Thinking and Shoveling the Snow

I got a late start today.  It was 1:30 in the afternoon but the sun was already low in the sky.  That violates one of the cardinal rules of snow shoveling.  If you are  shoveling light snow  and can get most of it up off the concrete - the sun will do the rest of the work and melt it off.  If it is too cold to melt on a dark surface sublimation can occur and it will transition directly from a solid to a vapor.  At this temperature and sun angle - I would be lucky to get 2 hours of melting.

One of the other cardinal rules of snow shoveling is that timing is everything.  I was up briefly at 7AM today.  It was still dark out, but there was plenty of activity in the neighborhood.  People shoveling, snowblowing, and plowing.  It was still snowing lightly at the time.  If you clear off the snow too early, there will be another inch or two of snow on top of your concrete.  If that happens consistently you might not see concrete again until the spring thaw.  I looked around and that had happened to several neighbors.  I also noticed that one of my neighbors had cleared off about 90% of the heavy snow from my driveway with his snowplow.  I am very appreciative of that.  At a psychological level it is a mixed blessing.  In my 20s, 30s, 40s, and even 50s I was a snow shoveling machine.  I would attack any depth or distance of snow with a thin steel scoop shovel and dispatch it as fast as I could.  Now I am becoming the old guy down the street who might be overdoing it.  Maybe they are right - decreasing snow shoveling vigor may be just another sign of heading toward decrepitude.

I have the inevitable associations to learning how to shovel snow from my father.  The theory of extending the shoveled surface out onto the grass for an inch or two so that any run off does not pool on the concrete and freeze.  Today for the first time, I realized why we used steel scoop shovels with short handles.  These were the shovels my old man used to shovel coal into a steam engine locomotive boiler when he started out as a fireman on the railroad.  He let me watch him once in a switchyard near our house.  I was only 5 or 6 at the time, but he was shoveling coal the size of softballs into that boiler.  You could only do that job with a light steel short handled shovel.  I have the usual associations about knowing my father for only 16 years or less than half the time I knew my father-in-law.  Today I had the thought that all of my interactions with and reactions to my father were the product of a brain that was 10-15 years away from neuroanatomical maturity.  What would it have been to know him as a mature adult?  How has that affected me?  If I had a son myself - what would I try to pass on to him about snow shoveling?  At this point - not having a son I will never know.  The snow shoveling knowledge of the Dawson clan dies with me.  Even the most liberal college will probably not have a "Snow Shoveling 101" for the curious.

I drag out the snowblower and fire it up.  There is still an uneven 3 - 8 inches of snow to clear up.  The snowblower is about 20 years old.  It was a birthday present to my wife.  Believe it or not she requested it - but she might have not disclosed her real motive for that.  She was probably concerned about me throwing snow around with that scoop shovel like a blender and thought: "OK - how long can he keep doing that before something bad happens?"  She tells me to use the electric starter so it doesn't freeze up and I oblige.  I start snowblowing in an arc over 90 degrees back and forth blowing all of the snow to the eastern side of my driveway.  I realize that my driveway alone has more area than all of the concrete that my father and I used to shovel at the family home.  I wish that I knew more about graph theory.  The pattern that I use to shovel the driveway could probably be optimized by graph theory.

After that I get out a shovel.  It is no longer a scoop shovel.  It is an  all plastic shovel with a 90 degree bend in the middle.  They sell a lot of these shovels these days.  I am very skeptical of the  mechanical advantage, but it does allow a more erect posture in the process.  I am using it because I have to shovel on a textured concrete sidewalk and can't use steel shovel or a snowblower without scratching the surface.  I shovel a scoop wide margin up the right hand side of my walkway and then come back cross cutting the width of the side walk.  Swing the shovel from left to right and throwing the snow off the end - the same way my father used to shovel coal.  It takes 30 swipes and I am clear.  I check my heart rate and it hasn't budged.  The last time I shoveled a week ago it was up about 20%.  As I was shoveling I thought of an exercise device that would mimic snow shoveling.  In many ways it is a whole body work out.  Kind of like a kettle bell at the end of a longer handle.

