Opinion: Snowblowers looking pretty good as winter goes on, snow piles up

Talk about it

Way back when, my father-in-law’s family bought him a snow blower.

It was one of the first I’d ever seen, and Paul was more than a little pleased with the new-fangled piece of winter maintenance machinery. I can still picture him in a winter coat and porkpie hat, grinning like crazy as he putt-putted across the L-shaped sidewalk of his big corner lot. Snow sprayed in every direction, including all over his face and glasses, as he learned the tricks of directing the blowing snow harmlessly onto lawns and boulevards. Paul Gust was a working man, but moving snow with his new toy looked a lot like fun.

Now, if he’d lived to see the monster snowblowers that stalk the sidewalks of neighborhoods in every city in South Dakota these days, he might have thought that first machine of his was a little puny. Some of the machines I’ve seen on the sidewalks hardly look street legal, and if they are, they should have a license plate, headlights and turn signals. In the days when Paul got his first snowblower, not many people had them, and those who did had the same compact, probably under-powered models my father-in-law used.

I’m not making fun of that first snowblower. A person has to start somewhere, and that wasn’t a bad one for starters.

For sure, I wasn’t making fun of it back when Paul first started using it. I didn’t have a snowblower. Nobody I knew had one in those days. What we had were shovels, and you might say those were often under-powered, especially when I was the operator.

For a long while, in college in Brookings and when we were first married in Sioux Falls, I used an old grain scoop from the farm as a snow shovel. I once used that to move a small drift from the kitchen of our rented house on First Street in Brookings my senior year. It had been snowing pretty steadily all evening, one of my roommates was the last one in, and for reasons I can only guess at, he didn’t shut the kitchen door behind him. The cold woke me, earlier than I’d have preferred, and when I went to see why the furnace wasn’t keeping up, I found the kitchen door standing open and a fairly impressive drift of snow across the tile floor. My shoveling woke the roommate who had caused the mess, so justice does prevail now and then.

I brought that same scoop shovel into our marriage and used it when we lived in Sioux Falls. The first winter, it served me well. We lived near McKennan, parked our car on the side street. We had a corner lot, but it was a really small corner and the sidewalk was one of those narrow ones popular in days of old. To help matters, it didn’t snow all that much the first year we were married.

We thought we could do better, so we moved the next summer to a rental place out on Conklin just north of 10th Street. We only had sidewalk across the front of the lot, but we had a long, long driveway to an attached garage. The way the house was situated on the lot, every time it snowed, a huge drift formed across the driveway. Nancy was pregnant, so the drive had to be clear in case we needed to make a midnight dash to the hospital. That was the winter of 1968-69, and the city received close to 100 inches of snow. I shoveled every packed, drifted inch of it. Midway through the winter, I tired of the heavy scoop and bought an actual snow shovel — light, flat and easy to handle.

I use that model snow shovel to this day. It’s a workable design, and most years, Pierre has a modest amount of snow. This year, though, the piles of snow on both sides of the walk are getting so high, I can barely toss a shovel load to the top. I’m wondering if a guy could pick up a snowblower — nothing fancy, maybe something like that first one my father-in-law had.

Terry Woster’s columns are published weekly in The Daily Republic.

Tags: terry woster, opinion, columns