Snowplows - January 2, 2012

It was coooold today. First time it's been really properly cold for a long while. It was 15°F this morning when I woke up, and 15°F at 3:30 when I left Sandstone MN to come back home after a day up there. The hound absolutely loved it: romping and bouncing and just ecstatic. It's a little sad we couldn't get her to the dogpark today, but we couldn't quite manage it.

The side streets are all sheets of ice. The snow that fell the night before last, fell on above-freezing surfaces, and was the leading edge of a cold front that froze all the resulting meltwater solid. It's treacherous out there. Even walking across the street with Anya I need to be careful she doesn't bounce be right onto my behind.

People haven't been clearing roads with snowplows forever. The National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote an interesting piece about plowing's history in the US in 1997: The first snowplow patent was 1840, and for a long time the main function of snow plows was to smooth lanes for sleighs, or clear the way for trolleys.

It wasn't until the 1920's and the growing dominance of the automobile that cities began to seriously salt and plow streets. But once they started, that quickly became the norm. In Katy and the Big Snow, for example—written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton in 1943 and based on the Gloucester, MA snowplows—the semi-personified plow feels like an old friend, though it was probably not much more than a decade old when the book was published. (There's a video of the book's illustrations with an original score here)

Now? Now we just assume everything will get plowed out, after all but the most trivial snows, and quickly after all but the most monstrous blizzards.

I am fascinated by what I've heard anecdotally about Houghton, Michigan, home to Michigan Tech. I understand a lot of people snowmobile into work in the winter, enough so they have a dedicated snowmobile lot. Do they do this in Murmansk, I wonder? Helsinki? What's the biggest city that just gives up and puts chains on everyone's wheels?