This was my first winter in Yakima. I moved here last August for work. I had to get studded tires on my car and shovel my driveway, which is like 50' long or something. It's decently long. From December 8th until sometime in early March, my lawn was white and frozen. It's late March now and it's thawed and I have to go clean up a winter's worth of dog shit that's suddenly visible before my landlord notices.
Local residents say it was a bad winter, though I have no real frame of reference to tell. I moved here from west of the Cascade mountains, from Bellingham. They get a lot less snow. They get so little snow, that one year the city council was like, "Why are we paying to maintain all these snowplows? Let's sell them!" So they sold all but one, and that winter had one of the worst winters in a decade. As far as I know, they never learned their lesson and still only have one.
Population wise, Yakima and Bellingham aren't too far off in size (93,200ish for Yakima, 82,600ish for Bellingham). Yakima is relatively flat, the snow that falls is a light powdery fluff, and the city and county are pretty excellent about sanding and plowing. Bellingham is more vertically-inclined with steep hills, gets the heavy wet slick snow, and, as aforementioned, owns a single snowplow. I feel that one of these cities is more fun to spend a bad winter in than the other.
I grew up outside of Bellingham in a little community called Sudden Valley, which is notorious for steep and winding roads. The curves of the roads don't even follow the hills. As a friend once described it, "It's like they gave a drunk monkey a map and a crayon and let him go to town, and that's how they plotted the roads". What I'm getting at is there roads were steep, curvy, and made no fucking sense.
The hills made for great sledding on snow days, but they also brought more work to us kids. I lived off of a side-street of a side-street; it was a long cul-de-sac that was fairly flat except for a steep slope where it connected with the next road. Our side-street was so insignificant and ignored by the public works that it never saw a street sweeper in the fall, forget about a snowplow, and because adults still want to go out and do adult shit like work and grocery shopping even when the schools were closed, us kids suddenly made convenient, free snow-removal labor.
I remember one such snow-day when I was about 15 or so. We woke up to over half a foot had fallen overnight. Mom was like "Go shovel the hill at the end of the street". So my younger brother grabbed our one snow shovel to take the first shift.
Now our street didn't get plowed, but the side-street we connected to was well-utilized enough and steep enough that it saw more attention. My brother was out there shoveling wet, cold, heavy snow for an hour. About every 10 minutes, a snowplow would pass him on the other street, completely ignoring him. I know this because I could see them pass him from where I was sitting in the warm house, sipping hot cocoa (with mini marshmallows, of course).
After an hour, my brother comes in, cold and soaking wet, and grumbled "It's your turn."
Now, due to a combination of my inner thermostat being set high (I'm always warm wherever I go; I cannot stand long-sleeve shirts during any season) and me being a teenager with no goddamn common sense, I decided that proper snow-shoveling attire included a remarkably low-cut shirt. Fashion before function, after all. I was about a C or D cup at the time, and proud of it!
So I go out there, and I'm bent over shoveling snow, and I'm wearing a low-cut shirt, and I'm bent over shoveling snow, and I'm wearing a low-cut shirt...you could see all the way to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, is what I'm getting out. I'm out there for maybe ten minutes, tops, when a plow goes by...and then it stopped and backed up, and the driver leaned out the window.
"Hey, you want me to plow that for you?" he asked with a wink.
Being a good little Catholic girl with no firm grasp of sexual innuendo at the time, I was like "OMG could you please?"
The driver plowed the entire street. I was thinking well, my work here is done, so naturally I went back home where it was warm and dry.
I'd been outside a grand total of about 15 minutes.
"That wasn't an hour," my brother scoffed when I came in.
"Look outside at the street, bro," I replied.
His jaw dropped when he saw the road. "Ah...I...you...how...that's not fair! MOM!"
My mother looked out the window, looked at me, looked at my shirt, looked out the window, looked at me, looked at my shirt, looked out the window...Mom's no dummy and I'm her daughter; she connected the dots fairly quickly. She shook her head, as if knew she should scold me, but she also seemed like part of her was a little proud of me, so all she said was "Well, the road's finally cleared, guess I better head to Costco and stock up on groceries before it snows again."
And that's how I learned to shovel snow.
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