I also fantasize about high tech approaches.  For some reason I have become more and more fascinated with tractors.  I was watching the Discovery Channel late one night and saw a small Swedish tractor that was designed to clear airport runways.  They were using it to build an ice castle.  It was designed to eject large amounts of snow directly over the front of the drivers cab.  I think about what a great time it would be to drive this tractor all day long - moving tons and tons of snow.  I conclude it is a narcissistic snow shoveling fantasy - a probable reaction to my concerns about becoming a less competent snow shoveler.  Still it would be nice to drive that tractor even for a day or two...

I come back to the main driveway and decide that I need to go over it with a shovel it see if I can expose more of the concrete surface to the sun.  This time I create several shovel widths down the west side and cross cut from west to east about 60 times.  I look at my activity monitor and notice that it has only taken about 3000 steps to do the entire job.  I have the thought that with the exception of some time I spent in East Africa, I have been shoveling snow for 50 years.  I also recall that in the famous Halloween blizzard/storm of the century my father-in-law and brother-in-law shoveled a foot of snow away from my old Chevy Chevette, crawled under it, and dropped in a new starter motor.  It was parked on the street at the time, it was nighttime, and it was 5 below.  They had to run a hundred yards of extension cord out to the street to do the work.                    

You might say that I am emotionally connected to the snow and shoveling it.  There is a lot of meaning there and in my 50th years of shoveling it - that meaning is not diminished.  It might explain why I have no interest in moving to warmer climates. Thinking a lot about things has always worked for me.  Shoveling snow is time to think and reflect.

I occasionally think of the limitations to all of this thinking.

Driving motorcycles is just one example.  I stay off of them.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Snow Shoveling Theory and Plasticity

I drove back from my home town to the Twin Cities area yesterday  In this age of connectedness, there are times when you get a false sense of information.  My wife called her friend who was driving north to Duluth on Hwy 35.  She got the message that there was about 6 inches of snow on the freeway and numerous vehicles in the ditch.  I don't mind driving in the snow.  I used to drive north in the winter in some notoriously unreliable vehicles.   Rear wheel drive and no limited slip differential.   Poor weight distribution was an added bonus.  Some of the worst engineered cars in the world.  Most people my age all still use the brand name Positraction, rather than the generic limited slip differential.  More evidence that pharmaceutical companies don't differ much from other businesses in terms of branding of inserting themselves into the public consciousness.  Like most people, when you get to the point where more safety is affordable you buy it.  I am driving a modern four wheel drive sport utility vehicle (4WD SUV).  I was confidant that 6 inches of snow would only be a problem if there was congestion from large trucks and snow removal vehicles.  I was also confidant that would only happen close to the Twin Cities.  Competency in snow removal seems to vary directly with latitude with northern latitudes being the best.   I thought about that as I drove down Hwy 2 across northern Wisconsin.  The road was clean down to the pavement about 4 hours after white out conditions.

As we turned the corner in Duluth, the grey skies lifted and it turned out to be a bright sunny day but 10 degrees colder than the day before (about 22 ℉).  There was no bad road all the way back to the Twin Cities.  That only happened when we pulled into our neighborhood and there was 6 inches of snow in the driveway.  All of my neighbors driveways were clear and in many cases the pavement was dry and clear.  The physical chemistry of snow is always interesting.  In this case the bottom few millimeters of the snow was liquefied, but the upper 5 inches plus was medium density snow, the kind that is good for cross country skiing.  Clear it off and the liquid evaporates in the direct sunlight, even when it is well below the freezing temperature.  In some cases sublimation occurs and the snow vaporizes directly from the solid state.  But I was focused on additional theories.

People living in northern climes think a lot about moving snow.  We have had some epic snowfalls.  Some of my fantasies coming into this season included getting an enclosed tractor with climate control and the ability to move a massive amount of snow.  The image I have is a condensation of a couple of images.  The first is a cola commercial from many years ago - a set of combines cutting wheat.  All of the operators in their climate controlled cabs drinking Coke (or Pepsi?).  The second is a show about building ice castles in Norway and a small vehicle that was described an an airport runway snowblower that could move a tremendous amount of snow through a chute directly over the operators cab.  Those are my grandiose commercial induced fantasies.  Even a small tractor with a cab set up to move snow is ridiculously expensive and it needs a lot of ongoing maintenance.  I have never been able to locate the manufacturer of the Norwegian snow blower.

