A Long Winter’s Night 2013 – Day 6: A Winter Lesson in Community
Posted By Randy on December 26, 2013
Nova Scotians complaining about the state of the province’s roads in the wake of Sunday’s winter storm should be careful how much they grumble.
An old law still on the province’s books can order “all physically fit male persons” between 16 and 60 years of age to shovel out highways made impassable by snow. At some point the law was amended to include women, too. ~ Old law can force Nova Scotians to shovel highways
When I was about 3 years old, there came a snow storm that literally buried my home town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. I grew up in a Cape Cod style house – two storey with sloping walls in all the second floor rooms due to the pitch of the roof. We had a spare bedroom up there along with my Father’s office and radio repair shop, and it had its own exit to the outside by way of a small exterior landing and a set of wooden stairs. This was fortunate because by the time the snow stopped falling and the storm winds abated, that second floor exit was the only way out … or back in for that matter.
I remember my Father clearing the snow off the landing, and calling out to the two nearest neighbours who lived on that side of the house. Everybody was in the same boat, but of those two we were the better off. They were calling out from second storey windows, and all their doors out were under 8 to 10 feet of fresh, wind packed snow. In the ensuing hours, and on into days, neighbour located and excavated neighour, and the jolly crew of shovellers steadily grew with each able bodied Gentleman freed.
That’s right. I said “jolly”. Municipal snow removal crews and equipment were as buried as everyone and everything else, but the citizenry of Lunenburg fell to without complaint; something that was undoubtedly true of those stout hearted worthies who inhabited similarly afflicted communities round about. People first freed each other and saw to it that their closest neighbours were freed, and in so doing they opened trenches to serve as passageways between. As the days went on, work crews were assembled that cleared the sidewalks that led along the main thoroughfares so people could open vital businesses like grocers and bakeries. Cut off from resupply for the time being, they would do what they could do. I remember walking with my Mother along Lunenburg’s Lincoln Street in a trench too high for a tall man to see over, with a blank snow wall on one side, and another snow wall on the other that was dotted along its length with the doors of the shops that lay within. Each door bore a sign that proclaimed what was behind it because all signage had been snow plastered over.
For weeks, the work of every able bodied man and woman was getting the town back to rights. While the men shovelled, the women of the town ran kitchens to keep them fed, and made sure there were warm places for people who couldn’t provide one for themselves. Some of the women, and children too small to shovel, delivered refreshment to the front lines. Through it all, friend and enemy alike laboured shoulder to shoulder, and in some cases grew a grudging respect between the previously estranged, of the sort that can only be found in shared hardship, where everything gets stripped down to the bare basics of what makes Man a social animal in the first place.
As the town was cleared, the roads to neighbouring communities had to be opened, and the snow depth far exceeded the capabilities of the machinery of the time. Back to the shovel, and I remember my Father, Uncles, and Grandfather joining the crew that opened the road leading to the community of Blue Rocks. Mid dig, they met the men of Blue Rocks coming the other way, and there was much rejoicing.
I was very young, but what I’ve brought forward with me, absorbed from the adults that surrounded me then, was a vibrant sense of urgency, adventure, and even what I might call a festival atmosphere. Would the townsfolk of Lunenburg have asked for this to happen? Of course not, but when it did, they didn’t need anyone to step in and tell them what needed to be done. They saw to their families, then their neighbours, and expanded outward from there. Personal animosities were set aside to the greater good of all. These are things we will need to do again, in the same order, when the excrement gets entangled in the ventilating appliance any time in the future.
Think on this as you read the article I quoted at the top of this piece.
Exactly! The same thing happened back here on the Mines Road, at Hebbs Cross, years ago – people would get together and shovel out the road, often with the help of ox teams and wagons.
I loved the article! 🙂
Thank you Laurie. Isn’t it amazing what people could get up to in a long stretch of Winter WITHOUT facebook? These days all that energy would be expended posting status updates about how deep the snow was, and how the kids trapped in the house were driving people crazy. You know – the perils of modern living!
Great read Randy that’s the way I remember it too the way it should be