It’s my third day of snow-forced seclusion, and my morale is wavering but still by and large intact. (I’m not including Sunday, the day of the storm, in my count because I snuck in a three-minute mental-health ride in the early morning, before the snow picked up. This was probably ill-advised—there was a bitter wind and a sheet of ice on the ground—but I went slowly and turned back as soon as I sensed that things were getting too dicey for me to proceed.)
Upon waking this morning, I immediately checked PlowTO. This is undoubtedly my most-visited site in the aftermath of a big snow, not only because the information is of critical relevance to me but also because it’s genuinely entertaining. I’d go so far as to call it a thrill, like watching someone play a really slow video game whose stakes pertain to the real world. I love live-tracking the city’s plows and salters; I love that I can input my address, filter for “sidewalk plow/salter” (as opposed to road salter, road plow, and cycling plow/salter), and see when my stretch of sidewalk was last tended to. I love the exhilaration I feel when the line is green, indicating that plowing was done within the previous four hours. I metaphorically throw up my hands in despair when there’s no line at all. The suspense! The agony! 10/10 recommend.
The line was green. This was no guarantee that the sidewalk would be wheelchair-level clear, of course, but I nonetheless allowed myself to cling to a flickering glimmer of hope.
My husband went out mid-morning to evaluate and soon returned with the report I expected: the same old choke points were, as usually, choke points. The main one—the stretch next to a church parking lot—was/is comically bad, as is always the way. It doesn’t matter how many times the sidewalk is plowed if vehicles drive over the snowbank and drag snow back onto it. This being an eternal source of frustration for me, I have long harboured a low-key grudge against the church, which never seems to clear or salt even when there’s less accumulation and they’re responsible for doing so.
I’ve learned from past snowfalls that passively waiting for the sidewalk to miraculously improve isn’t an effective approach, and while I’ve by and large come to terms with the fact I’ll be limited in where I can go for a while, I hate feeling like I’m not taking all the agency I can to improve my situation. I thus called the city this morning and spoke to someone who assured me that they would dispatch a plow ASAP. Invigorated and empowered, I next called the church. I left a message explaining the issue, and, much to my surprise and delight, a receptionist phoned me back an hour later. She told me that she’d called a contractor to take care of it and apologized that he wouldn’t be able to make it before 4:00. Faith in humanity somewhat restored!
In the time that’s elapsed since that call, however, I’ve received multiple pictures from multiple people belonging to my unofficial neighbourhood watch showing other disaster zones in the vicinity. This growing body of evidence suggested that it was magical thinking on my part to assume that I’d be fine if only I could get past that parking lot, which has become a convenient scapegoat for a much larger problem. It’s a mess out there. Narrow paths are enclosed by tall snowbanks just threatening to collapse. Whether or not the sidewalk will be—and if it is, whether it will stay—passable is unpredictable at best.
An hour ago, I figured that I might as well go out and take a look. It was time for my five minutes of fresh air, so I had nothing to lose but that false hope. I’d traversed half a block before I encountered my first obstacle; I went another few metres before I got close enough to the parking lot to see that it was covered in a thick layer of icy sludge and scattered piles of snow. It was not yet 5:00, so there was still plenty of time for the city and/or the contractor to come as promised, but the ride there and back was harrowing in itself: I had to pull a tight one-eighty when I spotted an elderly woman approaching without enough room for us to cross paths, and my chair felt worryingly unsteady under me.
Though this experiment was disappointing, it did its job in confirming that I need to hang tight as to not imperil myself or my fellow sidewalk users. Back to radical acceptance and sleeve plackets, then, in the warm, cozy prison I also call home.
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 