A Grammar for

Yurt Living

By Elizabeth Enslin

Shovel … Truth … Get the Drift … Scoop

By Richard VanGrouw

Despite a thrown shoulder and spousal discouragement, I lace old hiking boots and slip into a worn jacket. The back door swings an arc in the accumulation of new snow, an angel with one wing. As the door latches behind me on cozy homeliness, I find myself in a half-lit world where sounds are muted, where the dimmest glimmering lights are swollen and fuzzy with refraction. I lift my shovel from where it leans against the garage, and pause. The tick-tick-tick of falling snow seems louder, more distinct, than automobile wheels rolling on the avenue.

Bane of the thin-blooded, West Michigan winters with their pure unbroken coats of fresh snow also can inspire. White pines droop along the dunes. Rooftops stand taller under thick icing. And for me, no wintry symbol carries as much meaning as shoveling. For me, it parlays peace and tranquility and solitude, a sensation that warms up to joy as the cold air stirs dust in my lungs and the lights from warm living rooms across the way illuminate a blizzard of tiny diamonds twinkling down. It invokes a sense of isolation and a sense of accomplishment. It is an opportunity to deny the inevitable, to claim temporary victory over inexorable forces of nature. It is practically a religious experience. Sisyphus is happy.

Up and down the avenue, I can hear the hum and throb of snow blowers as neighbors conduct their own personal excavations in search of pavement beneath the drifts. I don’t deny the appeal of internal combustion. However, my affection for the old-fashioned shovel is not rooted in some tree-hugging granola carbon footprint reduction ideology. My reluctance to invest in power yard tools is not rooted in eco-extremism. Once upon a summer, at another house in another town, I did nurture such nobility. I bought a well-used manual push mower for the lawn. When I paid my $15, I ignored the distinct chuckle of the Mr. Fixit who sold it to me. The prospect of pushing a purring manual mower struck me as romantic and nostalgic and conservative and minimalist, a whim some latter-day Thoreau might indulge. I sharpened the mower’s blades with a file and soaked its moving parts with oil. It was heavy and hard to push, but it seemed to work well enough. After a couple of passes, however, it became apparent that the mower was incapable of navigating the shallowest divot. It stopped short on any unevenness in the turf whatsoever, bludgeoning my abdomen with its handle. After 30 minutes of toil and sucker punches to the midsection, drenched in sweat and grease, green and bristling with a coat of grass clippings, roiling in a rage of defeat, I lifted that moribund antique over my head and swung it down into the sod. I struck again. I began to pound at the lawn, again and again, a modern day John Henry who had neglected his Prozac. The next day, calm and resolute again, I drove to the nearest hardware store and bought a 7.5-horsepower self-propelling gas-guzzling Scotts mower that I have used ever since.

Perhaps psychoanalysis is warranted. The origin of my aversion for power lawn tools clearly can be traced to my childhood. In the household where I grew up, mechanical snow removers were for the rich or the soft. My father didn’t get a snow-blower until both my brother and I had moved on and out. At that point, Dad retired the only shovel I remember him ever using. It was a heavy steel model. Its black blade was a shallow convex curve, like a plow. Toward the end of its life, the shovel’s business edge turned ragged and jagged and rusty, worn by decades of scraping against concrete. Because for my father, no shoveling job was complete until the pavement was utterly devoid of snow.

My father was a shoveling fundamentalist, a puritan. He pursued his passion for clear, dry sidewalks with the fervor of the born-again. Every winter’s day after work, and many mornings when time allowed, he was out there in the dark, in his oversized unbuckled rubber galoshes, hunched, scraping and scooping, always down to bare cement, always with straight, crisp edges where dormant grass met the sidewalk. An enduring winter memory of my youth is the sound of Dad shoveling in the dark―scrape, silence. Scrape, silence. Scrape, longer silence. During heavy or prolonged snowfalls, he would head into battle as soon as the first trace of new snow had gathered. When he came inside between sorties, he stood at the dining room window, staring outside at the enemy, fists on hips, and sighed, loudly and repeatedly.

The crazy neighbor lady was nearly as obsessive about snow removal. Mrs. Essenberg got along with almost no one, as far as I could tell. She rented the apartment upstairs in her house, but could never keep tenants. They said she accused them of poisoning her water and committing other imaginary felonies. I cannot testify to the veracity of those claims, but I know Mrs. Essenberg lined the windows of her house with aluminum foil, presumably to thwart attempted espionage by her neighbor’s boys. My father and Mrs. Essenberg were sworn enemies dedicated to preventing encroachment across the front lines of battle. He seethed―and she knew he seethed―whenever her lawn sprinkler shed droplets on his side of the property line in the summer. Once she trimmed some branches from a tree that straddled our respective territories and the law had to be summoned to sort it all out.

