City on the Edge

The Plowman's Wrath

Boston, Ma - February, 2015

I'll start this all with a story from Sunday, the day after our last storm. Steph and our friends Josh and Libby decided we'd spend the day relaxing at our Brighton residence. We'd all been shoveling car spot after car spot (Steph and I don't own a car, but it seems like the neighborly thing to do), sidewalk after sidewalk, stairway after stairway. We were tired, worn out, and becoming stir crazy. We needed a break. So with some tasty snacks and a few IPAs to boot, we decided to build a snow fort in the snowbank that now covers my front lawn in over six feet of snow. It was surprisingly quick work--Josh and I had a car-sized space carved out in about fifteen minutes. We pulled a couple of lawn chairs from the basement (which had to be dug out) and a small coleman charcoal grill. All the felled wood is buried in snow, so we used charcoal and cardboard boxes. Not exactly green, but really what is?

After some nice time around the fire, my beard crisp and frosty from the sub-zero temperatures, we began to joke around. One thing lead to another, as things often do, and a snowball left our little roofless igloo and sailed across the street, where it crossed the path of a snow plowing backhoe. The driver stopped and opened the truck door with a thunderous crash.

"You're real fuckin' funny!" A voice bellowed down our silent street. "Real fucking funny! Yeah think it's funny if I smash up your fucking cars? How bout I smash your fucking cars!"

We stared silently at each other, afraid to venture out for what the man would do. The kids in the apartment above us all gathered at the windows, watching with curiosity.

"How bout I fucking bury your fucking cars you shits! You little shits!"

It should be noted here that none of the cars parked in front of our apartment belonged to us, but rather to the other tenants of the building. 

The clinking of chains rattled and the plow lifted its boom above a neighbor's car, jerking it up and down as if to mock smashing the vehicle. Door still open, the driver reversed down the road, lowered the plow, gathered snow from a large snowbank down the road and crushed it into the vehicles until they were satisfactorily buried in snow. He drove off into the still night. We didn't play in the snow anymore that night. I grabbed a shovel and shoveled out the cars I had unwittingly buried in the madman's wrath. 

 *     *     *     *

I won't spend time telling you, dear reader, the details of Boston's broken transit system, how coworkers from outside the city leave at 7am and arrive at 11. How we're turning two-way roads into one-way streets, because there's too much snow for two cars to fit down the road abreast. How every bus or T is overflowing with passengers. How there's nowhere to put all the snow. How offices are half empty. How bars and restaurants are struggling. How I've walked 8 miles to and from work every day since the first storm. How people are being told by employers to ignore the state's don't-go-in-to-work requests. How bad my Bean boots are starting to smell. Just know that all of that is happening. And there's more snow on the way. 

In due order, shoveled spaces have been claimed and stolen before being violently reclaimed. What was once a shady Southie tradition has, over the course of the last four years, become a citywide shame that now occupies every vacant space. Tires have been slashed. Lives threatened. Thought pieces on both sides trumpeted. And it's bound to last until the snow melts away. And the most our city officials do about it is to ask us to play nice.

This is a strange time to live in this city--a city I grew up in. Most of my life, I've known one mayor of Boston: Menino. And Deval Patrick led our state for most of my adult life (remember Jane Swift and her helicopter babysitter?). But over the course of the last few months, we've lost those leaders and replaced them with Walsh and Baker, respectively. I can't imagine a worse cauldron for a newly elected official to fall into than this snowy hell. It brings out all of the worst aspects of the Massachusetts: Bad traffic, shitty attitudes, selfishness, finger pointing, name calling, space savers. These officials and their administrations have been, at best, faltering. At worst, they've been failing miserably. It's not to say Deval or Menino would have done a better job dealing with these storms; no one can know that. But certainly watching elected officials bicker about who's to blame over the MBTA, the roads, the inefficiencies is a sorrowful sight. Leaders are meant to be followed; is this the example we should pursue?

Friends who grew up in other cities and states (or even just know that sometimes other places get lots of snow) continue to point out that although Boston is looking down the barrel at 100 inches of powdery death this winter (only halfway through February, people), other places have it worse. Sure, Minneapolis has sky bridges so you don't have to go outside in the winter. Yes, cities in Siberia are very snowy indeed. But we're not Siberia, Minneapolis, Chicago, Bangor, Anchorage or any other place. We're in Boston. And although it's got a lot of wicked great things about it, dealing with this much snow isn't one of them. Those other places have space to put the snow. We do not. Truly, there's so much snow that cars now park in the right lane (and are summarily ticketed by the same city that didn't clear the streets). Walking home the other day, I came to a gridlocked Kenmore and saw to my amazement that the traffic lights weren't working. Two hours, I was later told, was what it took for a 57 bus to leave Kenmore and reach Brighton that night. Walking takes about 30 minutes. As for the streets, they are woefully pock-marked with pot holes, appearing more like a mortar firing range than a roadway in a major city. Any given day now, you can watch lines of potential MBTA passengers snake their way along unshoveled sidewalks waiting for a shuttle bus. And as the Globe has been pointing out, we will soon see exactly what all this snow has cost us in the form of a big bill.

And people are awfully fed up. When the last snow accumulation predictions were posted, I heard people cackling like maniacs (I numbered amongst them). Where are we even going to put it? They asked no one, for no one knows. Every conversation I hear surrounds snow horror stories, from roof collapses and car accidents to ice-covered homes and backbreaking shoveling. The sidewalks are packed with an angry citizenry, eyes forward, unconcerned with those around them. Our workplaces filled with grumbling colleagues who've spent hours using Cold War-era transit systems to ferry them to work. Our homes are illuminated by the dull light of two million televisions, for what else are we to do after spending hours just trying to get home? Even my cat is getting sick of me staying indoors. 

But all the passive-aggressive note leaving, space saving, twitter ranting (blogger ranting?), and MBTA chastising won't save us. We're stuck in place, just watching the snow pile higher and higher, stuck in the routine of snow, shovel, save space, work, shovel, snow, repeat. There is no more joy in a snow day (kids will be in school until the end of June), no more whimsey to a fresh blanket of snow, no more fun in throwing a snowball, no more humor seeing people skiing down Beacon Hill (okay, those pictures are still great, I take that back). This is but a moment in time, which we should remember as readily as we should move away from it, for who knows what the future will bring (or how much snow will fall). 

In our zeal to become a world-class city, Boston has been so busy charging forward that it didn't remember to look back and maintain promises made to its citizenry--things like a working infrastructure and a top-of-the-line transit system. We were too busy trying to figure out how to bring 10,000 people to Boston to figure out what to do with 100 inches of snow.  But now the cracks in our infrastructure and our community are showing, and we should not ignore them or those who refuse to do anything about it. Like the storm of '78, I'm sure crotchety old yankees will be bemoaning this winter for generations to come. Let's just hope they remember to speak up come election day and when next year's budgets are set. 

In the mean time, House of Cards starts next week, so just keep shoveling 'til then. Good luck and see you on the sidewalk.