Westtown, alongside of Crebilly Farm north of Street Road. I’d come from Stetson Middle School where a friendly and talkative woman named Ellen Davis had told me about her decision to leave the home she’d slept in since 1981 to spend the night at the Red Cross emergency shelter there. (If you are wondering, two adjectives that newspaper people like in the folks we meet in the midst of our professional responsibilities are “friendly” and “talkative.” Much better than “dismissive” and “mute.”)

And I noticed that the branches of the trees that line both sides of the road were outlined in detail by the snow that clung to them, brining them into stark relief against the blue sky and asking me to open my eyes and take notice of them individually. Instead of the mass of brown and gray intertwined sticks globbed together as one, I saw instead each single fiber of the landscape – not unlike a group of colorful pick-up sticks laid out on a kitchen table, each one set against the other. The woods became transformed, branches singled out one by one.

So there you have it. Snow both obliterates and reveals, all in the same brush. Not the most profound of epiphanies, but one that I will remember for days to come as the white fades from the scene outside my car window.

Push. Lift. Sling.

Another thought that came to me whilst shoveling was the recollection from freshman sociology that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow and use them interchangeably to connote different types of frozen precipitation. Whereas I have only one extra word for snow in my vocabulary, and I cannot print it in a family newspaper.

Push. Lift. Sling.