ENDGAME
LOVE AT FIRST SHOVEL
WHAT’S THERE TO LOVE IN THIS TIME-HONORED TRADITION SHARE BY NORTHERNERS? PLENTY. BY LEATH TONINO
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or me, it was love at first shovel, love at first drift. Growing up in Vermont, sure, clearing the walk was a chore—hit it for Mom after an initial three inches fell, hit it again later for Dad—but somehow, for some reason, the fact that the task was mandatory never diminished its allure. No matter how arduous, no matter how sloppy, no matter how absurdly Sisyphean (progress? what’s progress when the sky is collapsing, ten bazillion flakes falling every second?), shoveling was always a game, an enticement to play both in and with the wild outdoors. As any self-respecting Green Mountain kid would, I practiced, honing my skills, taking what the walk taught me and applying it elsewhere. Driveway plow piles, once excavated, made incredible forts. Pillowy hillsides, given enough attention, became sled runs featuring banked turns and jumps. Throughout high school, during Adirondack mountaineering adventures, I built and camped in cozy (read: not claustrophobic) snow caves, and by the time I landed in Colorado for college, no joke, the prospect of digging avalanche test pits excited me almost as much as skiing. Yes, indeed. Love at first ugh, at first oomph. Love at first cut-and-heave, at first plunge-and-toss. Some consider my passion for huffing, back-busting, sweaty-yetsimultaneously-frigid labor bizarre. For instance, my uncle. At 22, when I told him that I was putting a newly minted philosophy degree to use by taking a job with the U.S. Antarctic Program (science-support shoveling at the South Pole!), he shook his head and mentioned Caterpillar tractors. I spent months on the austere, brutally flat East Antarctic Plateau, unblanketing drifted supplies: pallets of toilet paper, boxes of sirloins, construction materials, telescope hardware, the gamut. Despite 70-belowzero temps, I remained cheery, refusing to get sick of the scene, to tire of tiredness. At the end of the earth, improbably, my adolescent hobby had morphed into a profession, into an official red parka with a faux-fur ruff. Pros get rusty, though. My midtwenties found me trailing a girlfriend to gritty, noisy, way-too-temperate San Francisco. Our stuffy apartment deprived me of shoveling and, worse, the opportunity to routinely feel winter— burning my fingers and toes, cutting me with its sharp-edged shadows and
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silver-edged quiet. Still, for all the hummingbirds and crackheads and confusion and sirens and palm trees, I’ll admit that this urban interlude did help me better understand what, specifically, I’d been drawn to since childhood: not snow relocation or even snow sculpture, but the stirring confrontation with frozen, inhuman nature that these activities invite. Harsh nature. Powerful nature. Beautiful nature. The tactile engagement, the full-spine shiver. And so, finally, having at last abandoned the city and temporarily resettled at 9,000 feet in Colorado’s Elk Mountains, I did the obvious: jumped on a "Help Wanted" ad in the local paper and joined a crew of roof shovelers. Roof shovelers? Unaware that such a specialization existed, I was eager to learn what the job entailed. My hunch was that it entailed a fat dose of the primal contact I vividly remembered and sorely missed. My hunch was proven correct. You wake in the dark, grab your coffee, grab your harness, go. You wrestle an extension ladder into position, step gingerly from the penultimate rung, wade and burrow in search of an eye
bolt (they are as common on Colorado roofs as shingles), and anchor your rope. Hour after hour, you balance a deliberateness, a honed sensitivity to your sketchy environment, with the no-mind meditation of simply moving snow, moving snow, lifting snow, flinging snow, crushing snow, moving snow. Weeks begin and weeks end. Weeks of blizzard, weeks of effort. And then, on a bright Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous afternoon, perhaps the prettiest afternoon in the history of the planet—calm, sunny, glittery—you tiptoe toward a log mansion’s eave, test your gear with a tug, lean out, and delicately nudge a Volkswagen of crust. You watch the crust plummet: sparkling, shining, throwing sparks of blinding light. You watch the crust plummet and— explode. By chance, on that very afternoon, a young man in a nearby town died when a roof he was shoveling slid, burying him in the manner of an avalanche, pressing the air from his lungs and the life from his body. Of course, I wasn’t aware of the fatal accident, the impossible tragedy, at the moment of its occurrence. But
I heard about it that evening, after I’d descended from my log mansion, showered and cracked a beer. I have thought about it frequently ever since. In Vermont, I think of it. With a Nor’easter scratching at my face, I think of it. In January, hitting the walk for Mom, dusting away the initial three inches of what just might morph into a three-foot dump if we’re lucky, I think of it. Gripping my shovel, gripping it harder than necessary, hood up, hunched, lumbar aching, I think and think and think: Yes, indeed, shoveling is Sysiphean, an absurd confrontation with an absurd universe. Harsh nature. Powerful nature. Beautiful nature. The tactile engagement, the fullspine shiver. Yes, indeed, a strange kind of love.
Vermont writer Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections, most recently The West Will Swallow You (Trinity University Press, 2019). A different version of this essay originally appeared in Adventure Journal.