One winter brought an especially heavy snowfall. Maybe it was the persistently overcast skies, maybe it was inevitable. But that winter the latent ire between my father and Mrs. Essenberg came to a head. Her lot and our lot backed up to a municipal alley that provided access to our garages. A thin strip of neutral territory, perhaps three feet across, separated our garage from Mrs. Essenberg’s. After a snowstorm on a Saturday, my father and Mrs. Essenberg were alarmed to discover each other shoveling plow dross in the alley behind their garages. Snow from previous falls was piled precariously high along the peninsular property line. At some point, Mrs. Essenberg heaved a shovel load on top of this peak; some stray clumps skated wormily down onto our land. My father witnessed this trespass, scooped his own shovel full and tossed it back over the pile onto Mrs. Essenberg’s side. Mrs. Essenberg aimed her next shovel load directly at my father, who retaliated, softer sex be damned. And there they were: Two grown adults, hurling snow at each other in an alley. That story, that vision, is entrenched in family lore.

As a boy I was discouraged from shoveling the sidewalks at our home; my standards of excellence fell well short of house rules. However, I was good enough for others, so I earned a few dollars and a few blisters shoveling walkways and driveways for neighbors whose tolerance for mediocrity surpassed that of my family’s. One neighbor down and across Nineteenth Street, Mr. Van Zylen, paid me $5 on occasion to clear his walks and drive. I had special reason to succeed at this task that went well beyond a measly five-spot. Behind the perpetually closed and locked door of Mr. Van Zylen’s garage resided a mint condition 1961 Borgward Isabella, a sensuous sports car with a wood-trimmed interior and a flawless creamy complexion. I was a teen of recent legal driving age, so many of my peers had their own cars, or at least access to one. My situation was decidedly more pedestrian. Mine was that postmodern American rarity, a one-car family. My life was a gambol. And there was Mr. Van Zylen’s Borgward, unused and, I forced myself to believe, unwanted. In my vivid imagination, Mr. Van Zylen would take pity on my transportationless plight and offer me the Isabella for a song―maybe as a trade for shoveling. I dropped hint after obvious hint. I even asked to lavish the Isabella with a sponge bath in the summer. In hindsight, I suppose I should have felt guilty about coveting another man’s wheels. Despite increasingly suggestive and transparent hints, Mr. Van Zylen never offered me the car. Eventually my Isabella fantasy dissolved, I grudgingly rescued a 1972 Chevelle from sure banishment to the junkyard, and Mr. Van Zylen developed Parkinson’s disease and died. I have no idea what happened to the Borgward.

Back then shoveling to me seemed brute labor, an inglorious means to some inevitably material end. I shoveled the way you take medicine―do it quick, get it over with, get on with life. It took years and a homeless man named Gary to heal this misguided strategy. Down the avenue from the house where my wife and I now reside stands a liquor store. Homeless Gary lived in a stockade that surrounded a Dumpster outside this establishment. Sometimes, for beer money, Gary asked if he could shovel our driveway and walks. He charged a fair price―for the job, not by the hour―and did good work. I got more out of this charity than clean sidewalks. I definitely got more out of it than Gary did. Watching him shovel was an epiphany. Gary stood more or less erect with the shovel in front of him and walked, with an occasional sideways stumble, but always with slow and steady purpose. He didn’t hunch over and fling snow in a maniacal frenzy to remove all the snow in a single pass the way I always had done. He walked, simply walked, pushing the shovel ahead of him, from one end of the walk to the other. Whatever snow happened to gather in the shovel on each pass, he picked up and dumped. He paused to push up his thick clouded glasses. Then he turned and walked back the other way, pushing the shovel in front. Back and forth, back and forth. He never broke a sweat or pulled a muscle or strained his body or brain in any manner whatsoever that I could discern. True, razor-straight edges provide their own reward. But Gary taught me there’s no shame in mediocrity either. Good enough often is.

Even if valuable lessons are eternal, teachers are not. One dark night Gary was pushing a shopping cart across a busy street, five miles from our neighborhood. A car hit him and he died at the scene.

So tonight I stand at the top of the driveway and survey the task that confronts me. I listen to the restless muted whine of snow blowers up and down the glowing avenue and feel the snowflakes stroke my bare cheeks. I grasp the shovel in front of me and begin to walk slowly toward the street, feeling warm and calm. Perhaps the act is a coping mechanism against futility. Nature will endure, after all. No matter how meticulously or religiously or often I clear the driveway, even down to the pavement, and long after I care to do so or am able to do so, the snow will continue to fall. For tonight, even as the snowfall continues, I relish the calm.

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