by L G Hoel

Created on: January 09, 2010   Last Updated: January 11, 2011

My reflections on snow shoveling take me back to when I was a little boy. I have spent most of my life in the Mid-West where every year snow becomes plentiful. Almost everyone living in a northern climate has reflections of snow shoveling. Some might be good memories or maybe a scary blizzard memory. Those in a rural community have a more personal relationship with snow and shovel than city dwellers. The wind always brings new snow for you to shovel in the country. 

In the quiet, peaceful past, pioneer winter travelers used the sleigh or cutter. They traveled over the snow. There was not much need for them to carry snow shovels in the northern states in those early days. That all changed when those old sleighs and cutters went the way of the One-hoss shay. Automobiles brought an end to those quiet peaceful times gliding across the snow. The snow shovel became a tool that everyone had to have if they ever left their house in winter to travel by car. 

My Grandpa would sometimes take out the big old grain shovel after a blizzard ended. He would dig the sleigh part way out from a snow drift and break the runners free if they were frozen to the ground. After he hitched the horses to the sleigh, he was ready to travel just about anywhere, roads or no roads. I remember the first time I tried to move snow with that big old grain scoop, that old steel scoop shovel was heavier than the snow that you could put into it. I couldn't even lift the scoop when it was half full of snow, I had to drag it away to a different location and dump the snow out of it. If the temperature was just right, the snow would stick to the shovel, you would have to whack the shovel on the ground to loosen the snow from it. I remember Grandpa saying, ‘you better go get that little shovel out of the coal shed.’ I don't think he wanted me to lose any interest in what could be a lifetime of snow shoveling on the farm. We kids were taught to pitch in and help at an early age. My Grandpa might have been faking his appreciation of my help but he had me shovel snow right beside him anyhow.

Most of the people here in the Great Plains have had a snow shovel in their hands at one time or the other. During the blizzard of 1888 people even had to shovel the trains out of huge snow drifts. Some towns were running out of needed food and fuel. Everyone felt obliged to volunteer their services to get the train free to move again. Shoveling a train out of the snow drifts would certainly have

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