SNOWPLOWS ARE SCI-FI

I live feet from a county road and I usually wake up around the same time that the plows come through on a winter morning, around 5 am. The scraping sound is enormous; the snowplows have gathered ferocious momentum. The headlights fill the darkened room and the well-known scatter of fleeing shadows across the ceiling and walls heralds a new day, a celestial flare of mini-dawn in the black night like a comet. Pre-dawn, false dawn, negative dawn, seen for a second in an industrial headlight lens.

The sound is the real announcement, the grating noise of plow blade on pavement dislodging snow and ice is like a medieval cart rapidly progressing through the village with a man yelling “bring out your dead.”

I have spoken in other places of my love of winter or I should say my love/hate of winter. I hate it, the stress of the adverse weather, planning how to go anywhere, reevaluating travel priorities and securing fuel oil for heating your home. Knowing when you hear the crunch of the plow that it means you will have to eventually go out and shovel your car out and your sidewalk and risk cardinal infarction like David Goodis and countless other men who died while shoveling. All this I hate.

But there is something about the aesthetics of heavy machinery in winter that I love. I love seeing the frozen slush in the city streets near me and seeing the carbon monoxide wisps spitting from car and truck exhausts in wintertime and knowing that they are signs of life in a sick way. Life persisting in the dark frozen void, the icy unforgiving universe has within it the warm pulse of life forms going about their daily striving. I think about heavy snowplows in the darkest nights of Russia “where the nights are longest,” the persistent needs of traffic in St. Petersburg necessitating the constant scraping of city streets, somehow there is fuel to provide for all this daily maintenance of roads in the city budget. I worked for a few years in a liquor store in the nearby town of Delhi NY and in heavy winter snowplow drivers would come in, rolling in dough and drunk off their asses to buy champagne because when it snows they are getting paid, when it’s bad weather it’s a drunken jackpot. There’s municipal snowplowing vs private practice, owning a plow blade can get you paid if you line up jobs. Small town diners ringing out with a hero’s welcome to the plow drivers who rescued the day.

And when I think of heavy machinery operating in a freezing void I think of mammoth sci fi vehicles docking in space, metal structures steering with unearthly  precision, something the size of a mountain threading the needle to precisely couple with another mountain, lights blinking. The vast thick shield that precedes by several miles the spacecraft on its course, that the fragile spacecraft with its freight of millions of colonist lives onboard hides in the shadow of, the preceding shield deflecting hazardous space debris from the vessel’s carefully plotted pathway, it depends on the shield, the shield is its optimism. Pathbreaker 07, driven by space truckers, the Drith, paid in tons of uraninite ore by the colonists they protect on their way. The Drith are a wily people, they’re crazy and fearless. They’re the first people to make it to exoplanets and moons and therefore these places all have Drith in their titles: Anaxadrith, Isclerodrith, etc. They say a near-death experience during travel is like a pilgrimage for the Drith, it has staggering spiritual significance. The Drith don’t stay in one place, they’re always moving, they deposit massive shipments of building materials in orbit near a moon and keep moving, leaving swarms of highly organized robots with specialized roles to work for years to construct space stations not to be inhabited for decades, when the second wave of people arrive. And if one of those construction robots did its job wrong by even one centimeter, it could mean the deaths of thousands of people. Meanwhile the Drith have explored new places, new destinations, cleared pathways for new shipping lanes which will form the basis for new tendrils of civilization. But do the Drith technicians get lonely, out there steering their continent-sized vehicles in the unforgiving dark expanse? They’ve been adapted for the crushing isolation and loneliness of space travel, a single spur of which will take longer than four generations of them to survive.