The reality is that I have a 15 year old Toro 2 stage snow thrower and about 200 square feet of sidewalk and 1,000 square feet of driveway to clear.  The snow thrower cuts a 24 inch path.  In many ways the strategy is mathematical and practical.  What is the most efficient way to clear away the snow?  Is it just going back and forth and turning the chute on the snow blower on every turn or is it something else?  Since moving into this house I have decided it is a right angled arc starting up the left hand side of the driveway and then turning back (and turning the chute on the snowblower) and heading back in the same direction.  This moves all of the blown snow to the eastern side of the lot, away from the sidewalk and areas where ice might accumulate.  It also results in fewer change in the chute direction that just going back and forth or the length of the driveway.

Mathematics aside - what are the practical aspects?  The first of course is the weather.  Is more snow expected?  Do you really want to concentrate the effort if there is going to be another foot?  In some cases of wet and heavy snow it is imperative.  That layer cannot be allowed to freeze and it is the most difficult to handle with a snow blower.  In this case I was left with about 1/2 inch of translucent slush that I had to scrape up with shovel before it all froze in the colder temperatures.  The second is the surface that you are clearing.  There are some web sites that recommend snowblower sizes based on whether your driveway is finished (asphalt or concrete) or not (gravel).  In my case I have two different surfaces - a concrete driveway and a textured concrete sidewalk.   I can't use the steel shovel on the textured concrete.  I use a plastic shovel very similar to the metal shovel that my father used to shovel coal into a steam engine on the 1950s.  One of my earliest recollection was being placed in the cab of a steam locomotive.  My father was a locomotive fireman at the time and the engine was hand fired.  His job was to keep coal burning to keep the steam pressure up.  He explained to me at the time how the scoop shaped shovel was designed to slide large amounts of coal off of it and into the furnace without wasting any energy.  To clear the sidewalk - I clear one edge and then cut across that using the same motion my father used to shovel coal.  Snow is a lot lighter than coal but it takes me about 50 passes to clear it using this motion.

With every pass, I am careful to extend the stroke out onto the grass by about 2-3 inches.  When my father first taught me to shovel snow, he said this was critical in the event that there was any melting of the snow.  Without that 2-3 inch margin the water pooled on the sidewalk and created ice.  With the margin the water soaked into the grass and no ice was formed.  I have tried to pass that knowledge along to other sidewalk shovelers, but it falls on deaf ears.  Either they don't believe me or they have their own theories of shoveling.

In addition to the theory of clearing snow and carrying it out, I get another thought from about 50 years ago.  I have always been an insomniac and one night back then I was waiting for my father to come home from work.  By then he was a railroad engineer and drove freight and iron ore trains.  It was about midnight.  It was snowing and drifting to a depth of about 3 or 4 feet on the street outside of our home.  He told  me that day before he left that they might need to plow snow off the tracks.  The worst case scenario would be hitting deep snow and blowing it into the diesel engine air intakes on the top of the locomotive.  That would kill the engines and result in a long restarting process that would slow him down.  I kept staring out the window.  The wind was so intense that I could not hear any trains even though we were only about 3 blocks from tracks.  I could finally see him leaning into the wind and snow.  He always wore union style clothes and none of it was really made for winter weather.  He wore a chromer cap with ear flaps that offered limited protection.  He was carrying a leather satchel that he called a "grip" that contained all of his important paperwork.  He was wading through hip deep snow, using the exaggerated hurdler motion that you had to use to travel in deep snow without snowshoes.  I was very happy to see him and even happier when he burst into the kitchen and it smelled like the fresh air version of diesel fuel, Lucky Strikes and leather.

I have a greater appreciation of these events than I used to.  Early on it was easy to grasp the psychodynamic significance, especially when it came to countertransferences toward mechanics and anyone else who might smell of diesel fuel and cigarettes in my office.  There were the associated issues of blue collar rage, exploitation of union workers, and a stronger affiliation with workers rather than management.  These days I can think of it in terms of the brain systems that are represented and the underlying mechanisms that allow for this experience.  I still feel happy when I have that image of my father pushing through deep snow toward home.  It probably accounts to some degree for my affiliation with snow and winter weather.  Every month or so I give a lecture and talk about the time frame, neuroscience and structures that are probably responsible for that experience.

Most of all I remind the students about how these structures allow for unique human experience.  I like to say that if there are 7 billion humans on Earth, there are 7 billion unique conscious states.  I suppose planning and fantasizing about clearing the snow is not that unique in the upper midwest.

But I doubt that any two of us learned to do that in the exact same way.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA